About the Academy

For over 230 years, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has been honoring excellence and providing service to the nation and the world. Through independent, nonpartisan study, its ranks of distinguished "scholar-patriots" have brought the arts and sciences into constructive interplay with the leaders of both the public and private sectors.

The Academy was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other leaders who contributed prominently to the establishment of the new nation, its government, and its Constitution. Its purpose was to provide a forum for a select group of scholars, members of the learned professions, and government and business leaders to work together on behalf of the democratic interests of the republic.

In the words of the Academy's charter, enacted in 1780, the "end and design of the institution is...to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people."

Today the Academy is an international learned society with a dual function: to elect to membership men and women of exceptional achievement, drawn from science, scholarship, business, public affairs, and the arts, and to conduct a varied program of projects and studies responsive to the needs and problems of society.

The Academy's unique strength lies in the distinguished leadership of its 4,600 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members and the wide range of expertise they bring to its multidisciplinary analyses of compelling contemporary issues. The Academy is probably best known to the public through its quarterly journal, Dædalus, widely regarded as one of the world's leading intellectual journals.

Major Academy projects have focused on the changing nature and needs of higher education and research, the well-being of the humanities in the United States and their central role in assuring the vitality of our cultural life, the emerging challenges of scientific and technological advances, geoglobal politics, population and the environment, and the welfare of children.

Now in its third century, the Academy continues to mobilize the intellectual resources needed to anticipate, examine, and confront the critical challenges facing our society.