The National Association of Scholars (NAS) today is focused more than ever on public controversies and on public tools of communication. Where once NAS members were primarily concerned with debates within the academy, now they are equally concerned with debates about the academy. If the topics they address have changed, so too have the means by which they proceed. The author believes that the future of NAS is to be a voice of rationality in an era in which the university has a fraught relationship with the concept of "truth" and the human capacity to gain ground on the truth through disciplined gathering and rational examination of evidence. NAS is that thorn in the side of contemporary higher education that reminds people of that larger truth. He stresses that NAS's role is to keep troubling people with accounts of what is going wrong, proposals for setting those things right, and demonstrations of what liberal learning is good for. (Contains 4 footnotes.)