In an article for the Claremont Review of Books posted on RealClearPolitics, Harvey Mansfield cites the findings of NAS's report What Does Bowdoin Teach? as evidence of the scandal of American higher education: the decline of the liberal arts and the rise of political correctness. “Today’s liberals do not use liberalism to achieve excellence, but abandon excellence to achieve liberalism,” he writes.
Mansfield recommends the Bowdoin study as a perceptive portrait of the contemporary American college, which has given up the pursuit of liberal arts education for “an education in liberating oneself from the liberal arts.”
Mansfield has previously praised NAS's report on Bowdoin College as an “impressive” and “complete, top to bottom treatment of a college."