NAS Blog

Academic Questions author David French and his wife Nancy were interviewed on the 700 Club last month (8-minute video), discussing their new book, Here and Away, about their experiences during his tour in Iraq.

Human Events also ran a review of the book here.

David French’s article, “American Legal Education and Professional Despair,”  appeared in the recent issue of Academic Questions on law schools (Summer 2011).

Over at the leading libertarian magazine, Reason, writer Shikha Dalmia attacks conservatives for using FOIA laws to invade the privacy of historian William Cronon. At the same time, Dalmia defends Open Records laws while noting that groups may abuse their rights by going after individuals. On that score, the Left comes in for a tongue lashing for politicizing the process (and so much else in academia).

NAS is partnering with Intellectual Takeout to answer questions that call for scholarly judgment and can’t be answered by Wikipedia.

Have you ever wondered, for instance, whether science fiction is literature, or whether Russia is part of ‘the West’?  Email NAS or use Intellectual Takeout’s ‘Ask the Professor’ form to submit your questions.

“Ask a Scholar” is a complimentary service provided by NAS to serve our readers. We match each question to an expert and post the answers on NAS.org. We’ve gotten a great variety of inquiries, including ones on literature, chemistry, foreign languages, education theory, rhetorical devices, economics, and grammar, and sociology.

Two questions were recently answered by economist and recently elected congressman King Banaian: one on state discount rates, and one on the question of who pays for America’s health care.

Would you like to help answer Ask a Scholar questions? We’ll start listing unanswered questions in our email newsletter – look for them soon!

The New York Times recently ran an article by Edward Rothstein (“To Each His Own Museum, as Identity Goes on Display“) about museum exhibitions that seek to vindicate certain groups’ historical roles but end up distorting history through an overemphasis on group identity. In it Rothstein cites The Rise of Early Modern Science, a book by 2009 Academic Questions author Toby Huff:

And in the Golden Age of Islam, however we define it, the culture of learning was controlled by the mosques. As the fascinating book “The Rise of Early Modern Science,” by Toby E. Huff, suggests, this may have actually limited scientific research and its transmission.

Dr. Huff’s AQ article, “What the West Doesn’t Owe Islam,” appeared in our special issue on academic revisionism.

In an article on Minding the Campus, Mary Grabar cites a recent article from NAS’s journal Academic Questions, “The Other Danger…Scholasticism in Academic Research.” She writes:

Vacuous language that conveys a fear of giving offense has repercussions in the real world. Writing for the National Association of Scholars, Lawrence M. Mead, professor of politics and public policy at New York University, recently diagnosed a new form of “scholasticism” in his field. Scholars cannot provide solutions to real world problems because of their focus on narrow fields of statistical research.

Mead correctly analyzes this trend as more dangerous than the political correctness imposed by “baby boom professors who . . . shifted the academy to the left.” These retiring professors are being replaced by “technicians who often lack any politics at all.” I would add that in narrow, statistical analysis young scholars find safety from charges of giving offense. Mead is right in seeing this development as a greater threat than political correctness, which “is at least visible and controversial, provoking debate.”

NAS has posted three articles from the forthcoming fall issue of Academic Questions at NAS.org. They are:

• How Scholarships Morphed into Financial Aid by Jackson Toby
  Scholarships should be based on merit, not need, argues Toby in his latest book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America.

• The Glut of Academic Publishing: A Call for a New Culture by Stanley W. Trimble, Wayne W. Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak
  Too much publishing of too little substance wastes scholars’ time, breeds  cynicism, and hinders true academic enterprise.

• Scoping Out the International Spy Museum by Ronald Radosh
  The International Spy Museum presents an often one-sided perspective on the Cold War and propagates the  popular idea that McCarthyism was worse than Soviet crimes against humanity.

Other articles from this special issue on “Good Ideas, Bad Ideas” are available at SpringerLink.com (subscription required). For a free subscription to Academic Questions, become an NAS member.

Then ask a scholar!

“Ask a Scholar” matches readers’ questions to scholars who have the answers.  Submit questions by email or via Intellectual Takeout’s Ask the Professor feature.

Past questions answered by NAS scholars have been:

• Lots of experts say that an event as disruptive as our precipitous financial crisis has never before unfolded in the middle of an American presidential election. Is this true? Are there any relevant historical parallels?
• Why don’t school buses have seat belts?
• Does Lily Bart commit suicide at the end of Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, or does she die of a drug overdose?
• What do identity hustlers mean when they use words like “queering,” “race-ing,” “worlding,” etc.?
• In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is the encounter between Tess and Alec in the forest rape or seduction?  Why didn’t the author tell us one way or another?
• Do you have references of Latin-American authors that develop their work in Critical Discourse Analysis?
• What caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

If you’ve ever wondered things like whether science fiction is literature or whether Russia is part of ‘the West,’ you’re in luck. Ask us your questions and we’ll find a scholar who can take his best shot at answering them.

How does traditional American culture and Western civilization fare on your campus?

What are some of the obstacles or difficulties a traditionalist, conservative, or libertarian might find on your campus?

What can you tell us about the aesthetics of everyday life on your campus, from dating and sex, to dress and tastes, to behavior and mores?

