What is the National Association of Scholars?
One answer was provided in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. An article by Lisa Straganian mentions “draft legislation promulgated by the National Association of Scholars, a billionaire-funded right-wing think tank.” The title of that article is Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot.
That is not the best answer, but it is worth pondering.
President Trump has so far issued 210 Executive Orders, 54 memoranda, and 100 proclamations. Of the Executive Orders, nearly a quarter, some fifty of them, directly bear on higher education. These range from EO 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on January 20, to EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” issued January 21, to EO 14332, “Restoring Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” issued on August 7. Since early August, none of the new Executive Orders have been directly concerned with higher education. This does not, of course, mean that the White House has decided that it is done with the topic of reforming our colleges.
We need only think of the "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education" that the White House offered to nine universities on October 1. Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, USC, UT Austin, University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt were given a choice between being rewarded with favorable government treatment if they adopted some strenuous changes in policy or standing in opposition to the White House agenda.
Seven of the nine that were invited to sign have said no: Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Virginia, and now Arizona and Dartmouth. Only Texas has said yes. Vanderbilt is pondering.
The policy changes included equality in admissions, i.e., the elimination discrimination on the basis of race or sex; required use of standardized tests such as the SAT for admissions; commitment to a “broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff;” commitment to civil debate; prohibition of “incitement to violence, including calls for murder or genocide;” and “impartial” enforcement of all rights and restrictions.
One might think that the contemporary university that typically speaks loudly about academic freedom and fairness would find such stipulations to be anodyne. Many are already established law.
But other provisions on the proposed Compact struck a nerve. The universities were asked to freeze tuition for the next five years, eliminate “unnecessary administrative staff, " engage in “transparent accounting, " and reduce “administrative costs.” They were also asked to post statistics about the “average earnings of graduates in each academic program” and “refund tuition to students who drop out during” their first semester.
These proved hard to swallow for our esteemed academic administrators. The Compact has many other provisions and to cite them all would take us down a long road. (I will soon post another essay in which I take a close look at the Compact.)
But NAS has a definite interest in two provisions. The Compact calls for anti-money laundering rules that include strict disclosure of foreign gifts and KYC rules—that is, “Know Your Customer” rules—intended to end the use of cut-outs and intermediaries that some universities employ to disguise the true source of gifts from foreign entities.
The Compact also commits those who sign it to a ceiling of 15 percent of undergraduate students on foreign visas and no more than 5 percent from any one country.
NAS has been the nation’s leading advocate for the disclosure of foreign gifts to American universities. We were the first to blow the whistle on the use of cut-outs to disguise the source of funds. And we have also strongly cautioned legislators on higher education’s excessive reliance on international students. That reliance has made some colleges and universities eager to bend their curricula to favor the views of the home countries of the students—especially China. It has made American universities timid in addressing issues such as China’s aggressive and militaristic policies towards Taiwan and the Philippines. It has made American universities silent about the imposition of authoritarian control of Hong Kong. It has rendered universities mute on the brutalization of the Uyghur minority, China’s use of slave labor, the persecution of Christians and followers of Falun Gong practitioners, and the horrific practice of harvesting organs from living prisoners.
Instead, American higher education has treated China with kid gloves even as that nation’s agents have stolen billions of dollars of sensitive American research and technology, and intimidated overseas Chinese students reluctant to assist with illicit state activities.
China’s damaging influence on the United States goes far beyond what happens on American campuses, but the reliance of our colleges and universities on the tuition dollars of students from the People’s Republic and the funding for research projects favored by Beijing are among the deepest roots of that influence.
The National Association of Scholars has played an outsized role in opposing China’s incursions into American higher education, beginning with our 2017 report, Outsourced to China. And we are happy that members of Congress, President Trump, and several other advocacy groups have taken up the issue. But we note that so far the American higher education establishment has done nothing but downplay, excuse, and defend its reliance on China.
This is one area where Trump’s proposed Compact could make an enormous positive difference. NAS played no part in drafting the Compact, but we do see our imprint on the administration in many provisions. How that happened, we don’t know for sure.
The resistance of higher education to the proposed Compact says a lot about the current state of American higher education. The seven universities (so far) that have rejected the Compact have issued their explanations, and the chorus has been amplified by respected academics who agree that the Compact would compromise the necessary autonomy of colleges and universities and violate the principle of academic freedom. Among those voices are Professors Robert George, Tom Ginsburg, Robert Post, David Rabban, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and Keith Whittington. The six of them published a statement in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, “Our Politics Differ, But We Agree: Trump’s ‘Compact’ Violates Academic Freedom.”
I won’t engage the details of their argument here, but I note the statement as a further example of citing noble principles to the end of brushing away policy proposals that would do a great deal more good than harm for the American people.
So much for the policy contexts in which NAS now operates. There are also social and economic contexts to be mentioned, even though I won’t venture to explore them here.
Should we lament the 84 colleges and universities that have closed or merged between March 2020 and September 18, 2025? Or the nearly 300 that have closed since 2008? If you look at the actual list of institutions (to be found, among other places, on Higher Ed Dive), you will see that few of these will be missed. Small for-profits and small religious colleges have been hardest hit. Major downturns in enrollment, however, have also hit mainstream colleges and universities in the form of ruthless competition for students, program cutbacks and closures, faculty lay-offs, hiring freezes, and pauses in graduate admissions.
