Stephen Balch

Balch receiving National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in November 2007 Stephen H. Balch is an American conservative scholar and higher education reformer. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009.

Early life and education Balch was born on January 31, 1944, into a Jewish family and grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. It was during the Berkeley riots that he became a conservative.

Career In his early career, Balch held numerous faculty positions. He was instructor of government at the University of San Francisco (1969–1970), acting instructor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley (1970–1971), instructor of political science at Rutgers University–New Brunswick (1971–1972), assistant professor of urban policy and programs at the Office of Urban Policy and Programs in the CUNY Graduate Center (1973–1974), assistant professor and later associate professor of government at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for fourteen years, (2002–2006), chairman of the National Association of Scholars from 2009 to 2012, and is currently a member of its steering committee and board (2012–present). NAS now has about 3,000 academic members and forty-seven state affiliates.

Since 2010, Balch has been a board member of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. In the fall of 2012, Balch founded the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University. He is chairman of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions for distinguished service on behalf of the humanities, which was bestowed by President George W. Bush at the White House on November 15, 2007. This award cited him "for leadership and advocacy upholding the noblest traditions in higher education", and went on to say that "his work on behalf of reasoned scholarship in a free society has made him a leading champion of excellence and reform at our nation's universities." On February 27, 2009, Balch also received the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award presented by the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. "Build It and They Will Come: Reviving Academic Diversity through New Programs", Philanthropy, May/June 2005. "The Dubious Value of Value-Neutrality", The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2006. "The Route to Academic Pluralism" in The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, Reforms (The American Enterprise Institute, 2009) pp. 227–240. "The Vanishing West", NAS 2012 (co-authored) "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement", Society, January 2014 Economic and Political Change after Crisis: Prospects for Government, Liberty and the Rule of Law, co-edited with Benjamin Powell (Routledge, 2016) "Cognoscendancy: Tyranny of the Talkers", Quadrant, May, 2016 "Phenocracy; Going off the Genetic Rails", Quadrant, June, 2016 "For a Concert of the Powers", The American Conservative, October, 2016 "How Islam Saved the West", Quadrant, October, 2016