Greetings! This is the first entry of the National Association of Scholars blog. We're glad you found us. We created this blog in order to keep our readers attuned to higher education news and up-to-date on articles posted on the NAS website. We are continuing to publish new articles every day, but we realize that sometimes a one or two thousand-word essay is a lot to swallow in the midst of a busy schedule. So we present this blog as a place you can check for quick updates with sound-byte versions of the originals. Stay tuned for entries here contributed by our members and friends. In the meantime, check out our three most recent articles. In "What's Cooking," NAS president Peter Wood rounds up some of the latest issues in higher education:
- The Virginia Tech "diversity" tenure and promotion requirement;
- The professor who seems to have been fired for criticizing his college's sexual harassment policy;
- EMU's eagerness to accomodate gays and lesbians;
- A scholarly association's quandary when it schedules a conference at a hotel owned by a Prop. 8 supporter;
- A new organization's stand against "21st-century skills"; and
- Campus Reform, a new web-based effort to repair American higher education.
"Spring and Summer Highlights" presents our top 5-8 articles from each month since April. If you've been on vacation and missed some of these, or if you want to revisit one of your favorites, this posting is a great place to catch up. Finally, in "What Good are People?" I wrote about the MAHB (Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior) and a new UK-based Handbook of Sustainability Literacy. The MAHB is a group led by Paul Ehrlich that wants to control population growth and figure out "what people are for." And the handbook contains the skills and dispositions needed to be sustainably literate. These include "Gaia Awarenss," "Effortless Action," and "Social Concience."
