ABSTRACT
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is leading the drive to preserve academia's preferential option for all that is rich, white, macho, and ancient. The immediate predecessor of the NAS was a group called the Campus Coalition for Democracy, headquartered, as was the NAS, in Princeton. In late 1987 the NAS was formally inaugurated, with Herbert London named chair of the board and Stephen Balch president. The NAS will succeed if and only if progressives fail to do their homework. One by-product of the anti-PC campaign was the NAS's consolidation of a network of 3,000 faculty members organized into twenty-nine state affiliates. In an effort to dispel its neoconservative reputation, the NAS balanced its panels with a politically correct number of token liberals. The NAS represents a cohort of aging academics who see their colleagues' empty seats being filled by new categories of outsiders, and precisely at a time when the financial squeeze is on.
