This June was one of the rainiest, coldest, cloudiest Junes in the Northeast on record. Here in New Jersey, we at NAS weathered the storms and waited out the gray days. Now that the sun has finally arrived—he may have simply wanted to be fashionably late—summer is at last in full force. Also beaming with all its might is our remodeled website, www.nas.org. With the transformation of our website over the last year, we feel a bit as if we have emerged from a gloomy June into a warm sunny day.
When we first launched our new website last spring, we saw the change as a chance to improve our public image. Now, just over a year later, we are thrilled at the increased publicity and new initiatives made possible by this website.
We publish new NAS articles every day, each one brightened by illustrations—which often tell their own story. Some articles are lengthy and scholarly, others brief and lighthearted. We range over all sorts of topics, from “critical global studies” to “beehive whacking.” Coming up with daily fodder for our ravenous beast makes us very attentive to academic news and responsive to tips from readers. It pays off. We’ve broken some national stories. Since we launched the new website, nearly 300,000 unique visitors have browsed through our pages, and we’ve been mentioned, quoted, and linked in 160 news articles and blog entries. One of them was a Wall Street Journal article and two were front page New York Times stories.
Building new features into the site has also been a process. First we added a comments feature that allows readers to append their thoughts instantly to any of our articles. Our most commented article so far is “Rebuilding Campus Community: The Wrong Imperative,” a statement we released last summer about the movement to use residence life for ideological “education.” Comments from one article frequently help furnish content for another. Mainly we appreciate the opportunity to continue the conversation, extend the debate, and get feedback from our readers. And to enable them to stay up-to-date with what we’re doing, we implemented RSS feed as well as Twitter updates of all our articles.
What can you find on our website? We listed some of the highlights in a recent posting, “400th Article,” which you can browse by topic, by special series, by college/university, or by date. If you want to see what NAS has written about, for instance, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, or what we have to say about sustainability, or which of our articles has the best rhymes—this directory is a good starting place.
On NAS.org you can also find new article series, such as Academic Questions Samples, Ask a Scholar, If I Ran the Zoo, and the Argus Project.
The Academic Questions samples feature two or three articles from each issue of the journal. An article we posted this spring, entitled “The Classroom Without Reason,” engendered a storm of comments from both sides of the debate, sparking an exchange that would not have happened had the article appeared only in a print version. We were also able to post an excellent article by Wendy Shalit on the campus “hookup” culture, as well as a lively interview with Tom Wolfe who chatted about his book I Am Charlotte Simmons.
“Ask a scholar” is an opportunity for our readers to pose to us their most burning questions—things like “Does science fiction count as literature?” and “Is Russia part of the West?” So far, we’ve fielded inquiries on literary interpretation, the meaning of new verbs such as “queering,” and why there are no seatbelts on school buses. We encourage all our readers to submit questions—and not the sort of thing that can be answered with a quick trip to Wikipedia. You may have wondered, for example, “Is the printed word on the brink of extinction?” or “How is the cell phone changing our culture?” or even, “Has Big Brother arrived?” Conjecture no more. Ask a scholar and we’ll match up your question with an expert who knows.
As a lighter alternative to these hefty questions, we began a summer tradition based on Dr. Seuss’s beloved story If I Ran the Zoo. In Seuss’s rhymes, a young boy named Gerald McGrew dreams up new and unusual animals he would bring in to improve the contemporary (and boring) zoo. NAS’s version asks readers to tell us how they would run the higher education zoo if they had the chance. What whimsical changes could they imagine? So far we’ve published articles by twenty-one would-be zookeepers, and to launch this summer’s series, NAS president Peter Wood performed a poem he composed about his dream zoo—a zombie zoo—on YouTube.
We have videos on our website of our national conference in January in Washington, D.C. Conference highlights include the debate between Peter Wood and AAUP president Cary Nelson on the meaning of academic freedom, and Victor Davis Hanson’s keynote address on how Western culture is unique. Our photo gallery documents the conference and Chairman Balch receiving two national awards for his work at NAS.
The new website also helps readers make contacts. We offer an index of forty “excellent programs” in American studies or Western civilization. Each one is based at a particular college or university; some are Great Books programs, some are free institutions centers, and some are academies for the study of the Constitution and democratic government. If you are looking to get connected with like-minded people, or if you’d like to find out which programs are closest to you, our Excellent Programs listing is a good place to begin.
Another resource is our Argus project. We launched Argus last summer as an effort to find people willing to “be our eyes” on campuses around the country. By means of a website-based survey, we recruited over seventy volunteers to help keep NAS up-to-date on campus mischief. NAS in turn is able to bring attention to neglected issues in cases where faculty members, students, and administrators may fear retaliation for speaking out publicly. Since launching the initiative, we have published many articles based on leads from Argus volunteers. One discussed the “Safe Spaces” movement on campus; one exposed U Mass Amherst for offering college credit to student volunteers in the Obama campaign; and one was a first-hand account from an administrator who was told it would be difficult to find “another black woman to replace you.”
A recent can of worms we discovered and have tracked on our website is a case of bold political bias in a policy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—Virginia Tech, that is. We’ll leave it to you to read about the university’s blatant efforts to use a “diversity” litmus test on faculty members. To find our articles on Virginia Tech, just type “Virginia Tech” into the search box on the homepage.
Our days of withdrawing into the shadows are over. With our new website we have stepped into the bright rays of public engagement. So join us in the sunlight, where we are in hot pursuit of accountability and integrity in higher education. Visit our website, www.NAS.org, and help us bring the facts to light.
