As global temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more common, nations face unprecedented safety and security challenges. While communities strive to protect themselves from the harmful impacts of climate change, each measure taken to increase perceived safety can have unintended consequences. As we surpass the 1.5°C threshold outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the question remains: how can we ensure that our short-term security goals are aligned with climate scientists’ mitigation recommendations?

Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does. Are all opinions equally valid in a university classroom? Joan Wallach Scott speaks about academic freedom after accepting the Talcott Parsons Prize.

Noteworthy

As the Academy continues to look at issues related to public perceptions of risk, uncertainty, and scientific research through its Public Face of Science initiative, it partnered with the University of Chicago to organize a public symposium on “Communicating Scientific Facts in an Age of Uncertainty.” The symposium featured presentations by Olufunmilayo I. Olopade and Arthur Lupia.

Following an introduction from Robert C. Post, Linda K. Kerber discusses her work as part of a new generation of historians who have begun to study law as a cultural formation that both reflects and forms the discursive construction of collective identity in society.

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.

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At a meeting sponsored by the American Academy, the Royal Society, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, Wendy Freedman (Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science) and Martin Rees (Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal; and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University) discussed what we know and do not know about the universe.

On April 1, 2019, the American Academy and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale presented their first joint public program, which featured a conversation between David Blight and Robert Stepto. The program, which served as the Academy’s Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture, included a welcome from Ian Shapiro. Crystal Feimster moderated the program.

On September 17, 2015, at the Silver Center of Arts and Science at New York University, Matthew S. Santirocco moderated a panel discussion featuring Kevin Guthrie, Daphne Koller, and Nicholas Lemann.

Randy W. Schekman moderated a panel discussion on consensus and controversy in science with Jennifer Doudna, Richard A. Muller, and Pamela Ronald.

On December 12, 2016, at the Century Association in New York, the Academy hosted the Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture on “Communicating Science through Art” with Diane Ackerman and Alan Alda. This program served as the Academy’s 2048th Stated Meeting and included an introduction by Geneva Overholser.

Francis Amory Prize Symposium: Advances in Reproductive Biology and Medicine

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On March 30–31, 2023, the Academy gathered humanities scholars and leaders at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to mark the tenth anniversary of the release of The Heart of the Matter, the final report of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The goal of the meeting was to reflect on what has happened to the humanities over the past decade and to consider future directions for the field. To provide context for the conversation, Richard H. Brodhead (who cochaired the Commission with the late John Rowe) offered the following reflections, describing what shaped their thinking a decade ago and what has changed in the years since.

Immigration is not only where the people come from, and why they come, and whether they are forced to come; it's also how and, in the long run, whether they are received.

On November 15, 2016, the Academy’s San Diego Program Committee hosted Veerabhadran Ramanathan and David G. Victor for a discussion on the state of scientific understanding of climate change and the implications of this knowledge for the development of future policy.

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