Here is the text of an email letter I received recently. I thought you may be interested in reading and replying.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is looking for some help.
We are the group of scholars who got together in the 1980s to fight political correctness on America’s college campuses. Back then, we imagined that the grown-ups on campus only needed to be reminded of their responsibilities to put things right. After all, how could serious scholars permit higher education to descend into speech codes, racial quotas, and political indoctrination? Or preside over the trashing of the core curriculum, Western civilization, and the American founding?
Boy, were we naïve!
We fought and fought hard. But while thousands of professors joined us, and we surely slowed the tide, American higher education is more politicized and less intellectually cogent today than when we started. Then we faced Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) and Jesse “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go” Jackson. Today we have Ward Churchill, Sami Al-Arian, the Duke 88, as well as entirely “postmodernized” academic programs and university requirements, devoted to ensuring that students, who may know little else, know loads about diversity, feminism, global warming, the failures of capitalism, and the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.
An ideological monoculture reigns supreme. Outside the hard sciences, only a handful of institutions exist in which the full spectrum of ideas gets robustly debated. Notions elsewhere regarded as good common sense are routinely dismissed by academic putdowns implying ignorance and malice. Where else but on an American college campus would you find male-female attraction stigmatized as “heteronormativity?” A recent study showed that students at some elite universities, including Yale, know less about American history upon graduation than they did when they finished high school. In some ways, an American college education has become an act of cultural erasure, with “identity” and political commitment replacing genuine knowledge.
Undaunted, we continue to fight, but, now more than ever, your help is needed. We ask you to take our survey. We’ll make good use of your answers in any case, but we do have an ulterior motive. We also welcome your questions—you can reach us at nasonweb@nas.org.
Yours Sincerely,
Stephen H. Balch
President, National Association of Scholars