Peter Wood, president of NAS, commenced the National Association of Scholars' 25th anniversary conference, "A Mighty Maze: Charting the Future of American Higher Education in an Age of Illiberal Ideologies, Broken Budgets, Big Debts, and Declining Standards" on Friday, March 1, 2013 at the Harvard Club in New York. Then followed Session 1: "The Illiberal Arts: Politicization and Academic Decline." Robert Paquette of the Alexander Hamilton Institute at Hamilton College, moderated the discussion. Tom Klingenstein, president of Cohen Klingenstein, LLC, told the story of how The Bowdoin Project began. Michael Toscano, director of research projects at the National Association of Scholars, presented his findings on Bowdoin College. Charles Geshekter, professor emeritus at California State University, Chico, spoke about the 2012 report A Crisis of Competence, which looked at political activism at the University of California. Ashley Thorne, director of the NAS's Center for the Study of the Curriculum, talked about the NAS's Beach Books report, for which a 2012-2013 edition is coming soon. Richard Fonte, an NAS member and the principal researcher for the Texas Association of Scholars report, Recasting History, released in January 2013, presented his findings about how U.S. history is taught at the two largest universities in Texas. The session concluded with a Q&A time.
The videos for each speaker and the Q&A session are below and on NAS's YouTube Channel. Photos from the conference are available on NAS's Flickr page.
