At the National Press Club, members of the Academy's language commission met for a public discussion of their answers. Commission member Rubén Rumbaut, offered the core of the commission’s framing, “Ironically, despite the diversity of American languages, the United States has acquired the dubious designation of being a language graveyard...we have immigrants and children of immigrants not passing on their language skills.”

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.

From the Archives

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).

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.

The British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosts a series of events with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Essays explore how technological innovations and political shifts are changing the nature of warfare.

In the early 1800s, the Academy received reports of a sea serpent, described as 60 to 100 feet long, in what is now Maine’s Penobscot Bay. In 1810, upon hearing that the reports had been lost, minister and politician Alden Bradford, with the assistance of Lemuel Weeks, collected and presented to the Academy sworn statements of witnesses. In doing so, Bradford acknowledged, “Accounts of this sort, I am aware, should be received with caution.”

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.

Renowned immunologist and former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, is receiving the Award for Excellence in Public Policy and Public Affairs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his work on behalf of the common good.

The twenty-first-century information sciences will allow us to communicate information and compute at unprecedented speeds. By 2029, for example, we should be able to build computers, in quantity, that are a million times more powerful than the personal computers of today.

The Legacy Recognition Program, an important part of the Academy’s overall effort to address and reconcile our history regarding racism and inequality, highlights the contributions of scholars, researchers, writers, artists, business leaders, community leaders, and others whose accomplishments have been overlooked or undervalued due to their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

Though technology and warfare have greatly evolved since Michael Walzer published his seminal text Just and Unjust Wars over forty years ago, the debate on the ethical challenges posed by these changes has been confined mostly within the boundaries of specific disciplines; few attempts have been made to pursue a genuine interdisciplinary debate on this matter.

On June 19–20, 2019, the Academy convened an Exploratory Meeting in Boston, MA, on “Water in Our Future.” The participants included water program officials, water policy experts, research scientists, and scholars in the humanities and sciences from the United States and around the world. The meeting was organized to help identify key questions related to water security and to inform how a potential Academy project might make a contribution in this area.

On February 4, 2015, Andrea Roth and Franklin Zimring participated in a conversation at the University of California, Berkeley, on police use of lethal force against civilians.

On a gray London morning in January, I walked past familiar markers of institutional gravity on my way to the Royal Society. Stone facades. Heavy doors. Plaques engraved with names that have outlived the controversies of their eras. It is easy, in places like this, to slip into a kind of historical reverence that feels comforting, even anesthetizing.

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.