American Academy of Arts and Sciences Paper Assesses How Industry, Regulators Have Applied Lessons Learned

The Obama Administration has an opportunity to fundamentally reformulate U.S. space policies that are anchored in Cold War-era mindsets. Participants in the American Academy’s “Reconsidering the Rules of Space” project briefed Washington policymakers today on options facing the Obama Administration in U.S. space policy.

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.

More than 200 individuals with compelling achievements in academia, business, government, and public affairs were elected to the Academy in 2019.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded by visionaries who foresaw that the nascent republic would benefit from the expertise of learned citizens to guide its development, health, and integrity through any challenges that may arise.

The class speakers at the Induction Ceremony explored several themes, including the value of curiosity and the unexpected; strategies to prevent scientific failures with harmful consequences; the role of the social sciences in addressing the urgent challenges of today; the processes of transformation and translation; and how openness fosters innovative and sustainable problem-solving. The ceremony featured presentations from theoretical astrophysicist Charles F. Gammie, research ecologist Helene Muller-Landau, lawyer and legal scholar Daniel E. Ho, writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri, and economist and nonprofit leader Cecilia A. Conrad. An edited version of their presentations follows.

There is a surge of outbreaks in vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States. What research is needed to reverse this trend?

On October 6, 2012, the American Academy inducted its 232nd class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony featured historical readings by Daniel Day-Lewis, new member Bonnie Berger, and Tom Leighton. It also included presentations by five new members: Steven H. Strogatz, Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, Maureen E. Mahoney, David Blight, and Penny Pritzker. The ceremony concluded with a memorable performance by Thomas Hampson (baritone).

In November 2003 the people of the former Soviet state of Georgia forced a revolutionary change in leadership to establish a new government under President Mikhail Saakashvili. “Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution,” a new book from the American Academy, analyzes the security problems that confront this new government and the greater Caucasus region.

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.

The humanities, arts, and culture are woven through virtually every Academy program, where artists and humanists add interdisciplinary breadth to projects in science, democracy, and security. However, the Academy also undertakes projects that put humanities, arts, and culture at the forefront, strengthening their practice and highlighting their importance to all aspects of the nation’s thriving intellectual life. These projects call attention to the role the arts and humanities play in enriching the growth and vitality of individuals, communities, and the nation.

On October 6, 2018, the American Academy inducted its 238th class of Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony featured readings from the letters of John and Abigail Adams by Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, a performance by André Watts, and presentations by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Huda Y. Zoghbi, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Robert Gooding-Williams, and David Miliband.

The Spring 2023 issue of Dædalus on “Delivering Humanitarian Health Services in Violent Conflicts” features essays, poetry, fiction, and visual art to illuminate the dilemmas facing humanitarian health actors and the potential for innovation in humanitarian health delivery.

Academy member James Fallows includes Our Common Purpose as one of three developments that shed light on how the parts of America that still work can be applied to the parts that need help most.

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.

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.

We have entered a new nuclear era. The Cold War world dominated by only two nuclear superpowers no longer exists (even if Russia and the United States still possess the lion’s share of nuclear weapons); it has grown into a multipolar nuclear environment.

Arthur Gelb, a prominent member of the American Academy since 2000, died on November 8, 2023. He served as the Chairman of the Academy’s Investment Committee and as a member of the Academy Trust. For many Academy Induction ceremonies his role was to introduce the Class I speaker (in the mathematical and physical sciences).