An entity called the Texas Freedom Network pulled out all the stops on January 24 to denounce Stephen Balch, the founder, former president, former chairman, and current member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. The verbal attack, however, has nothing to do with Steve’s long history with the NAS. Rather, the Texas Freedom Network is upset that Steve was appointed a member of a state panel that is studying how to reform Texas’s social studies curriculum. The Dallas Morning News tells the story here.
Steve, who began his academic career as a professor of political science, has served for the last ten years or so as director of Texas Tech University’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He has over the course of his career gained a lot of credibility on what students should learn about “social studies,” and it makes perfect sense that he would be appointed to a state panel on the topic. Social studies is among the areas that have been twisted into left-wing political advocacy—even in Texas. Presumably the task facing Steve and his fellow panel members is how to un-twist the social studies curriculum so that it presents students a fair-minded view of our principal public institutions.
The Texas Freedom Network, on the other hand, styles itself as a “nonpartisan, grassroots organization” that is “the state’s watchdog for monitoring far-right issues, organizations, money and leaders.” One can venture a guess that TFN applies the term “far-right” with all the precision of a child splashing in a bathtub.
In any case, Steve is plainly a political conservative, though of a sober and intellectually meditative demeanor. But no matter, that’s enough for TFN to classify him with the bug-eyed fringe. The TFN offers as evidence Steve’s criticism of the 2020 presidential election, when he called for people to “register indignant protest.”
Steve himself brushed off the TFN criticisms, but it strikes me that it is worth taking note both of their intemperate tone and the eagerness of TFN to forestall reform of the state’s social studies curriculum. NAS is deep into a fifty-state fight against the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) distortion of public education, and the new “action civics” that aims to turn students into an army of avid protesters on topics they know nothing about. It stands to reason that the founder of NAS would get in their way. Steve Balch is just the sort of person they fear most.
Image: Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Texas Tech University
