Stephen Balch

Stephen H. Balch is an American conservative scholar. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009.

Stephen Balch was born into a Jewish famly in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn. He received a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College. He received masters and Ph.D.s, the latter in political science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation supervisor was Nelson W. Polsby. It was during the Berkeley riots that he became a conservative. He now identifies as a Republican.

He taught at John Jay College, City University of New York for fourteen years.

He joined Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World and, by 1982, he founded the Campus Coalition for Democracy. In 1987, he left his academic position and founded the National Association of Scholars, a conservative think tank against political correctness in higher education. He also started the journal Academic Questions. In 1992, he founded the American Academy for Liberal Education, an alternative accreditation body focused on the liberal arts.

He is a founding member and a trustee of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He has been involved in founding the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and the Association for the Study of Free Institutions. He was also for a time a Trustee of the Philadelphia Society. He is also a member of the History Association.

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