PRINCETON, N.J.
Forty scholars from across the country met quietly this fall in Lake Tahoe, Nev., to talk about the curriculum -- not an unusual topic in academe. But this meeting was the first of its kind.
Nearly all of the participants were members of the National Association of Scholars, invited because they had created academic programs built around the “Great Books,” or were bent on doing so. The meeting was the first in a series designed to spur the kind of curricular reform favored by the tradition-minded group.
It also served another purpose: to send a message that the association plans to do more than just gripe. “We’ve had to be reactive while much that we viewed as important was being given away at a fire sale,” says Bradford P. Wilson, the executive director. “At some point, you’ve got to put down your own plan.”
It’s been 10 years since the advocacy group emerged with a vow to “reclaim the academy.” The association came along just as a wave of public attacks began accusing higher education of weakened standards and political contamination of the classroom, hiring, and intellectual life.
Today, a group that started out with four members and an annual budget of $85,000 has more than 4,000 members, affiliates in 42 states, and a yearly budget of nearly $1.2-million.
More important, it has earned a measure of respect -- if not widespread acceptance -- in faculty circles.
“I think we’re taken seriously as a voice in academic life,” says Stephen H. Balch, a key founder. “That was not the case five years ago, to say nothing of 10 years ago.”
“Many people thought this was going to be a 90-day wonder,” he adds. “The media preoccupation with political correctness couldn’t last forever, and when it passed, people thought we would, too.”
Famously dismissed in 1990 by Stanley Fish, a Duke University literary scholar, as “racist, sexist, and homophobic,” the reputation of the N.A.S. has softened. Even some scholars who find no common cause in its pronouncements no longer view it as just a bunch of reactionaries.
“Its influence has been negative in spreading misinformation and often unfair criticism,” says Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Chicago and a founder of the association’s counterpart on the left, Teachers for a Democratic Culture. “But I’d also have to say I give grudging respect to a group that has demanded that professors explain themselves.” He adds: “It’s definitely a player.”
And it is no longer playing alone. The association has helped spawn, either formally or informally, a network of like-minded groups, such as the National Alumni Forum, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and a new national accrediting body, the American Academy for Liberal Education.
Still, some scholars say, the group is beginning to seem passe. It was easy for it to grab headlines when the culture wars were at their peak. Minor skirmishes over diversity, multiculturalism, and P.C. still occur, they say, but no longer resonate as deeply. Some scholars wonder about the role and future of an organization that has so much stake in those wars.
“I do think some of the fire has gone out of their effort in the last few years,” says Jon Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine. “You can only keep this going for so long.”
The culture wars in academe have been eclipsed, he argues, by serious financial problems and the growing “vocational” emphasis of many colleges. “I wish the N.A.S. would use their resources to address that,” Mr. Wiener says. “But their effort has been to push state legislators to think the main problem at the state university is that the affirmative-action officer has gone too far in one case or another.”
Academe has enough lobbying groups pursuing bread-and-butter concerns, responds Dr. Balch, who is on leave as president of the association to write a book about higher-education reform. “We speak for the interests of scholarship and teaching -- not for the interests of scholars and teachers.”
In fact, few of the group’s leaders or rank-and-file members seem to think that the culture wars are waning. The media frenzy over political correctness in the early ‘90s gave the N.A.S. its “biggest burst of recruitment,” Dr. Balch acknowledges. Membership, which initially had increased by 10 per cent annually, has grown in recent years at 5 to 6 per cent. “We’re not necessarily at a final plateau,” he says.
As members gather this week in New Orleans for their annual meeting -- this year on the theme of “multiculturalism” -- many say that if anything, they want the group to make more noise in the years ahead.
“I don’t think we’ve reclaimed the academy at all,” says Herb London, a professor of humanities at New York University who was the first editor of the association’s quarterly, Academic Questions. “We have established a base within the academy, a beachhead, if you will.”
Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, was at the first N.A.S. national meeting, in 1988. He sees even less intellectual pluralism today. “Universities do not put on page one of their catalogues: ‘We believe you to be the racist, sexist, homophobic progeny of a wicked America, and for $30,000 a year, we will redress historical wrongs,’” he says. “They don’t say that. But that’s what they do.”
What the association has to do, Mr. Kors says, is to keep shining a bright light on such false advertising. “Exposure and shaming should be occurring daily. And the N.A.S. should be at the center of that.”
The offices of the association here seem far from the center of the battlefield. Housed on a few tree-covered acres within a mile of Princeton University, the group rents space from a charter school, which is run autonomously within the public-school system and offers a more rigorous curriculum. No sign outside the building marks the association’s presence. Interviews with its leaders are punctuated by the shouts and pounding feet of the schoolchildren, including Dr. Balch’s two kids and one of Dr. Wilson’s three.
“There is an argument to be made that we should be in Washington, with the other higher-education organizations,” says Dr. Wilson, the executive director, who is also serving as acting president. “But frankly, we like being independent.”
On leave as a professor of political science at Ashland University, he is to decide this month whether to resign his tenured post to remain at the association.
Dr. Balch gave up a tenured post at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1992. He is as surprised as anyone that he turned activist and made the N.A.S. the “project of my life.”
“I was at Berkeley and certainly didn’t cut a figure in the melees of the time,” says Dr. Balch, who earned his Ph.D. in political science there in 1971. “I was a quiet fellow who attended to his books.”
But Berkeley did leave him skeptical about what mass politics could do to an institution, and his years at John Jay only furthered his apprehension. “I don’t think it’s possible for a professor to avoid disclosing what he thinks about issues in his realm of competence. But what I saw at John Jay was a significant number of professors engaged in consciousness-raising of their students, and others who saw students as cannon fodder for the revolution.”
