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 field of security studies has long been defined by great power politics, interstate conflict, and traditional military threats. However, shifts in the global balance of power, the rising influence of non-state actors, and the increasing urgency of nontraditional threats—such as climate change, infectious disease, biological weapons, and the risks associated with artificial intelligence—are challenging key assumptions in the field. In addition, security studies institutions are facing major funding cuts as U.S. government support for academic research and foundation support for security studies decline.

On March 12, 2014, the Academy hosted a program at its 2006th Stated Meeting about “At Berkeley,” a new documentary by Frederick Wiseman. The program included screened selections from the film, followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, Robert J. Birgeneau, George W. Breslauer, and Mark S. Schlissel.

Valerie Bunce, George W. Breslauer, and Timothy J. Colton discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and Russia.

The Academy presented its Emerson-Thoreau Medal to Maxine Hong Kingston for her distinguished achievement in the field of literature. The award, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was first given to Robert Frost in 1958 and has since been presented to several notable authors, including T.S. Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.

On October 30, 2018, Kenneth Prewitt spoke about the 2020 Census at a gathering of Academy members and guests at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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 April 18, 2024, Kwame Anthony Appiah received the Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies. Established in 1975 as the Award for Humanistic Studies and renamed in 2017 in honor of musicologist Don M. Randel, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to humanistic scholarship. The award ceremony included opening remarks from Academy President David W. Oxtoby, a reading of the prize citation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., acceptance remarks from Professor Appiah, and a conversation between Professor Appiah and journalist Margaret Sullivan. An edited transcript of the program follows.

On May 18, 2017, the American Academy, in partnership with the Carnegie Institution for Science, hosted a meeting at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., on “Communicating Science in an Age of Disbelief in Experts.”

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.

Allen S. Weiner, Neta C. Crawford, Jennifer Leaning, and Gabriella Blum participated in a discussion of the war on terror and whether conflicts with non-state actors can be fought in a just way.

Elizabeth J. Perry explains the means by which the Chinese Communist party-state maintains campus calm, despite the many unpopular and potentially unsettling higher education reforms.

Academy member Arthur Kleinman discusses his intellectual journey and personal odyssey for the Bulletin’s new feature, “On the Professions.”

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

John L. Hennessy, Ann M. Arvin, Carla J. Shatz, and Peter S. Kim participated in a discussion at Stanford University about the role of university research in the innovation pipeline.

Martha Nussbaum accepts the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies and speaks about a philosophical approach to anger and fear.