Citing Academy report "America's Languages," Kathleen Stein-Smith explores the increasing scarcity of foreign language classes and teachers.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

Study is requested by bipartisan group of members of U.S. Senate & House of Representatives.

Los Angeles is globally renowned for its cultural institutions and communities, and attracts some of the world’s most creative and artistic talent. While the film industry and Hollywood tend to draw the most attention, numerous other institutions in the region have made significant investments in places and projects that support and promote cultural production in the city. On March 3, 2024, the Academy’s Los Angeles Program Committee hosted a gathering at The Getty Center with local members to discuss the evolution of this larger cultural infrastructure. It was the Academy’s 2121st Stated Meeting and a Morton L. Mandel Conversation.

Greetings from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where earlier this fall the Academy celebrated its first in-person Induction weekend since 2019. We welcomed new members from the classes of 2020 and 2021 with an opening celebration featuring Yo-Yo Ma in conversation with David Rubenstein at Harvard Business School’s Klarman Hall. On the following day, new members gathered with governance members, project leaders, and Academy staff for a lively open house at the Academy’s headquarters in Norton’s Woods. Later that afternoon, the two classes of inductees gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for a resumption of the moving Induction Ceremony that we have all missed for so long.

An evening program at the Congressional Visitors Center in Washington, D.C., featured Commission Cochairs John W. Rowe and Richard H. Brodhead; Commission members David Brooks, Karl W. Eikenberry, Pauline Yu, and John Lithgow; Senators Lamar Alexander and Mark Warner; and Congressmen Tom Petri and David Price.

Academy member James Fallows includes Our Common Purpose as one of three developments that shed light on how the parts of America that still work can be applied to the parts that need help most.

Arts education, properly supported and available to all, can play a vital role in our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Arts Commission cochairs John Lithgow, Deborah Rutter, and Natasha Trethewey make the case for arts education commitment in the Chicago Tribune.

A reflection on work done to advance democratic renewal rooted in the recommendations of the Our Common Purpose report, issued by a bipartisan Academy Commission in 2020.

On March 6, 2019, Douglas E. Soltis and Pamela S. Soltis spoke at the Academy about a project that harnesses algorithm development, computer power, and DNA sequencing to create a comprehensive visual Tree of Life. The program, which served as the 2079th Stated Meeting of the Academy, included a welcome from President David W. Oxtoby and an introduction from Scott Vernon Edwards.

Prolific scholar and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been named the recipient of the Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies, which recognizes remarkable scholars whose work shapes our inner lives and our understanding of the world around us.

In a series of recent reports, leaders in the sciences, humanities, and higher education have called for additional data on the career outcomes of recipients of graduate degrees. Drawing on national surveys of college graduates, the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators offers a fresh perspective on the outcomes of recipients of advanced degrees, providing a snapshot of their earnings, occupations, and job satisfaction.

The Commission on Opportunities After High School held illuminating listening sessions with high school and college students, K-12 administrators and teachers, higher education administrators and faculty, employers, philanthropic leaders, and community partners. The insights shared will guide the commissioners in their work to ensure that all students can thrive.

Induction weekend is always a highlight for the Academy, and this year’s ceremony did not disappoint. It was the second consecutive “double” Induction, to make up for canceled ceremonies during the pandemic, and we enthusiastically welcomed several hundred new members from the classes of 2022 and 2023 along with their families and friends. From your own Induction, you may remember the bagpipes, the children’s chorus, the class speakers, the signing of the Book of Members. I love the traditions and how they help bind us as a community—past, present, and future.

College graduates – regardless of their major – earn considerably more than those without college degrees, and they are highly likely to be satisfied with their jobs and their lives. These are among the key takeaways from a new report, State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce & Beyond, from the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project. The report gathered and analyzed data on a variety of outcome measures, including perceived well-being, earnings, and financial and occupational satisfaction.

In recent months, the media has been filled with reports of colleges and universities nationwide cutting humanities programs, at institutions ranging from large state flagships (such as West Virginia University) to smaller liberal arts colleges (such as Simmons and Lasell Universities). To clarify some of the choices involved in these decisions, the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project is releasing a series of reports on the state of the humanities in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. These reports demonstrate the depth of the challenges facing the humanities (with the numbers of humanities degrees declining in all but three states), but they also provide resources to counter some of the prevailing narratives about career outcomes for graduates in the humanities.

While much of the discussion about the state of the humanities tends to focus on the declining number of students majoring in the humanities, the health of the field relies on a much wider array of practices. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project has been exploring this wider frame of humanities activity by compiling data from federal sources and conducting the first national survey about the health of the field.

Danielle Allen, cochair of the Academy's Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, writes in the Washington Post that "There is something we can do" to move the nation toward a better normal - and peace.

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

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.