Projects

This project examined higher education and research in Germany and the United States.

German and American scholars met in three working groups to address admissions policy, absorption of immigrants, and policies that receiving and sending countries might adopt together to reduce the increasing numbers of refugees and migrants. This study resulted in five volumes comparing migration in the United States and Germany.

Genocide in Rwanda, instability in the Middle East, anarchy on the Internet—insecurities abound. But do they occur "naturally," or are they, as this path-breaking volume suggests, cultural and social productions?

For this project, the Academy co-sponsored a series of symposia and conferences to examine censorship from a variety of perspectives. In the resulting volume of essays, an interdisciplinary group of scholars analyzed efforts to regulate speech and examined the subsequent cultural implications.

In 1994, nearly one hundred university leaders, scholars of scientific research, and executives from industry convened at Stanford University to examine the nature and significance of developments in university-industry research relationships over the previous fifteen years.

After an examination of research literature showed that evaluations of many educational interventions were nearly useless because they provided little reliable information about whether programs worked, the Academy created The Center for Evaluation to apply meta-analysis to the problem. Researchers extracted information from experimental data from multiple sources to analyze studies on topics such as optimum class size and grouping students according to skill levels.

This project focused on the critical importance of civic engagement to issues of democratization and economic development, in the U. S. and in developing countries with the aim of sharpening the concept of “social capital” — that is, social networks, norms, institutions and trust — through sustained dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers.

A follow up to an earlier Academy study titled “Environmental Change and Acute Conflict,” this project examined how state capacity influences governmental responses to environmental scarcities, and potential subsequent conflict, in developing countries.

In 1994, the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) hosted the first major international workshop on the dangers posed by the increased proliferation of small arms and light weapons to areas of conflict around the world.

The Academy co-sponsored a conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that invited philosophers and political scientists to examine what was driving the global resurgence of nationalism and to discuss how the conflicts it engenders can be resolved.

This project focused on the meaning of “public interest” communication in a 500-channel marketplace, with particular emphasis on television’s failure to fulfill its potential as an educational medium.

This multi-pronged project examined shifts in the boundaries between the internal affairs of member states whose sovereignty is protected by the United Nations Charter and those matters which the U.N. and other international organizations deem to be within their cognizance.

This project brought together physical scientists, legal experts, space program directors, economists, political scientists, and policymakers from all space-faring nations to discuss how to mitigate the problem of ever-increasing quantities of man-made orbital debris in space.

To address a deepening crisis in the lives of America’s children, the Academy organized a steering committee to explore how the Academy could increase the nation’s commitment to and investment in children.

In the early 1990s, the Academy held a four-day conference to address America's crisis in health care spending and the idea of equitable and adequate health care for all. The edited report was distributed to health care leaders around the country.

Working with Argonne National Laboratory and the Midwest Consortium of International Security Studies, the Academy co-sponsored two conferences on global climate change, with one focusing on international security issues and the other focusing on social and economic consequences.

Representatives of two of the world’s major industrial nations, and thus major polluters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., met in August 1991 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, to discuss ways to improve environmental protection practices in the two nations.

In 1990, the Academy co-sponsored an interdisciplinary symposium focused on trends in current scholarship on homelessness. The resulting publication critically examined the shortcomings of the research into the causes of homelessness and addressed barriers to remedying this social problem.