A new book from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines the impact of providing high-quality education to every child in the world between the ages of 6 and 16.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies to address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.

Since our nation’s founding, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has celebrated excellence in every domain of scholarship and cultivated knowledge from many perspectives to advance the public good. The Academy is an independent, nonpartisan institution. Central to our work is a commitment to intellectual freedom–the freedom to teach, to learn, to speak, and to inquire without strictures of ideological or political orthodoxy. Freedom to pursue knowledge, without fear of censorship or discipline, is a bedrock value of our constitutional democracy and a practical condition for crafting the most effective solutions to our society’s toughest challenges.

William G. Thomas III, Anne Cong-Huyen, Angel David Nieves, and Jessica Marie Johnson engaged in a panel discussion on pedagogy in undergraduate digital humanities classrooms. The discussion, which was presented in collaboration with Emory University, was moderated by Erika Farr. Stephen G. Nichols and G. Wayne Clough provided national perspectives as respondents to the panel.

From visual arts to jazz, theater to poetry, the opening program of the Academy’s 2019 Induction weekend celebrated the arts and humanities. The event included a video featuring artist Mark Bradford; a performance by composer, pianist, and singer/songwriter Patricia Barber; remarks about the power and importance of the performing arts from theater director and scholar Harry J. Elam, Jr.; a reading by playwright Donald Margulies from his play Sight Unseen; and remarks and readings by poet, writer, and foundation leader Elizabeth Alexander.

The nation’s public research universities serve approximately 3.8 million students each year and perform much of the country’s groundbreaking research.

In today’s high-tech and hyperconnected world, threats from insiders go far beyond leakers and lone-wolf shooters. How can we better protect against the enemy within, no matter what it is that needs to be protected?

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.

Timothy J. Colton and George Breslauer gave a presentation on “Russia Beyond Putin,” the subject of the upcoming Spring 2017 issue of Dædalus.

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).

Attendees of the 21st Annual Conference of the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities were urged today to consider advancing new strategies to sustain and strengthen public research universities by members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Lincoln Project.

The Academy typically holds events around the country and the world that bring members and others in their communities together. Although the COVID-19 pandemic suspended in-person events, the Academy continued to explore topics of national and global concern through a series of virtual activities. Academy President David W. Oxtoby provided opening remarks and moderated most of the virtual meetings and events.

Stephen Heintz, cochair of the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, says Biden’s single most important step in his first 100 days is to establish a White House Office for Democracy.

Federico Capasso and Alfred Cho recognized for invention, application of laser technology

On September 6, 2018, at Emory University, the American Academy hosted a Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture on “The Study of African American Women’s Writing: Pasts & Futures.” The program, which included a welcome from Dwight A. McBride, served as the 2069th Stated Meeting of the American Academy. Michelle M. Wright introduced the evening’s speakers – Frances Smith Foster, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Pellom McDaniels III – and moderated the discussion.

On October 24, 2023, the Academy released Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Action Across America, the final report of the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action. Prompted by a statement by the Academy’s Board in 2021, the report addresses the need for a climate strategy that breaks through the divisions that characterize politics in the nation today.

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?

On February 6, 2018, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf participated in a discussion on Jefferson, race, and democracy, drawing from their recent book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.