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Happy Thanksgiving!
From all of us at the National Association of Scholars

Dear John,

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at the National Association of Scholars. This has been a long year, with many changes, and many of those for the better of our organization and for education reform in America.

None of our work would be possible without your continued support of the National Association of Scholars and your continued advocacy for broad education reform in America. If you would like to read more about some of our recent successes, be sure to read this week’s CounterCurrent ([link removed]) and Jared Gould’s Top of Mind ([link removed]) .

We often discuss in our Thanksgiving email the various accomplishments of our organization and the things we want to highlight in our giving thanks. This year, the communications staff thought it might be good to hear from the rest of our staff. We asked what brought them to NAS, what effect they would like to see come about in education as a result of their work, and, of course, what they are grateful for this year. While this may be a little longer than our typical note of thanksgiving, we hope you’ll enjoy reading these reflections from our staff.

Peter Wood:

My role is that of chief watchdog. NAS keeps a constant watch on American higher education and increasingly on K-12 education as well. Colleges and universities frequently act in what they take to be their own best interests, which seldom match the best interests of scholarship, students, or the nation. Moreover, the safeguards against the diversions and derelictions are weak. Congress, state legislatures, and accreditors are only intermittently attentive to the ways in which educational institutions can go astray. College presidents often defend misguided policies, or indeed, they originate them. The profusion of DEI policies is an outstanding example of such collusion with illegal or highly suspect ways that colleges conduct themselves. We are also attentive to the sources of temptation that arise off-campus. Perhaps the strongest of those temptations comes from foreign actors who wish to subvert our educational institutions. By far the most dangerous of these is the Chinese Communist
Party.

My role as president of the NAS is to sort through the myriad missteps and temptations in American education, determine which we should focus on, and devise appropriate remedies. This requires a lot of time listening to people, reading news sources, and consulting with NAS's expert staff. Of course, I am also responsible for raising the funds NAS needs to operate; hiring staff; keeping our members and supporters abreast of our work; and ensuring that the public at large recognizes NAS's vital mission as we seek to save Western civilization from the decline that our colleges and universities have in fair measure instigated.

What am I most grateful for? I am most grateful for the enormous goodwill of our members, who frequently express their support in a manner that shows they really understand our work, not just in general terms but in substance and detail. I am also grateful that the federal government, after ignoring our issues for more than thirty years, has all at once acted on many of them—and cited our work as it has done so.

David Randall:

For NAS, I work on higher education research as a whole, and on a variety of science, civics, and K-12 social studies topics in particular. I campaign for public policy reform, especially on the state level. I try to state clearly what the problems are in select topics of education policy and to provide first drafts for solutions. I hope that way to help education reform happen a bit faster than otherwise. Any success I have depends upon an extraordinary number of other people working in the same direction—and I am deeply grateful to everyone whose labors ensure that mine have some effect.

Scott Turner:

Forty years ago, I made a choice to become an academic scientist because it promised me the freedom to pursue my curiosity in trying to make sense of the natural world.

For the most part, my academic career made good on that promise. I was able to explore how reptiles use blood circulation to manage heat flowing between their bodies and their environment and control body temperature. Much of that work involved a captive population of fifty alligators, which included two five-footers named Wally and Hulk. This led eventually to a better understanding of how dinosaurs might have managed the same trick. From there, I went on to study how birds managed the temperature of their eggs during incubation. There’s more to it than the mommy bird sitting on the eggs, by the way. That work eventually took me to ostrich eggs and to South Africa. That experience led me to the topic that dominated the rest of my research career: the remarkable soil lungs of the mound-building termites that are common in the savannas. I had a lot of fun learning how the natural world worked, and it’s taken me to some pretty interesting places, both geographically and intellectually.
In the last decade of my career, things got a lot less fun. I was no longer free to teach in new ways; I was under relentless pressure to generate grant revenues, whether I needed them or not. Students became inordinately focused on test scores and grades, overshadowing the students with the sparkling curiosity and intellectual verve that sustain an academic career. They’re still there, by the way. They’re just overshadowed. I’ve given a lot of thought to what happened.

Which brings me to what I am thankful for this year. I’m thankful that the flame of the promise of our universities—of defending the core precepts of the liberal education—has a shelter in the National Association of Scholars, and that I am privileged to be part of it.

Suzannah Alexander:

Education matters because our children and their futures matter. That commitment brings me to NAS, where I research policy and work with lawmakers and stakeholders to advance free speech, rule of law, and the civic education essential to our constitutional republic.

My recent return to graduate school revealed how far many institutions have drifted from their educational mission—judging students on beliefs rather than merit, and allowing quality standards to serve ideological purposes rather than intellectual ones.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to work alongside the NAS team on higher education reform. Our research documents these challenges and offers evidence-based solutions. By upholding standards that prioritize intellectual freedom and the pursuit of truth, we provide institutions with a roadmap for course correction. This work matters, and I'm honored to contribute to it.

Ian Oxnevad:

I do the work that I do because America and Western Civilization cannot flourish without universities and ideas that refresh and nourish the Judeo-Christian tradition. The work I do seeks to ensure that our universities are not hijacked or used as tools by America’s adversaries to steal technology, influence policy, or serve as staging grounds for subversion under the cover of a classroom. The work I do entails a lot of research, crafting policy recommendations, writing, and uncovering connections between American higher education and various threats from abroad, especially from China, anti-semitism, Iran, Qatar, and the other issues that keep me up at night. I am thrilled and thankful to do what I do and to work alongside a set of incredibly rare and dedicated people at NAS who also work to ensure that the West survives.

