The California Association of Scholars seeks to:
* affirm the centrality of academic freedom to the integrity of university life and
strengthen the right to teach and learn in an environment free of politicization
and coercion;
* nourish the free exchange of ideas and the virtues of tolerance as essential to the
pursuit of truth and the maintenance of civility;
* build and sustain an academic leadership dedicated to the idea of reasoned and
responsible scholarship;
* maintain intellectual standards in research and teaching, and resist quotas and other
numerically based formulas as divisive and inequitable strategies for faculty
recruitment and student admissions;
Issues That Concern Us:
* Politicization of scholarship and teaching, and the substitution of social reform for
the pursuit of knowledge;
* Dogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and reflexive use of non-Western
cultures as a means of denouncing American society;
* Inappropriate use of sexual, racial, and other nonscholarly criteria in selecting
works to be studied, and the associated denigration of great literary and artistic
works;
* Absence of core curricula or other requirements ensuring a well-rounded
education, and their replacement by unscholarly curricular innovations that lack
substance and intellectual depth;
* Use of sexual, racial, or other criteria unrelated to merit in hiring, in promotion,
and in student recruitment, and the resulting campus polarization;
* Use of noncurricular resources such as orientations and residential life programs to
impose political and ideological conformity on student life;
* Unfair treatment of teachers and students suspected of holding "politically
incorrect" views, and its obverse, the frequent placation of activists by
administrators who refuse to enforce campus regulations;
* The impact of lowered academic standards in colleges and universities on
education at lower levels, and the resulting inadequate preparation of high school
graduates for college work.