Some would say the N.A.S. is into consciousness-raising of a different sort. In 1996, it issued a well-publicized report, “The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993,” that found “a purging from the curriculum of many of the required basic survey courses” that were once central to a liberal-arts education. It also commissioned a 1996 survey of faculty attitudes toward affirmative action. The 800 respondents -- a representative sample of the professoriate, the N.A.S. says -- opposed the use of racial preferences in hiring by a two-to-one margin. The reports are available on the Internet (http://www.nas.org).
Association leaders say they need only look to their own members for evidence that ideology continues to taint campus life. Some still want their membership kept quiet. One recently declined to renew because he was going out on the job market and feared that knowledge of his N.A.S. participation would hurt his chances.
Sanford S. Pinsker, a professor of humanities at Franklin and Marshall College, says he gets a steady stream of mail, as editor of Academic Questions, from scholars who feel victimized by political correctness. “I encounter members who won’t get the journal sent to their campus office. It’s got to be sent to their home address, in a brown paper bag.”
Dr. Kors says he does not admire such “cowardice” but understands it. He and many other senior scholars who belong to the association insist that they would not be tenured, given their politics, were they to come up for promotion now.
Just what are the political leanings of association members? For years, its leaders have been defensive about describing the group as “conservative.” “Being called a conservative in academe is a conversation stopper,” says Dr. Pinsker.
A recent survey of members who have attended association meetings sheds some light on their politics. About a quarter described themselves as moderate, and another quarter said they were liberal or left of center -- liberal in “a New Deal sort of way,” Dr. Balch says. The rest said they were conservative, neoconservative, or libertarian.
One test of the association’s political neutrality, critics say, would be whether it had ever come to the defense of a leftist scholar. Dr. Wilson says the group rarely speaks out on behalf of individual scholars -- usually only when it is asked to do so by a member or by the news media. “The fact is,” he says, “in the decade of the association’s existence, it’s been the politically incorrect that have found themselves skating on thin ice.”
As it is, the N.A.S. hasn’t quite shed its image as a haven for aging white males; Dr. Balch estimates that a quarter of the membership is female. He adds that “we’ve never asked members about their racial identities. Our belief is those things are irrelevant to the life of the mind.” But he guesses that not more than 2 per cent of the membership is black.
Members pay $38 a year in dues. However, as has been widely known for years, most of the association’s budget comes from non-profit foundations that support conservative causes, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation.
Scholars on the left attribute the association’s longevity partly to money. “You can do a lot with a million dollars a year,” says Mr. Wiener, the Irvine professor.
He finds its defensiveness about being labeled “conservative” to be mildly amusing. The same for its complaints about being victimized by political correctness. While association members castigate the left for employing the logic of victimization, Mr. Wiener says, “they thrive on the idea that they are a persecuted minority.”
It is the subject of some debate why the N.A.S. has thrived while its counterpart on the left, Teachers for a Democratic Culture, did not. Dr. Balch calls the other group “a redundancy. It represented the prevailing view in the academy.”
But T.D.C. organizers say money was the main difference. The group held some meetings and had a newsletter that appeared intermittently. “We couldn’t hire a staff, and we didn’t have time to do the fund raising,” says Chicago’s Professor Graff. “We were working academics.”
Some scholars at Temple University are trying to revive Teachers for a Democratic Culture. It is now housed at Temple’s Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture and will use the institute’s World-Wide Web site (http://www.temple.edu/isllc). Steve Parks, an assistant professor of English and director of the institute, is moving to form an advisory board and apply for grants.
Michael Berube, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agrees that a lack of steady financial support stymied the group, but he says its members -- himself included -- “didn’t have the same sense of working for the resistance as the N.A.S. did.” In many humanities departments, he says, people on the left were, in fact, the establishment.
Mr. Berube no longer regards the N.A.S. as “this grave threat from without,” and he finds some of its members to be “good sparring partners.” He even applauds its efforts to go after campus speech codes.
But he doesn’t believe that the culture wars can be over. “They’re fundamental disputes about values,” he argues. As a result, he remains somewhat suspicious of the association. He finds its reports to be “full of mischief,” producing “predetermined conclusions.” As an example, he points to the “purging from the curriculum” charge leveled by its general-education study. “Requirements have declined since ’64,” he says, “but they are up since the late ‘70s. The N.A.S. didn’t want to say that. It’s much easier to say it’s all downhill since the ‘60s.”
Still, Mr. Berube was “pleasantly surprised” to be asked to write an essay for a symposium on academic freedom in the latest issue of Academic Questions.
Association leaders say they have not always been so welcomed by the left. Last January, Dr. Wilson was invited to speak about the curriculum on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Shortly before the meeting, however, he was “airbrushed off the program,” he says.
It turned out that the session was canceled, in part because another participant, Lawrence W. Levine, a noted historian and author of The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History, had backed out.
Joseph S. Johnston, vice-president for programs of the college-and-university group, explains that the “11th-hour” cancellations by Dr. Levine and another panelist (for unrelated reasons) decimated the session, and adds that the historian “didn’t see the possibility for a reasoned exchange.” Dr. Levine could not be reached.
“So much for the opening of the American mind,” says Dr. Wilson.
What the N.A.S. is after in the next 10 years is more than just invitations, says Dr. Balch. It wants “real institutional influence” over the curriculum and the appointment of higher-education leaders. “The battle,” he says, “still is very much engaged.”
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