On behalf of the Development and Communications Committee, I would like to extend my deep gratitude to all the Fellows, friends, and foundations who supported the Academy this year.

Public research universities contribute to overall economy, research, and infrastructure in support of students, families, and the nation

Wendy Freedman gives the remarks for Class I – Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the 2010 Induction ceremony.

Three of the nation’s leading private foundations have awarded funds totaling more than $1.6 million to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to support its initiative on the Global Nuclear Future.

Despite the many challenges to higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by every field except the humanities increased through the end of the 2021 academic year.

Howard Mumford Jones was president of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences from 1944 to 1951. He was instrumental in transforming the Academy into a national organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary analysis of broad-scale intellectual issues.

In updates released this morning, the American Academy's Humanities Indicators report that visits to historic sites, museums, and art galleries are on the rise in recent years.

Mandel Family Support Now Exceeds $11 Million Overall

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

One of the recurring questions the Humanities Indicators receives concerns the extent to which students are engaging with the humanities as undergraduates—a subject for which there is precious little data. The best available information comes from an occasional survey of college graduates, which includes a painstaking review of the college transcripts of a nationally representative sample of college graduates.

Public-private partnerships, new sources of revenue among recommendations for strategic directions

There is no resource more central to life on Earth than water, and it is impossible to overstate its role in shaping human history. Humanity’s need for water is inextricably linked to its need for security, energy, food, and community. The Summer 2015 issue of Dædalus moves beyond the problems and failures.

In a new release today, the Humanities Indicators reports on substantial declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the field. NCA Director Trevor Parry-Giles responds.

This Annual Report comes at an important moment in the life of the Academy. After years of primarily virtual engagement, our members are again gathering in person with a renewed sense of energy, vitality, and hope. During the last year, we held major Academy events in a dozen U.S. cities, and this fall we visited international members in Mexico City and London. In September, we hosted a historic Induction weekend for the classes of 2022 and 2023, welcoming 366 new members and more than one thousand total guests—the largest single in-person event the Academy has ever hosted. And in October and November, we released the final reports of two major Academy commissions: the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action and the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.

The Academy is honoring author Margaret Atwood and linguist William Labov, whose exceptional accomplishments include decades of new ideas and transformative impact.

Alexander Graham Bell’s paper “Researches in Telephony” was presented at a Stated Meeting of the Academy on May 10, 1876. In it, he considers the “three varieties of currents”–intermittent, pulsatory, and undulatory–that produce telephonic effects, and he also describes one of his experiments.

The Academy issued its first volume of papers in 1786.

Compared with our knowledge about students who take courses in the sciences, we know very little about who takes humanities courses in college. With the sciences, most of what we know is about majors rather than courses taken because data on majors are more readily available. Therefore having basic information about relative course-taking by students who majored in particular subjects is extremely important.

By Maggie Boyd, Associate Archivist at the Academy