PBS and the Academy are partnering for a PBS AMERICAN PORTRAIT storytelling project to develop a crowdsourced poem curated by Academy member and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey.
The Commission on the Arts is a multi-year project with distinguished cochairs, more than $1 million of support from foundations and individuals, and a commitment to exploring the role of the arts in American life, with an emphasis on arts education and infrastructure.
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.
The Academy's Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences has hosted a series of regional forums to collect testimony on the value of the humanities and social sciences.
Globalization has come to define the modern world. Originally venerated as a force that would bring humanity to the peak of its flourishing through economic integration and positive cross-cultural exchange, globalization has deepened economic inequities, driven the dangerous degradation of the environment, and destabilized regions over fights for resources. Migration, a natural response to this precarity, has swelled, making the children of immigrants a growing, key demographic in schools across many high- and middle-income countries. The resilience, flexible thinking, and multilingualism of immigrant-origin students make them valuable community members in our globalized world. However, their schools are not always equipped to meet their psychosocial needs. While the current primary focus on language acquisition is an important foundation for supporting these students, an equitable whole-child approach is necessary to address their unique challenges and create an environment in which they can flourish.
$5.6 million gift to fund The Morton L. Mandel Program for Civic Discourse and Membership Engagement. Funds designated for fellowships, lecture series, and technical enhancements for communication
The Commission seeks to reimagine the nation’s political economy, rethink the values that drive economic policy making, and advance recommendations that help individuals, communities, and the nation flourish.
This essay examines why academic freedom has become a defining issue in the geostrategic competition between liberal democracies and their authoritarian challengers. The growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China is threatening to disrupt, even destroy, academic interchange between liberal and authoritarian societies. At the same time, populist right-wing leaders in Western democracies are attacking university autonomy, as part of a strategy of authoritarian consolidation. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has pursued an authoritarian takeover of his country’s higher-education system while seeking new partnerships with Chinese institutions. Through this essay, I seek to explain why academic freedom faces unprecedented challenges, both within liberal democracies and from authoritarian competitors.
Artists can help us emerge and heal from the global pandemic — but first we have to create more systems that support them and their work. Laura Zabel, member of the American Academy’s Commission on the Arts, explains how.
The Academy hosted a meeting at the University of California, Los Angeles, on public research universities in the twenty-first century. The speakers included Gene Block, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Kim A. Wilcox.
On December 4, 2015, at the Georgetown University Law Center, the Academy hosted a panel discussion on “The Crisis in Legal Education” with Louis Michael Seidman, Robert A. Katzmann, Philip G. Schrag, Robin L. West, and Patricia D. White.
Christopher B. Field and Anna M. Michalak led a panel discussion on "Water: California in a Global Context" with Annie Maxwell, Holly Doremus, and Isha Ray. The program, which served as the Academy’s 2032nd Stated Meeting, followed from the Summer 2015 issue of Dædalus “On Water.”
On October 16, 2024, the Academy hosted a discussion on the importance of science communication and strategies to bridge the gap between science and the public. The event featured Sean Decatur (American Museum of Natural History) and Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) in conversation with Holden Thorp (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Shirley Malcom (American Association for the Advancement of Science) offered opening remarks and Cristine Russell (formerly, Harvard Kennedy School) provided some final comments.
As the Academy continues to look at issues related to public perceptions of risk, uncertainty, and scientific research through its Public Face of Science initiative, it partnered with the University of Chicago to organize a public symposium on “Communicating Scientific Facts in an Age of Uncertainty.” The symposium featured presentations by Olufunmilayo I. Olopade and Arthur Lupia.
