Induction 2000
October 14, 2000—Take three Nobel laureates, two Pulitzer
Prize winners, the creator of Star Wars, the publisher of Black Enterprise,
32 Guggenheim Fellows, the leader of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project,
and add a dash of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and what do you
get? This year's edition of the new fellows Induction ceremony at the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dating back 220 years to its Revolutionary
War-era founding by John Adams and fellow patriots, the American Academy now
boasts the broadest, most diverse membership of any learned society or
scholarly organization in the nation. Four of this year's Nobel laureates are
Fellows of the Academy.
On October 14th, the American Academy hosted the Induction Ceremony
at its Cambridge headquarters and welcomed a new class of 169 Fellows. They
were greeted by Academy Vice President Patricia Albjerg Graham, Academy
Secretary Emilio Bizzi, and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz. The
inductees joined George Washington, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein as
Americans and foreign citizens who have been elected to membership. Current
Academy Fellows Patricia Meyer Spacks, Matthew Meselsen, and Joel Cohen gave
new members a glimpse of the breadth of ongoing Academy programs and studies
through presentations on topics that ranged from improving the state of the
humanities to reducing the risks posed by biological and chemical weapons to
providing the children of the world with universal basic and secondary
education. Heather McHugh and Paul Muldoon, poets and new Fellows, concluded
the ceremony with readings from their works.
"The Induction Ceremony is designed to give our new Fellows an introduction to
the unique blend of rich history, cutting-edge thinking, and interdisciplinary
collaboration that characterizes the modern Academy," explained Ms. Berlowitz.
In addition to filmmaker George Lucas, chef and author Julia Child,
cosmologist Wendy Freedman, philanthropist Teresa Heinz, historian Saul
Friedländer, and publisher Earl Graves, the new Academy class includes five
winners of MacArthur Fellowships and five National Book Award nominees.
For more information, please call Phyllis Bendell at (617) 576-5047
or email pbendell@amacad.org.
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