The National Association of Scholars today is focused more than ever on public controversies and on public tools of communication. Where once we were primarily concerned with debates within the academy, now we are equally concerned with debates about the academy. In addition to topics such as higher education’s misguided pursuit of racial preferences and speech codes, and its descent into anti-Western ideologies, we now deal with matters such as the higher education bubble, the student loan debacle, and the rise of Web-based alternatives to traditional forms of college education. Where once NAS assumed we knew what the university should do, now we are more inclined to ask, “What purposes does it serve? How well does it serve them?”
If the topics we address have changed, so too have the means by which we proceed. For more than two decades
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