On May 18, 1921, a Special Meeting was held at the House of the Academy at 28 Newbury Street in honor of Professor Albert Einstein of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, during his first visit to the United States...

Policy Perspectives on Police Use of Lethal Force

What are the lessons learned when community college leaders, researchers, area employers, policymakers and philanthropists get together to discuss how to provide postsecondary students with the skills they need for meaningful employment?

Dysfunctional immigration policies implemented in recent decades have accelerated growth of the Latino population and racialized its members around the trope of illegality. Until 2016, the cultivation of White resentment relied on a dog-whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump, White nationalist sentiments became explicit.

With generous support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education is conducting an analysis of American undergraduate education and looking ahead several decades at the educational challenges and opportunities facing Americans.

On February 13, 2019, Anthony Abraham Jack (Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) spoke at a gathering of Academy Members and guests about his new book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students. The program, which served as the 2078th Stated Meeting of the Academy, included a welcome from David W. Oxtoby (President of the Academy) and an introduction from Bridget Terry Long (Dean of the Faculty of Education and Saris Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education). Danielle Allen (James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics) participated in a conversation with Anthony Jack following his opening remarks. An edited version of his remarks and of his conversation with Danielle Allen appears below.

The American Academy’s quarterly journal, Dædalus, has released its Winter 2009 issue, Reflecting on the Humanities. The issue coincides with publication by the American Academy of the Humanities Indicators, the first comprehensive data set about the humanities in America.

Listen to Seamus Heaney read his poem “From the Frontier of Writing” along with commentary about its inspiration. This is an excerpt from a compete transcript and recording of his evening at the Academy.

Federico Capasso and Alfred Cho recognized for invention, application of laser technology

What challenges confront U.S. courts as democratic institutions in the twenty-first century? And what does the changing role of courts teach us about our conceptions of justice?

On April 1, 2019, the American Academy and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale presented their first joint public program, which featured a conversation between David Blight and Robert Stepto. The program, which served as the Academy’s Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture, included a welcome from Ian Shapiro. Crystal Feimster moderated the program.

Inspired by the Academy report on "America's Languages," Congressmen David Price (D-NC) and Don Young (R-AK) announced the creation of the Congressional Caucus on American Languages, a bipartisan effort to support and enhance foreign language competency and international education in the U.S.

Higher education leadership was the focus of the Academy’s annual convening of The Higher Education Forum in June 2025. More than one hundred higher education experts and leaders, including university presidents, provosts, and deans from many of the Academy’s Affiliates as well as several Academy members, engaged in an array of topics.

The British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosts a series of events with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

On February 6, 2018, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf participated in a discussion on Jefferson, race, and democracy, drawing from their recent book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

The Academy’s New Haven Program Committee, in partnership with Yale University’s MacMillan Center, hosted a conversation on national and international policies for slowing global warming that featured William Nordhaus (Yale University), recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The program included remarks from Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale University; formerly, The World Bank Group) and Scott Barrett (Columbia University) as well as introductions from Steven Wilkinson (Yale University) and David Oxtoby (American Academy of Arts & Sciences).

American Institutions, Society & the Public Good

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 new study from the American Academy finds the United States trailing other developed nations throughout the world in the number of citizens with fluency in multiple languages. Of the 20% of American citizens who can speak at least two languages, only half can speak both at advanced levels, and more than 50% of those speakers are foreign-born.

A big boost to college completion would pay off for students and the economy, a new paper finds, but would substantially increase the federal deficit. Academy report cited in coverage.