NAS asked 8 undergraduate college students these questions for a student symposium in the forthcoming “Student Culture ” issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 2). We left it up to each respondent to choose which question to answer and how to answer it. The students’ essays are the following:

Beneath the Rungs: Locating the Liberal Arts at Harvard by Brian Bolduc

From Raging to Engaging at Vanderbilt by Mary Frances Boyle

Catholic or Bust? The Spirit of Inclusion at Notre Dame by Mary K. Daly

Generation A at Fordham by Amanda Fiscina

Debate Denied: Conservatives Stifled at Stanford by Gregory Hirshman

Intolerant Tolerance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Nash Keune

Conservatives and Libertarians Face Challenges at the University of Michigan by Adam Pascarella

Pursuing Truth and Virtue: The Great Tradition at Hillsdale College by Julie Robison

Cross posted from NAS.org

We are pleased to announce that the current issue of Academic Questions, a special issue on “Sustainability,” is available FREE online! To read it, click here, or click on the article titles below to download the PDF versions. This issue will remain publicly accessible for twelve to eighteen months. We encourage you to forward the above link to potential members and subscribers.

Members, to gain access to other issues of Academic Questions, email nasonweb@nas.org with “AQ access” in the subject line. We’ll email you a unique link which you can use to set up your online AQ account. If you are not a member of NAS, please join us! We welcome everyone who agrees with our principles. Membership is renewable annually and includes a one-year subscription to Academic Questions in print and online.

The Issue at a Glance

Earth Worms: The Eco-Corruption of Higher Education
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Editor’s introduction to this issue

The Roots of Sustainability
Glenn M. Ricketts, National Association of Scholars
In a sweeping history that begins in the 1960s, Prof. Rickets, NAS director of public affairs and tenured historian, investigates how the sustainability movement emerged from the extremes of environmentalism. In considering how these movements diverge, Ricketts points out that what sets “sustainatopians” and environmentalists apart from earlier conservationists is their quasi-mystical claim that “everything is connected to everything else.”

If the Science Is Solid, Why Stoop? An Environmental Scientist Parses Climategate
Stanley W. Trimble, University of California at Berkeley
According to Prof. Trimble—soil scientist, UCLA geography professor, and environmentalist—“Climategate is…the greatest science scandal in my lifetime.” He urges that scientific skepticism is the only responsible academic reaction to current revelations about the research behind “climate change theory.”

Under the Green Thumb: Totalitarian Sustainability on Campus
Adam Kissel
Mr. Kissel offers a compelling indictment of the totalitarian tendencies within the sustainability movement on campus, whose proponents relentlessly argue that saving the earth outweighs every civil liberty.

Corroding the Curriculum: Sustainability v. Education
Austin Williams, Future Cities Project
In The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability (Societas, 2008), British architect Austin Williams called sustainability “an insidiously dangerous concept at odds with progress.” In his Academic Questions essay Williams examines the sustainability agenda in education in the United Kingdom (with parallel examples from the United States) and reveals that sustainability curricula are propagandistic and motivated by envy, status seeking, and financial gain, particularly among the less distinguished academic institutions.

Is Sustainability Sustainable?
Daniel Bonevac, University of Texas at Austin
What is “sustainability”? The sustainability movement has smugly produced hundreds of definitions, but can any of them withstand genuine analytical scrutiny? Philosophy professor Daniel Bonevac strives to answer that question and finds that many of the definitions by sustainability advocates rest on impossibilities or appear to be well-argued abstractions lacking substance. He concludes that sustainability is a bucket with no bottom.

Pluralism Lost: Sustainability’s Unfortunate Fall
Edward T. “Terry” Wimberley, Florida Gulf Coast University
Dr. Wimberley, a professor of ecological studies at Florida Gulf Coast University and supporter of the concept of sustainability, offers an unflinching account of what happened in a very short amount of time when one university carried its commitment to sustainability beyond the bounds of fair-minded intellectual pluralism.

Art and Delusion: Unreality in Art School
Ross Neher, Pratt Institute
Pratt painting instructor Ross Neher shares an inside look at the contemporary art school and observes that institutional obeisance at the altar of postmodern theory has only worked to widen the gap between an art student’s dreams of success as an artist and the harsh realities of the postgraduation world.

Bibliotherapy: Literature as Exploration Reconsidered
Stewart Justman, University of Montana, Missoula
Stewart Justman, Liberal Studies Program director at the University of Montana, Missoula, examines Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration, a popular textbook used since 1938 (in five successive editions) in high school English classrooms across America. Prof. Justman discusses how the one-time college roommate of Margaret Mead managed to transform teaching literature into a form of student therapy that encourages students to find their own meaning in texts.

Letters of an Old School New Critic
Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters
Edited by Edward Alexander, Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen
Reviewed by James A. Grimshaw, Jr.

Poems by Benjamin A. Plotinsky and David J. Rothman
“Jennifer Cheevy” by Benjamin A. Plotinsky, City Journal
“Three Voices” by David J. Rothman, Conundrum Press

Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest
Compiled, with commentary, by Peter Wood

LETTERS