New Data Available on College and University Humanities Departments

Danielle Allen assesses the threats that new AI tools may pose to American democracy.

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.”

One of the recommendations for strengthening American democracy proposed in Our Common Purpose - the report of a bipartisan Academy commission - is to move to a system of proportional representation where elected seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are based on the share of votes each party or candidate receives. This article examines legislative progress at the federal and state levels concerning proportional representation.

As part of the 2013 Induction weekend, Ken Burns (President of Florentine Films) and Ernest J. Moniz (U.S. Secretary of Energy) spoke about the challenges and opportunities for the arts and the sciences.

The Academy’s larger projects, like the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education and The Public Face of Science, are designed to help influence the intellectual life of the country – by providing new ideas, recommending new ways to address challenges, and calling attention to new knowledge.

On November 11, 2015, Diane P. Wood, Goodwin Liu, and David S. Tatel discussed issues of access to the justice system. The program, which served as the 2027th Stated Meeting and the Inaugural Distinguished Morton L. Mandel Annual Public Lecture, was streamed to gatherings of members in four cities around the country: New York, Washington, Chicago, and Berkeley. The program concluded the first day of a two-day Academy symposium on the state of legal services for low-income Americans, which brought together federal and state judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and legal aid providers concerned about the state of legal services for Americans.

Barbara J. Meyer accepts the Francis Amory Prize and gives a brief presentation about the fundamentals of sex and death.

Robert Ballard tells the story of his passionate career in ocean exploration and discusses the educational initiatives he has created to engage a new generation of scientists.

The decennial census is the longest continuous scientific project in American history. It is also the largest applied social science project undertaken in this country.

An Academy working group has issued a new resource for repairing and strengthening civic culture in America. In a highly polarized political environment, the Academy’s new publication reminds us America is united by people who believe in its ideals and who balance their self-interest with the well-being of their community and country.

This fall the Academy Archives embarks on a new project to clean, repair, rehouse, and digitize many important documents from the Academy's early years, as well as a unique collection of records to related to the family of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

Richard Saller, Elaine Treharne, Franco Moretti, Joshua Cohen, and Michael A. Keller discussed the humanities in the context of rapidly developing new technologies.

The Academy’s project on the Alternative Energy Future is working to identify societal barriers to the widespread adoption of new energy technologies and to assess how these barriers might be better understood and managed.

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.

Stephen Heintz, Cochair of the Academy's Commission on Democratic Citizenship, calls for greater philanthropic support for work that strengthens democracy in American democracy. He makes the case that a healthy, functional government advances every other investment.

Ernst Bamberg, Ed Boyden, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, Gero Miesenböck, and Georg Nagel will receive a storied science prize in recognition of their extraordinary contributions related to the invention and refinement of optogenetics. The Rumford Prize has been awarded previously to Thomas Edison in 1895 for his work in electric lighting; Edwin Land in 1945 for his applications in polarized light and photography; Enrico Fermi in 1953 for his studies of radiation theory and nuclear energy; and Federico Capasso and Alfred Cho in 2015 for their contributions to the field of laser technology.

On May 15, 2014, at the Academy’s 2008th Stated Meeting, five experts discussed how institutions protect against the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Judith Resnik, Jonathan Lippman, Carol S. Steiker, Susan S. Silbey, Jamal Greene, and Linda Greenhouse participated in a conversation on the function of courts in the United States.