The travails of the Ivy League universities, including Harvard and Columbia—institutions which especially benefited from Trump’s scrutiny—also bear witness to the declining fortunes of higher education.
Out of all these elements, we could conjure forecasts that lean in the direction of delight or despair. Preston Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, calls falling enrollment a welcome “correction” from the nation sending too many people to college—too many underqualified and too many who graduate unprepared for the job market. Our board member (and treasurer) Richard Vedder similarly published a book, Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education. Those are, ironically, the optimistic views.
On the other side of the ledger are those who see the decline in enrollment, the loss of public respect, coupled with the rise of AI, as the beginning of the end of American higher education as we know it. Arizona State Professor Robert Niebuhr has written about “AI and Higher Ed: An Impending Collapse.” Cornel Law professor William Jacobson published on Saturday an essay that announces, “Academia is a sinking ship, and the Trump administration is actually trying to intervene and rescue it. […] Yet higher education is defiant of attempts at outside reform.”
Some of the pessimism among academics indeed stems from unhappiness over President Trump’s policies, but dig deeper and you will find a well-cooked casserole of discontents over costs, enrollment, quality, credentials, public support, and more.
Look in a different direction, however, and higher education appears to be prospering. Endowments are up, including at Harvard, where its endowment grew 12.9 percent to over $57 billion during its year of torment.
I take all of this as the environment in which NAS now operates. We are abundantly aware of that environment, but not defined by it. Let me turn to what NAS is, what we’re doing, and what lies ahead.
What NAS is: We are a 47-year-old membership organization, founded to sustain liberal education in an increasingly illiberal era, as our founders saw in the mid-1980s. Our mission is to “uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.” This has propelled us into certain kinds of controversy and resulted in some who think we are “a billionaire-funded right-wing think tank,” or worse.
I will admit that our positions are usually thought of as right of center and that we are, in addition to being a membership association, something of a think tank. A better metaphor would be that NAS is a watchdog. We seek to spot the derelictions and defaults in higher education before others have noticed, and then, like a good watchdog, we stay vigilant after others have grown complacent. Our work on China fits the first-to-notice category. Our work on racial preferences fits the sticking-with-it after others have resigned themselves category. But no matter the issue, we seek to conduct ourselves as scholars who are determined to follow the facts.
That doesn’t mean that we shy away from opinions and interpretations, including controversial ones. We frequently publish opinions we disagree with because we think they deserve to be aired. But we distinguish sharply between our factual reporting and our presentation of our own or others’ opinions.
We are a prolific publisher, with our substantial quarterly journal, Academic Questions, and our heavily trafficked webzine, Minding the Campus, in addition to our research reports and draft legislation.
But I’m afraid we have no billionaire backing us. We raise our financial support by applying to foundations for grants and urging members and friends to make contributions. We are incorporated in New York as a 501(c)3 tax-deductible charity.
The most important thing I have to say is that NAS has emerged over the last several decades as a leading voice for the preservation and perpetuation of Western civilization. The standards of liberal education we promote are integral to that civilization.
Colleges and universities are, or at least they used to be, pleasant places to study and work, but we are not pursuing a parks and recreation agenda. If colleges and universities consume themselves with hatred of America and the West, liberal education will be hampered, but it won’t disappear. It will find new homes, and we will be among those who help to rescue it.
But we are not yet faced with such a full-scale collapse. Higher education has deep faults, but it still stands, and the task at hand is to set it right. We have, at the moment, more than a dozen projects underway. These include our work on China; our opposition to racial preferences; our project examining the links between DEI and campus anti-Semitism; our Bowdoin-style Brandeis Project; our continuing work on Title IX and radical feminism; and our work on the deterioration of the natural sciences under the influence of both radical ideology and political corruption. We are planning a study of how ESG—Emotional Social Learning—which has become a port of entry in K-12 for the radical ideologies that flourish in college. We are mindful of the need to figure out how to respond to the rise of AI and to the related problem that many college students no longer know how to read at a college level, and even if they do know how, choose not to.
These are some, not all, of our projects. Our website supplies a fuller picture. We also play an important role in giving a platform for views that are often censored on college campuses and the mainstream press. We do that via our Minding the Campus website and our journal Academic Questions. And we are all the time intervening or attempting to intervene on behalf of faculty members who have been threatened, punished, or otherwise coerced because of their decisions to resist the edicts of woke bullies who so often have gained positions of power on campus.
I offer this as a sketch of where NAS stands in the context of contemporary higher education and where we stand outside that context as an independent voice. We are the National Association of Scholars, which doesn’t commit us to the academic status quo. While we would prefer colleges and universities to reform themselves in the direction of liberal learning and the pursuit of truth, we recognize that this is less and less likely. In the spirit of not putting all our eggs in one basket, we give just as much attention to saving what’s best in our culture as we give to rescuing what is least bad in our universities. We aren’t a “right-wing think tank,” though we welcome whoever is convinced by the merits of our mission. That includes any billionaires who are inspired by our ideals, but so far, none have wandered in.
Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash
