According to their own description (see "NAS: About Us"),

NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities.

NAS was founded in 1987, soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus. The founders of NAS summoned faculty members from across the political spectrum to help defend the core values of liberal education.

The NAS today is higher education’s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus—and we respond when colleges and universities fall short of the mark. We uphold the principle of individual merit and oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences. And we regard the Western intellectual heritage as the indispensable foundation of American higher education.

The existence of this organization greatly warms my heart. In a recent post, "American Character, the Remix: How College is Shaping Us Now," Peter Wood argues that modern higher education resembles Islamic madrassas, in that they seem to be more focused on the destruction of a competing culture than they are on the survival of their own (my characterization).