The election of new Academy members in 2021 provides an opportunity to recognize extraordinary people who help solve the world’s most urgent challenges, create meaning through art, and contribute to the common good from every field, discipline, and profession.

Grants will support the Academy’s Humanities Indicators (www.HumanitiesIndicators.org), the first comprehensive collection of statistical data about the humanities in the United States.

Academy Convenes Educators, Donors, and Evaluation Specialists

Projects in the Education and the Development of Knowledge program area inform policy and practice in support of high-quality, lifetime educational opportunities for all Americans. The program area continues the Academy’s enduring focus on the vital role education and knowledge development play in our nation and in our world. From advancing equitable educational outcomes to leveraging new developments in the learning sciences and digital technologies to questioning how domestic and international scholarly work may be affected by advances in machine learning, the Education and the Development of Knowledge program area draws upon scholars and practitioners from various fields and disciplines to explore the conditions that foster the creation, transfer, and preservation of knowledge in a global context.

What are the lessons learned when community college leaders, researchers, area employers, policymakers and philanthropists get together to discuss how to provide postsecondary students with the skills they need for meaningful employment?

Judge Theodor Meron on his experiences being an international criminal judge.

James O. Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa, took office as the forty-second President of the Academy. He succeeds Daniel C. Tosteson, dean emeritus of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University.

Martha Nussbaum accepts the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies and speaks about a philosophical approach to anger and fear.

The 2015 Induction Ceremony included presentations by five new members: Phil S. Baran, Patricia Smith Churchland, Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Sally Haslanger, and Darren Walker.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences receives a $10 million gift from David Rubenstein. This is the largest gift in the organization's 241-year history and will support a new facility for the Academy Archives and establish the Rubenstein Fund for American Institutions.

An evening program at the Congressional Visitors Center in Washington, D.C., featured Commission Cochairs John W. Rowe and Richard H. Brodhead; Commission members David Brooks, Karl W. Eikenberry, Pauline Yu, and John Lithgow; Senators Lamar Alexander and Mark Warner; and Congressmen Tom Petri and David Price.

Prizes Awarded by the American Academy

Much of the attention about the humanities in higher education tends to focus on four-year colleges and universities (and more specifically, on the declining number of students who major in the humanities). In recent years, the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators (HI) have been exploring the growing presence of the humanities in the community college sector.

On October 11, 2014, the American Academy inducted its 234th class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members. The ceremony included presentations by new Fellows Ramamurti Shankar, Diana H. Wall, Sherry Turkle, Mary Kelley, and John W. Rogers, Jr.

On March 26, 2024, stem cell biologist Haifan Lin received the Francis Amory Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. First awarded in 1940, the Amory Prize recognizes significant scientific advances in reproductive biology and medical care. The award ceremony included remarks by Yale University President Peter Salovey and Academy President David W. Oxtoby, a reading of the Amory Prize citation by Dean of the Yale School of Medicine Nancy J. Brown, and a presentation by Professor Lin. An edited version of the remarks and presentation follows.

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

The American public holds the humanities in high regard, and most people engage in one or more humanistic activities at work and in their leisure hours, according to a recent national survey by the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project. The survey, conducted with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, asked 5,015 Americans age eighteen and older who participate in NORC at the University of Chicago’s nationally representative AmeriSpeak Panel about their engagement in a variety of humanistic activities, as well as their beliefs about the personal, societal, and economic benefits of the humanities.

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.

One of the most notable developments in American academic life of the past sixty years has been intellectual renewal where it might have been least expected: among evangelical Christians.