SourceWatch needs your financial support to survive and thrive. If you've found this information on the people, organizations, and issues shaping the public agenda helpful, please make a tax-deductible donation now.

From SourceWatch

The National Association of Scholars (N.A.S.) was founded in 1985, was created, according to a report by People for the American Way, " to unite right-wing faculty against 'politically correct' multicultural education and affirmative action policies in college admissions and faculty hiring that take race or gender into account."

"In addressing issues that are of academic concern across the political spectrum, the N.A.S. has recently been successful in attracting a small number of liberal and moderate faculty, but the overall thrust of the N.A.S. remains conservative. In lecture halls and on the op-ed pages of many prominent national papers, N.A.S. members across the country put forward the idea that multicultural education, gender studies and affirmative action policies are simply trendy endeavors or throwbacks to 1960s "radicalism." 112 Invariably, these programs are described as threats to the study of Western civilization. As of 1996, the organization has approximately 4,000 members (faculty and graduate students), with 38 state affiliates; it has representatives in the American Sociological Association, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.

The N.A.S. is heavily backed by the Olin, Bradley, Sarah Scaife, J.M., Coors and Smith Richardson foundations, among others, receiving a combined total in excess of $348,000 from these foundations alone in 1990-91. 116 Its advisory board lists right-wing intellectuals such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, co-director of Empower America and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; Irving Kristol; Leslie Lenkowsky, president of the Hudson Institute; and Chester Finn of the Edison Project, a corporation formed to privatize public education.

The association first gained notoriety in 1990 at the University of Texas, at Austin, where N.A.S. faculty succeeded in blocking the inclusion in an English course of civil rights readings that had been proposed in response to increasing racial and sexual harassment on campus. During the controversy, the faculty group also encouraged a right-wing student group to lead an ultimately successful campaign to defund the university's Chicano newspaper. More recently, the N.A.S. released an update of a 1994 report urging the University of Massachusetts system to abandon its goal of expanding minority enrollment to 20 percent of the freshman class, and to end a program that encourages the hiring of women and minorities. The report focuses on SAT scores to claim that minority students are below average, and therefore unfairly take the place of qualified white students. The University of Massachusetts chancellor countered that the practice is based on the philosophy that "the class should reflect the diversity of seniors graduating from the high schools."

The N.A.S. has also come out with a 1996 survey, heralded in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by William Simon, president of the Olin Foundation and major N.A.S. backer. The survey asserts that the decrease in core requirements at the top 50 universities and colleges since 1914 threatens "the common frame of reference that...has sustained our liberal, democratic society," according to N.A.S. president Stephen Balch. The N.A.S. fixes much of the blame on student activism in the 1960s "when the rage in higher education was a radical libertarianism based on notions of 'relevance.'"

Contact details

221 Witherspoon Street, 2nd floor
Princeton, NJ 08542
Phone: 609-683-7878
Email: nasonweb AT nas.org
Web: http://www.nas.org

External links

• People for the American Way, "Buying a movement: Conservative University Programs and Academic Associations", undated, accessed May 2004. (Used with the permission of People For the American Way (or People For the American Way Foundation).