The Commission on the Arts is the Academy’s first major programmatic effort focused on the arts and culture. At its center is the belief that the arts are essential to both individual and civic life and that artists are crucial to the functioning and development of healthy communities.

An examination of the financial advantage earning a bachelor’s degree, in any major, provides over not attaining the degree.

Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, members of the Academy's Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, write that the recent college admissions scandal represents a small fraction of college admissions and should not distract from persistent inequalities in higher education access.

Research funding is not unlike food production; it is not the amount, but the distribution of research funds that matters.

The closing program of the Academy’s 2025 Induction weekend featured a presentation by new member David Dunning on the psychology of overconfidence and its influence on decision-making, followed by a conversation with Academy President Laurie L. Patton. An edited transcript of the presentation and conversation follows.

Few need to be told that the academic humanities have been beset by challenges over the past fifteen years, but the evidence tends to be scattered. To provide a clearer picture of the state of the field, the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project recently released the results from a new national survey of humanities departments in fourteen humanities and humanities-adjacent disciplines, the fourth such survey since 2008. Drawing on responses from more than two thousand department chairs, the report demonstrates both the challenges the field experiences today and the resilience of many departments in the face of those difficulties.

In an effort to place the job advertisements in the broader context of the humanities field, staff members at the Humanities Indicators gathered up the numbers reported by the larger societies back to 2001.

The Humanities Indicators project recently released a series of reports on the life cycle of doctoral degree recipients in every field, shedding light on the challenges involved in earning the degree, and the occupational outcomes and incomes of those with a Ph.D.

As Board Chair Nancy Andrews notes in her message, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect every aspect of Academy life. Yet despite the challenges of the last eighteen months, by nearly every measure the strength of our community of members has only increased.

The Academy convened a workshop in Chicago to discuss how a regional working group of state, local, and university leaders from the plains states could help implement the recommendations from the Academy’s recent report.

The Chronicle interviewed Michael S. McPherson, cochair of the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, to hear about improving educational quality, raising completion rates, reducing inequality, and making college more affordable.

Amplifying a recommendation in Our Common Purpose, this OpEd in the Boston Globe proposes aligning state and federal election calendars to strengthen democracy by increasing participation, representation, and engagement in voting. 

A wide-ranging survey of humanities departments shows that prior to the pandemic, departments in most humanities disciplines appeared relatively unchanged since the Great Recession, with the exception of declines in undergraduate degrees.

Among the founding documents in the Academy Archives is a large bound volume, in three parts, of manuscript minutes, dating back to the Academy’s first meeting in May 1780. In addition to attendance rolls and descriptions of business trans­acted at these meetings, the volume contains other documents that chronicle the establishment of the organization’s rules, regulations, and practices.

When forced to decide between a career in biochemistry or psychology in the spring of 1950, Jerome Kagan chose the latter because of a gnawing puzzlement provoked by the observation that apparently sane people living in the same community held different beliefs about love, honesty, and whom was entitled to respect and whom to scorn.

Major study by American Academy of Arts and Sciences seeks change in curriculum and assessment, commitment to funding public higher education, new ideas about the faculty role, and more.

Since 2007, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences reports, four-year universities have reduced their number of departments offering art history, English, languages, history, linguistics, literature and religion. The proportion of students who major in the humanities in the United States has fallen from a high of nearly one in five in the late 1960s to one in 20 in 2015.

On May 5–6, 1956, the Academy hosted a conference on “Science and the Modern World View–Toward a Common Understanding of the Sciences and the Humanities.” The conference, funded by the National Science Foundation, was held in honor of physicist Percy Williams Bridgman and mathematician and physicist Philipp G. Frank. At their request, the meeting was not a celebration of their individual work. Rather, it highlighted the discipline of the philosophy of science, which they both advanced. Specifically, the conference examined the history of a scientific worldview and its intersection with the humanities in the mid-twentieth century.