At a time when national and international leaders were involved in a debate over restraints on chemical and biological weapons, the Academy, with the Salk Institute, organized a conference to illuminate the most important public policy issues raised by the existence of chemical and biological weapons.

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 provides an institutional history of higher education in California.

This project examines the relationship between legal systems and the cultures in which they are embedded, with particular emphasis on the legal profession.

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 focused on the critical importance of civic engagement to issues of democratization and economic development, in the U. S. and in developing countries with the aim of sharpening the concept of “social capital” — that is, social networks, norms, institutions and trust — through sustained dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers.

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.

A group of scholars from the historical, psychological, psychiatric, and social science disciplines met in a series of seminars to explore the interplay between individual psychology and historical change.

A study group composed of policy figures, military experts, and policy analysts studied such issues as the technical and political aspects of the U.S. and Soviet command and control systems over nuclear forces; the devolution and delegation of authority to use nuclear weapons; and the synergistic effects of U.S. and Soviet actions during a crisis.

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 project studied the influence of Paul Tillich⁠—a distinguished philosophical and cultural theologian and an eminent interpreter of the 20th century⁠—on contemporary life.

This project examined superpower relations during the Cold War as a cooperative effort in order to illuminate the constraints and opportunities that will influence possible superpower cooperation in the future.

In 1977, nearly twenty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision found that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the aftershocks were still affecting American society. The Academy convened an interdisciplinary study group to examine the post-Brown urban school integration experience and to consider solutions to ongoing education inequality in American classrooms.

The Academy convened a group of business people, public officials, and scholars from the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities to discuss changing expectations for the future of society and culture.

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.

This project brought together American and Japanese scholars and decision-makers to discuss the security problems of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Participants met five times over several years, in the United States and in Japan.

This Academy-organized symposium brought together more than 30 scientists, scholars and public officials, from developed and developing nations, to discuss how social values do and should influence technology choice by nations and by groups of nations.

The Academy co-sponsored a workshop to explore the feasibility of the United States and the Soviet Union agreeing to halt production of the radioactive, warhead-boosting agent tritium and to pace steady, significant reductions in their arsenals at the relatively rapid rate of tritium’s decay – the so-called “tritium factor.”

After World War II, the social sciences operated in a changed field, particularly in terms of their relations to the polity and the economy. This study examined whether the social sciences can credibly claim to perform an impartial role and how to maintain ethical integrity in social science scholarship.

The Academy convened a program of conferences and studies that led to the seminal 1960 special issue of Dædalus on arms control, which President John F. Kennedy subsequently called the “Bible” on the subject.