James O. Freedman 42nd President

President James O. Freedman

James O. Freedman, President Emeritus of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa, has been elected the 42nd President of the American Academy. He took office for a three-year term at the Academy's 220th Annual Meeting in May 2000.

Both as a university president and as a scholar, Freedman has been a vigorous and outspoken supporter of liberal arts education and its role in fostering moral leadership. In his 1996 book, Idealism and Liberal Education, he made a compelling case for the vital role of liberal arts education in preparing students for the leadership of their communities and of the nation. Citing the experience of Vaclav Havel as an idealistic but engaged intellectual, Freedman wrote that the Czech playwright's actions "summon us to recognize that intellectuals have obligations, by virtue of their capacities of language and thought, to the destinies of their fellow citizens."

Freedman is a native of Manchester, New Hampshire, and received his BA cum laude from Harvard College in 1957 and his LLB cum laude from Yale Law School in 1962. After serving as law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, Freedman practiced law with a New York law firm before joining the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty in 1964. He became university ombudsman in 1973, associate provost in 1978, and dean of the law school in 1979. In 1982 he was appointed president of the University of Iowa. He served in that position from 1982 to 1987 and as president of Dartmouth from 1987 to 1998. Currently, Freedman is the Bicentennial Professor of Law and the Liberal Arts at Dartmouth.

In an interview with the Boston Globe this past summer, Freedman laid out some of the social concerns he hopes the Academy will address during his tenure: "We need to talk about central issues in American life—race, poverty, and income distribution," he said. Under his leadership, the Academy has organized several Stated Meetings, starting in November 2000, that will address inequality.

Back to the November 2000 Newsletter