Jared Gould:

I do this work because the future of the West depends on restoring truth, rigor, and intellectual courage to our universities. I spend my days editing and shaping the essays we publish, managing projects like the American Revolution series, doing a fair share of writing myself, and helping authors sharpen their arguments so they actually cut through the noise. This work may seem largely ineffectual at reforming institutions, but I believe it does push back against the decline in higher education by giving readers a clearer picture of what’s gone wrong and what it will take to repair our institutions. I hope our work helps students, faculty, and the wider public rediscover the culture, reason, and open inquiry that universities once existed to protect. I’m grateful to be part of a team committed to the same fight.

Nathaniel Urban:

I am the development associate at NAS. I process, record, and acknowledge all of our membership renewals and smaller donations and look for new members and foundations to support NAS. I have also written pieces for American Greatness, Minding the Campus, and The Imaginative Conservative this year.

I am grateful to spend my day-to-day getting to know our members and supporters. We often discuss the modern crises in higher education. This gives me a chance to talk about our work and how it is addressing their concerns. It is my pleasure to listen to them and learn more about the issues they care about. I serve a community of scholars that defends the traditional liberal arts. My hope is that today's work, the combined efforts of the NAS staff and our members, will indeed preserve Western Civilization and American history in higher education for generations to come.

Glenn Ricketts:

I am the NAS Public Affairs Director and Professor of Political Science and History at Raritan Valley Community College in Somerville, NJ. When I entered the teaching profession in 1980, I did not imagine that an organization such as NAS would be necessary. I was aware, of course, of the turmoil that had engulfed college campuses in the last half of the 1960s, but I was impressed with how my professors at Temple University were commendably professional and largely kept their politics out of the classroom. On that basis, I decided that the academic “life of the mind” was one I wished to pursue as well, and so pursued my graduate studies at the University of Chicago. But then, when I began to apply for full-time teaching positions and routinely received rejections by return mail, I sensed that the academy had embraced ideology rather than the pursuit of truth. By fortunate coincidence, I happened to attend the first NAS national conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, where I encountered
many others who also believed that something was seriously wrong in River City. I joined the NAS staff in September 1989, and I’ve been with this island of sanity since then.

Ben Dorfman:

Anti-Semitism represents a serious threat to the campus climate and to the very foundations of higher education itself. When students or faculty don’t feel they can do the work they were brought to college to do because of rampant stigmatization ignored by the college administration, their ability to contribute to higher learning is compromised. My job is to research and draw connections between DEI and anti-Semitism so that one of the major forces perpetuating this discrimination is exposed. My work has involved managing three case studies and conducting quantitative research on this topic. I hope that through my work, concrete policy changes will be instituted by colleges that will prevent this type of anti-Semitism from occurring in the future. I am grateful for the NAS’s commitment to my work and the fact that many triumphs have occurred in the fight against anti-Semitism in the past year.

Seth Forman:

Three decades of teaching on college campuses have given me little reason to expect bold leadership on higher-education reform. Yet President Trump’s efforts in 2025 to restore merit and academic freedom have caught my attention. It has been thrilling to watch our highest elected leader openly challenge the woke dominance and DEI-driven drift eroding America’s academic standards. The result of that drift has been two generations of young people bereft of the knowledge and character needed to sustain a nation as free, prosperous, and powerful as ours.

But along the way there have been reminders that the battle is long and the outcome, at best, uncertain. Just yesterday, a piece in The American Spectator ([link removed]) told of Temple University’s Medical school sending out flyers announcing that its renamed DEI office remains committed to “advancing equity” and proudly announcing, “Approximately 20 percent of the total enrollment consists of students from groups underrepresented in medicine.”

Curricula at my own college are still bathed in racial grievance, transgender normalization, and political activism. Many of our top academics have proudly contributed to Ken Burns’s new documentary on the American Revolution ([link removed]) , which leads off by crediting the idea for the new republic to the I ([link removed]) [link removed] Indians.

In short, there is little evidence that colleges have recommitted themselves to the critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and empirical reasoning necessary for a solid liberal education.

So at Thanksgiving, my optimism for the long-term success of higher ed reform is tempered. But I remain buoyed that the battle has at last been joined.

Teresa Manning:

America’s future depends on our young people. Will they realize what they have been given and how the torch has passed to them?

Higher education is not just a ticket to a good job, though it may sometimes offer that. It should also cultivate the life of the mind and should awaken a civic spirit. Who founded this country that we all inhabit, and why? On what principles? How do I benefit, and how can I preserve what is good and improve what could be made better?

Civilization itself depends on this transmission of knowledge and moral character from one generation to the next.

But today the education system is controlled by those who see it solely as a source of political power, not the opportunity to learn from our ancestors and from the best that has been said and written.

This politicization demotes education and degrades the mind. It can actually bring down civilization. We might be witnessing that now.

I’m grateful to be part of the National Association of Scholars, which understands what is at stake with education policies and norms. Its mission is to help rescue higher education from destructive political ideologues and restore it to the higher purpose of academic excellence and civic virtue.

I am thankful to all our staff who work day in and day out like a good bird dog on the trail to a bouquet of pheasants. They are always willing to go the extra mile and find the rot within American education. They work not just to uncover problems, but to bring them to light and advocate for a remedy. I am deeply humbled by their work and grateful to do what I can to ensure their ideas and projects reach policymakers, reporters, and caring members of the public.

If you want to continue supporting education reform in America, consider giving ([link removed]) to the National Association of Scholars.

With humility and gratitude, I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family.

All the best,
Chance Layton
Director of Communications
National Association of Scholars
Give to the National Association of Scholars ([link removed])

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