National commission to undertake data-driven examination of opportunities and challenges in U.S. higher education. Initiative receives $2.2 million in funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

A new report from the Academy issues recommendations for closing the civil justice gap. Developed with an interdisciplinary approach involving legal professionals, scholars, and community leaders offers an array of approaches for delivering and increasing civil justice in America.

On September 17, 2015, at the Silver Center of Arts and Science at New York University, Matthew S. Santirocco moderated a panel discussion featuring Kevin Guthrie, Daphne Koller, and Nicholas Lemann.

For centuries, humans have sought to enhance their natural appearance and abilities through medicine, surgery, exercise, and education. Today, performance enhancement is most often associated with drugs taken by athletes and college students to improve physical and mental performance.

Reflections from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Receiving the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies

This summer, the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences held panel discussions on Public Governance and Civic Engagement. From these conversations emerged clear recommendations for policymakers to build a stronger civic culture and increase trust in government.

A bipartisan Academy Commission recommended eighteen-year terms for Supreme Court justices to “help move the Court toward a less partisan future, restoring its legitimacy as an independent arbiter of justice.” The idea from Our Common Purpose is detailed further in a subsequent publication.

"Twenty years ago I set out with a Chinese friend and research partner, Gao Xiaoxian, to seek from elderly women in northwest Chinese villages their memories of socialist collectivization in the 1950s. We wanted to hear from them before advancing age and death silenced their stories."

Amid increasing concern over the extent to which the public values scientific evidence, a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences offers an in-depth examination of the current state of trust in science among Americans.

On behalf of the Development and Communications Committee, I would like to extend my deep gratitude to all the Fellows, friends, and foundations who supported the Academy this year.

Frank Wilczek discussed the modern concept of substance and the nature of the Higgs particle following an introduction given by Jerome Friedman.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, and prominent physicist and arms control expert Sidney D. Drell, will be honored with one of the nation’s oldest awards.

Our focus on issues of inequality in many areas of the Academy’s work – from convenings, to commissions and projects, to issues of Dædalus – illustrates what the Academy does best: explore contemporary challenges, identify solutions, and offer ways forward to advance the public good.

While the world’s economy is increasingly global, fewer American students are studying how to speak a language other than English. That’s a backward slide that hurts the nation’s ability to compete economically and diminishes the overall quality of a typical American education. Citing Academy report on "America's Languages," the editorial board of the News & Observer makes the case for improving foreign language instruction.

The 2015 class includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Holland Cotter, singer-songwriter Judy Collins, Nike co-founder Philip Knight, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Kobilka, Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and novelist Tom Wolfe.

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.

A new publication from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences is released. Its purpose is to inform policymakers who will shape the relative safety or danger of the future international nuclear environment.