Five international academies call for more investment in language education, to increase access to and diversity of languages spoken in the respective academies’ national borders, including Indigenous languages.

Since our nation’s founding, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has celebrated excellence in every domain of scholarship and cultivated knowledge from many perspectives to advance the public good. The Academy is an independent, nonpartisan institution. Central to our work is a commitment to intellectual freedom–the freedom to teach, to learn, to speak, and to inquire without strictures of ideological or political orthodoxy. Freedom to pursue knowledge, without fear of censorship or discipline, is a bedrock value of our constitutional democracy and a practical condition for crafting the most effective solutions to our society’s toughest challenges.

In August 2020, the Public Face of Science initiative published its final report, The Public Face of Science in America: Priorities for the Future, which outlines recommendations for strengthening the relationship between science and society. The first two reports released by the project, Perceptions of Science in America (2018) and Encountering Science in America (2019), show the heterogeneity of current attitudes toward science and the great breadth of experiences that can influence those attitudes. The final report takes a multifaceted approach and identifies three high-level areas for change that can, over the long term, shape attitudes toward science and people’s experiences with it.

The Academy is engaged in a number of projects, studies, and meetings that, when taken together, support the quality education and informed exchange that shape a healthy and inclusive democratic society. Just recently the Academy announced a Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship

A protracted debate within the Academy over Darwin’s Origin of Species began with a paper on Japanese flora presented by Asa Gray in 1858, leading to an exchange between Louis Agassiz and William Barton Rogers...

Today the Academy’s Humanities Indicators launches its latest informational resource, the National Inventory of Humanities Organizations (NIHO).

Research funding is not unlike food production; it is not the amount, but the distribution of research funds that matters.

The Academy's Commission on Language Learning makes the case for increasing foreign language learning capacity in a political climate that's increasingly anti-global.

Academy member and Indiana University President Michael McRobbie urges institutions to expand their language offerings and enhance global awareness, citing Academy report on "America's Languages."

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.

News about Academy events and projects, including the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Global Nuclear Future initiative, as well as new research and publications.

Lassina Zerbo, Rose E. Gottemoeller, Siegfried Hecker, and Robert Rosner participated in a discussion on the prospects for ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the challenges presented by nuclear testing.

For the first time in their histories, five international academies have joined together to sign a document in support of increased investment in language education, an unprecedented collaboration during a time of global uncertainty.

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.

The American Academy has announced its 2014 class of new members, which includes leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector.

To thwart the skepticism of prospective students, some map job options, offer guarantees.

Ann Ardis writes, "The workforce data in this new American Academy of Arts & Sciences report is the perfect complement to individual storytelling in helping today’s humanities majors think through 'What are you going to do with that?'"