Roger Ferguson, cochair of the Academy’s Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, addresses how recent crises have exacerbated enduring challenges in higher education and how we collectively address those headwinds will shape outcomes for generations to come.

Jack Fuller reflects on the speeches of Edward H. Levi, who "helped restore the belief that the Department of Justice was committed to the rule of law" and served as President of the American Academy from 1986-1989.

Courts have long called upon experts making scientific claims to inform legal proceedings. As the range of scientific knowledge has expanded, so too have questions and challenges about the role and basis of claims of scientific expertise. For instance, how should courts respond when scientific experts do not agree?

On March 20, 2024, the Academy’s University of Chicago Program Committee hosted an evening with historian Tara Zahra. Informed by her archival research and the themes in her most recent book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars, Professor Zahra discussed how the forces of early-twentieth-century global instability—the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, ethnonationalism, the development of both democracies and dictatorships—can help us better understand our own contemporary political moment. Following her presentation, she joined Academy President David W. Oxtoby in a conversation about the past, present, and future of our interconnected, yet increasingly divided, world. John Mark Hansen, a member of the Academy’s Board of Directors, opened the program. The event was organized as a Jonathan F. Fanton Lecture, in honor of the past president of the Academy whose career has been dedicated to solving global issues. Jonathan F. Fanton and his wife Cynthia were in attendance. An edited version of Professor Zahra’s remarks and her conversation with President Oxtoby follows.

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.

A new report, focused on improving international scientific partnerships, recommends actions the United States - the world’s largest funder of scientific research – can take to strengthen connections in an increasingly global network of science and technology.

On September 22–23, 2022, the Academy convened an exploratory meeting to discuss the effects of prolonged war on democracy. Chaired by Neta C. Crawford (Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford) and Scott D. Sagan (Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, Stanford University), the meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule. The participants included political scientists, historians, lawyers, policy-makers, anthropologists, and aca­demics as well as retired U.S. military personnel and a Washington, D.C., reserve police officer. The attendees shared their expertise in militarization, civil-military relations, democratic erosion, gender and security issues, White supremacy movements, and budgeting and public finance to explore the relationships between long-term militarization, extremism, and democracy, both within the United States and abroad.

The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship will work across disciplines to develop an understanding of how native born and newly arrived Americans engage with the institutions of their democracy, and how they exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens.

Academy President Laurie Patton shares her experience at the Higher Education Forum and how a diverse group of leaders - with an array of divergent viewpoints - answered the question “Is higher education leadership possible?”

The Spring 2018 issue of Dædalus, “Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century,” offers Native and non-Native voices on subjects ranging from political movements, adaptive leadership, and representational politics to the production of scientific knowledge, the ethics of bioscience, and language preservation.

2110th Stated Meeting | January 18, 2023 | Virtual Event | Morton L. Mandel Conversation

In November 2003 the people of the former Soviet state of Georgia forced a revolutionary change in leadership to establish a new government under President Mikhail Saakashvili. “Statehood and Security: Georgia after the Rose Revolution,” a new book from the American Academy, analyzes the security problems that confront this new government and the greater Caucasus region.

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.

On November 28, 2017, at the Century Association in New York City, Vartan Gregorian, Gail O. Mellow, Michael S. McPherson, and Nicholas Lemann participated in a discussion about new opportunities for U.S. undergraduate education.

Robert Ballard tells the story of his passionate career in ocean exploration and discusses the educational initiatives he has created to engage a new generation of scientists.

Institutions are critical to our personal and societal well-being. They facilitate relationships; they regulate behavior. They develop and disseminate knowledge, enforce the law, keep us healthy, and uphold social and religious norms.

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.”