In a quarter century spent fighting change it regards as harmful to higher education, the National Association of Scholars has learned just what a mighty foe change can be.
The group, whose 25th-anniversary conference will be held in New York this weekend, has struggled to keep up with technology and has been hurt by economic downturns. Its membership has dwindled to about 3,000, down by one-third from its height in the late 1990s. It has given up on trying to maintain the health of its state affiliates, several of which have shut down or are dying on the vine. It has found philanthropic support harder to come by as tight times have prompted major donors to give less money, with more strings attached, and a federal program that provided much of its revenue in recent years has stopped awarding grants.
Other national higher-education groups are similarly challenged—forced by a tight economy, an aging professoriate, and the ascendance of online communication to rethink how they take in money, enlist members, and promote their agendas. But most other such groups exist to represent specific constituencies, like admissions officers or language professors, and can alter their messages to keep up with the times.
The NAS cannot change its message because its message is its reason for being.
That message is that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone’s political views. It is a message rooted in romanticized recollections of how America’s colleges operated in the middle of the 20th century, before the advent of affirmative action, ethnic-studies departments, and other products of the 1960s that the association regards as anathema.
Barring a major resurgence of traditionalist thinking on college campuses, the appeal of that message might not be enough to carry the group another 25 years.
Looking Ahead
The NAS’s leaders believe they have taken big steps to reinvigorate their organization, including moving its headquarters from Princeton, N.J., to Manhattan, where they will have easier access to media outlets and major donors.
They see their group as still being more than capable of making a big splash in the news media, as it did last summer with a report arguing that colleges’ American-history programs overly emphasize race, class, gender, and ethnicity at the expense of important subjects like military and religious history.
The NAS expects to make headlines again this spring when it releases the results of a two-year study of Bowdoin College. The group says the study will illustrate how selective liberal-arts colleges have abandoned instruction in the traditional liberal arts by eliminating course requirements in that area.
Some of the campaigns the scholars’ association helped get under way, and some of the organizations it helped establish, have had a major effect on higher education and continue to do so. The association’s California affiliate, for example, mounted the first campaign for a state referendum barring public colleges from using affirmative-action preferences, which passed in 1996. Five other states have since approved similar referenda, and the NAS has remained a significant player in legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies, offering up both legal briefs opposing the policies and critiques of the research supporting them.
In the two decades since the scholars’ group undertook a campaign to encourage colleges to establish academic programs on Western civilization, America’s founding, and the study of free institutions, more than 60 such programs have emerged, estimates Stephen H. Balch, who served as president of the NAS from its founding, in 1987, until 2009 and remained chairman of its Board of Directors until last year.
The NAS also played a central role in establishing four national groups that have a significant voice in academe: the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative group that encourages college trustees to assert more influence over their institutions’ affairs; the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, a free-market-oriented group; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, founded as a traditionalist alternative to the Modern Language Association; and the Historical Society, founded to counter what its members regard as the politicization of that field.
A fifth group that the NAS helped establish, the American Academy for Liberal Education, continues to gives its stamp of approval to institutions and programs that meet its standards, but it gave up seeking the Education Department’s recognition as an accreditor after running afoul of federal regulations.
Picking Battles
Despite its recent gains, some critics of the NAS dismiss it as a thing of the past.
“If I had to be blunt, I would say the NAS is composed of old men playing a broken record,” says Cary Nelson, who often verbally sparred with that group’s leaders in his capacity as president of the American Association of University Professors, a post he held from 2006 until last year.
The group appeared to be earning grudging respect from its foes as a voice of dissent in the mid-1990s. But Stanley N. Katz, an expert on higher-education policy at Princeton University and the director of Princeton’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, argues that “they haven’t been real players in years.”
The NAS denies that it lacks influence, although it acknowledges having to make tough choices about where to focus its resources.
For example, the association’s central office devotes little attention to its Argus Project, established in 2008 as a way to enlist faculty members and ordinary citizens in reporting incidents of political indoctrination on campuses. Peter W. Wood, a former provost of King’s College, in New York, who rose from executive director to president of the NAS in 2009, says the group lacks the money and manpower to investigate most complaints it receives.
A few of the association’s 46 state affiliates, such as those in California and New York, remain vibrant and vocal due mainly to strong leadership. But the national association has decided not to try to prop up state affiliates that are struggling. Mr. Wood blames the decline of the affiliates largely on the aging of his organization’s membership, and says the Internet has alleviated much of the need for his group’s members in each state to meet face to face.
Only a few state affiliates have closed their doors, but many are barely hanging on. The Iowa affiliate, for example, has had to scrap recent efforts to hold state meetings because it has been unable to gather an eight-person quorum. The president of the association’s Colorado affiliate, Charles L. King, a 91-year-old retired professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says he has been trying to get someone to take over his leadership post for years.
The NAS also has come to regret a longstanding contractual agreement with Springer, a publisher, that has left most of the group’s flagship journal, Academic Questions, behind a paywall, limiting its reach.
Aside from a 2009 decision to open itself up to nonacademics, the association has done little recently to build its membership. Mr. Wood, a frequent contributor to The Chronicle, says he would rather devote his energies to speaking out against developments in higher education that he opposes. Those include the sustainability movement, which he sees as demanding conformity to radical environmentalism, and a White House-backed effort to promote civics education that he criticizes for defining such education in liberal terms. Raising his group’s profile by weighing in on such matters, he says, is a far more cost-effective means of attracting members than direct recruitment.
Once able to count on foundations to underwrite whatever activities it chose to engage in, the association now derives its funds mainly from grants for specific research projects its benefactors want carried out. It had found a new source of revenue in the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program, established in 2001 largely in response to a survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. That survey found that most seniors at highly selective colleges could not answer basic questions about the nation’s past. The NAS became a provider of short-term training for teachers of history, but the federal program is no longer awarding grants.
Mr. Balch says the NAS planned ahead for the loss of such funds, and Mr. Wood says he “won’t miss” the association’s involvement in the program because “it didn’t do a whole lot to enhance other things we were doing.” But the NAS’s most-recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, for 2011, shows that federal grants for its training of history teachers accounted for about $2-million of its $2.4-million in revenue that year. That’s a large sum to do without, and the association’s expenses exceeded its revenues in recent years. The NAS has responded to the loss of the grants by establishing its own in-house fund-raising operation and by temporarily trimming the salaries of its top executives.
As was the case in past years, most of the association’s major donors in 2011 were philanthropies with reputations for backing conservative causes, like the Adolph Coors Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Its reliance on conservative support has fed arguments that the NAS represents conservative ideology more than any sort of vision of higher education as untainted by politics. Mr. Wood, like Mr. Balch before him, argues that his group should not be labeled conservative because it has liberal members and does not take conservative positions on issues outside academe.
Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, discusses the history of the NAS in his book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, scheduled for release next week. He says the NAS has managed to attract the support of some liberals and moderates, even as it “has really carved out a reputation as a critic of the liberal professoriate,” because faculty members across the political spectrum are concerned about the politicization of academe.
Looking back on the association’s first quarter century, Mr. Balch acknowledges, “we have not converted the academy.” His group’s chief accomplishment, he says, may have been helping to keep in place a group of scholars who adhere to the traditionalist view that college professors should be treated as individuals and be free to go against political currents. “We have kept that ideal alive.”
