To address a deepening crisis in the lives of America’s children, the Academy organized a steering committee to explore how the Academy could increase the nation’s commitment to and investment in children.

In 1994, nearly one hundred university leaders, scholars of scientific research, and executives from industry convened at Stanford University to examine the nature and significance of developments in university-industry research relationships over the previous fifteen years.

This project brought together experts from education, law, statistics, economics, policy studies, and business to assess how critical thinking is taught and to propose ways to strengthen these skills.

An Academy study group looked at the intellectual and ethical dilemmas faced by U.S. professors as they balance responsibilities to their students, their disciplines, the university, and the broader community.

After an examination of research literature showed that evaluations of many educational interventions were nearly useless because they provided little reliable information about whether programs worked, the Academy created The Center for Evaluation to apply meta-analysis to the problem. Researchers extracted information from experimental data from multiple sources to analyze studies on topics such as optimum class size and grouping students according to skill levels.

Using the field of chemistry as a case study, this project probed how the expansion of electronic communications is altering the collection, dissemination, and storage of scholarly information.

This project examined higher education and research in Germany and the United States.

The Academy initiated this study in 1964 to imagine the future and identify the problem areas and social and intellectual questions likely to be central by the year 2000.

Published as a double issue of the Academy’s journal, Dædalus, this study is a comprehensive survey of the problems and the status of Blacks in American society, a topic of great urgency at the time. The resulting volume has been considered seminal in explaining the complexities and implications of racial problems in the United States in the 1960s.

This project traced the development of the modern general-purpose philanthropic foundation and assessed its role in philanthropy as a whole, as compared with the roles played by government, business corporations, company-affiliated foundations, individual donors, community-service organizations, and other participants in philanthropic activity.

In the 1960s, the United States developed a national system of social programs based on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 declaration of “unconditional war on poverty.” In 1966, the Academy convened a series of seminars on the many components of poverty.

Human migration is a worldwide phenomenon, spanning every epoch and encompassing many peoples, but one that had not been much studied by scholars. Motivated by this gap in knowledge, the Academy organized a symposium to encourage cross-disciplinary exchange on the policies, patterns, and implications of migration over time, and across and within national borders.

The Academy co-funded a conference at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to explore emerging scholarly work on the social and psychological characteristics of adulthood as a distinct stage in the human life cycle.

This series of studies analyzes the evolution of humanities disciplines and institutions, examines the conditions and intellectual climate in which they operate, and assesses the role and value of the humanities in society.

This project investigated the function and historical role of learned societies in advancing research and stimulating communication about scientific and scholarly ideas, not only within the intellectual community but among segments of the larger society.

In collaboration with the Royal Society of Canada, the Academy sponsored a symposium in 1976 in Quebec to discuss the revolutionary tradition in Canada and America, and how each nation has dealt with revolutionary goals in the context of contemporary issues.

The Academy convened a group of academics and business leaders to explore the potential for and limits of an expanded role for corporations in addressing unmet social needs. The resulting study illuminated the complicated and controversial issues that arise from public-private collaboration.

This project was initiated in response to the widespread recognition, in the late 1970s, that the institution of marriage was experiencing profound but poorly understood changes.

The Academy joined with the British Commission for Racial Equality and the Policy Studies Institute in London to compare and evaluate America’s and Britain’s policies toward eliminating discrimination and increasing opportunity for racial and cultural minorities.

This study compared France and the United States’ immigration policies, race relations, and political institutions. It looked at how both countries educate and house immigrants and analyzed the political and legal implications of integration, marginalization, and discrimination in each country.