Over the past three years, the American Academy’s Commission on the Arts has developed a rich and diverse array of materials to elevate and promote arts education, the creative workforce, and the arts generally. Drawing on the expertise of artists, scholars, activists, and leaders of a variety of artistic institutions, the Commission developed two reports and a collection of artistic expressions.

Learning to cope with the transitory nature of information storage and transmission will eventually become a normal feature of
twenty-first-century scholarship. In the worst cases, one wrong click of a mouse button and weeks of research, years of written text, and decades of preservation can be undermined, effectively making the written word as transitory as the spoken one.

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.

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of a broad range of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and promote innovative and evidence-based policies to address crucial issues affecting the international community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice at all levels of society.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded by visionaries who foresaw that the nascent republic would benefit from the expertise of learned citizens to guide its development, health, and integrity through whatever challenges may arise.

Today, the clarity of that vision has never been more evident. We find ourselves in a time of deepening divides across lines of politics, race, religion, income, and opportunity. The institutions we have long turned to for leadership and information are under fire, as trust in the media, government, commercial enterprise, and academia declines. Strong and responsive institutions and a healthy civil society can carry us through crises and are vitally important in their aftermath.

The 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding is approaching, and the opportunities are huge for museums to reframe history and engage their communities more deeply.

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.

Announcing the six universities awarded $250,000 as part of the inaugural Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement (MA3) Challenge. This new cohort of university awardees will implement bold institutional reforms to faculty hiring, evaluation, promotion, and tenure systems. 

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.

In light of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and v. University of North Carolina, which bans the consideration of applicants’ racial status in admissions decision-making, the Academy’s Education program area engaged senior leaders of Affiliate institutions with the goal of supporting these leaders’ commitments to equity in higher education.

Arthur Gelb, a prominent member of the American Academy since 2000, died on November 8, 2023. He served as the Chairman of the Academy’s Investment Committee and as a member of the Academy Trust. For many Academy Induction ceremonies his role was to introduce the Class I speaker (in the mathematical and physical sciences).

The Academy has launched a cross-sector Commission on Opportunities After High School. The multi-year project will bring together educators, economists, and employers to envision a new system that would help foster informed decision-making among students, enable effective planning by colleges and universities, and promote business growth.

Remembrance of Stephen R. Graubard

Journalists seeking background information on yesterday’s report of the reported test of a Chinese anti-satellite weapon are encouraged to consult Academy resources from the Reconsidering the Rules of Space project.

While the scientific community understands the benefits of international scientific collaboration, risks of such collaboration to U.S. national security are now at the forefront of debate. Terry Magnuson examines the recommendations offered in “America and the International Future of Science,” a report from the Academy’s initiative to address Challenges for International Scientific Partnerships.

The report calls attention to the United States’ comparative decline in research investments over the past decade and offers recommendations for sustaining long-term thinking in science and technology policy, and for strengthening the partnership among government, universities, and industry.

On October 1, 2011, the American Academy inducted its 231st class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new members: Frances Hamilton Arnold, David Conrad Page, Sir Adam Roberts, Annette Gordon-Reed, and William I. Miller.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has launched the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy, an interdisciplinary and nonpartisan multiyear effort to rethink the principles that drive economic decision making and to recommend policies that enable opportunity for all.