Who We Are

NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities.

Background

NAS was founded in 1987, soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus. The founders of NAS summoned faculty members from across the political spectrum to help defend the core values of liberal education.

The NAS today is higher education’s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus—and we respond when colleges and universities fall short of the mark. We uphold the principle of individual merit and oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences. And we regard the Western intellectual heritage as the indispensable foundation of American higher education.

Our board of advisors brings together distinguished scholars from every field of higher education.

Who May Join?

NAS membership is open to all. This is a change as of October 2009. Before that NAS restricted membership to academics. We now encourage anyone who agrees with the principles we espouse to join.

We do, however, continue to distinguish between academic and public members, and a large majority of our members are current and former faculty members. We have also made a special outreach to graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, college administrators, and independent scholars. Membership is renewable annually and includes a one-year subscription to Academic Questions.

Is It Dangerous to join?

It can be. We recognize that graduate students and untenured faculty members run a risk if they join an organization that is famous for challenging campus orthodoxies. So we won't tell your colleagues -- or your dean, and we’ll mail Academic Questions to your home if you wish.

Is joining NAS worth the risk? That’s a decision you must make for yourself -- and something you should consider the next time you bite your tongue in a department meeting for fear of the consequences of expressing what you really think.

The Issues

• Ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring
• Trivialized curricula
• Hollow baccalaureate requirements
• Restrictive speech and “civility” codes
• Self-dealing administrators
• Violations of academic freedom
• Phony allegations intended to silence opposition
• The post-modernist evisceration of the humanities
• Politicized science

NAS cannot solve every problem besetting higher education. We can, however, subject the abuses to rigorous examination and public exposure, consistent with our belief that reasoned scholarship undergirds the foundation of a free society.

Reasoned scholarship, needless to say, always faces challenges, and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge has never been easy. In the past, universities often had to fight external authorities to achieve academic freedom. Today we face a new, more sinister threat: an attack on academic freedom from within our colleges and universities.

Sound familiar?

Programs

NAS is both a national organization based in Princeton, New Jersey, and a group of local and state chapters. The chapters present their own programming, often in the form of monthly seminars. The national organization publishes a quarterly journal, Academic Questions (free with membership); maintains the NAS website, www.nas.org; and issues the quarterly newsletter NAS Update to keep members abreast of current projects and publicize the work of affiliates. Our most recent addition is exclusive access to a social network similar to Facebook® for our members. We hold a national conference about every eighteen months.

Much of our work is prompted by concerns that members bring to our attention. During the national debate in the 1990s regarding sexual harassment on campus, for example, NAS published a widely-noted statement on harassment policies. During the run-up to the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger (the racial-preferences-in-college-admissions cases), NAS published a detailed examination of the principal research report put forward by the University of Michigan in support of its policies. In 2007, we examined the ideological character of curricula in schools of social work.

The Network

NAS is also a network of scholars united by their commitments to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and a free society. Several decades ago, these were the common currency of American higher education. But no more. Today, scholars committed to the classic ideals of academic excellence, the republican virtues of ordered liberty, civic duty, and self-restraint, and the liberal principles of freedom of thought and expression often find themselves on uncertain or even hostile ground.

College administrations are often more committed to diversity than to the pursuit of truth. Academic departments often watch for any unwelcome sign of intellectual independence. Many professors master the art of bland non-disclosure for fear of being stuck with a label suggesting less than ardent support for one campus orthodoxy or another. Or worse, they may be cornered into expressing support for views against which they privately harbor significant reservations.

Pressure to conform is nothing new among academics. Jonathan Swift satirized it in The Battle of the Books over three hundred years ago. It has been part of college and university life from the beginning. But today, the pressure on faculty members to conform to ascendant political ideologies is at an all-time high and encompasses college life from freshman orientation to the selection of commencement speakers.

If this type of experience sounds familiar, NAS may be the organization for you. We offer the chance to meet and work with other scholars who have had similar experiences and who have found ways to resist the petty -- and sometimes not so petty -- tyranny of the PC campus. We are not of one mold. Our members include mainstream liberals and conservatives, secularists and the religiously committed, senior scholars and graduate students, women and men, citizens and international visitors --united by a concern that the tradition of academic freedom in the United States is imperiled by the abuses of some and the complacency of many.