Bulletin - American Academy of Arts & Sciences · Paul Sagan, Robert Darnton, David S. Ferriero, and Marjorie M. Scardino Cybersecurity and the Cloud Tom Leighton, Vinton G. Cerf,

winter 2011 Bulletin

ALSO INSIDE:

american academy of arts & sciences

vol. lxiv, no. 2

Academy Welcomes 230th Class of Members

Induction 2010 Weekend Celebrates theArts, the Humanities, and the Sciences

Technology and the Public GoodA Free Press for a Global SocietyLee C. Bollinger

Technology and CulturePaul Sagan, Robert Darnton, David S. Ferriero, and Marjorie M. Scardino

Cybersecurity and the CloudTom Leighton, Vinton G. Cerf, Raymond E. Ozzie, and Richard Hale

Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences

The Academy Around the Country

Condoleezza Rice on Public Servicea

me

ric

an

ac

ad

em

yo

fa

rt

s&

sc

ie

nc

es

bu

ll

et

in

win

te

r2

011

ContentsAcademy News

Academy Inducts 230th Class of Members 1

Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences 2

Induction Ceremony: ChallengesFacing Our Global Society 9

Induction Symposium

A Free Press for a Global SocietyLee C. Bollinger 17

Technology and CulturePaul Sagan, Robert Darnton, David S. Ferriero, and Marjorie M. Scardino 22

Cybersecurity and the CloudTom Leighton, Vinton G. Cerf, Richard Hale, and Raymond Ozzie 32

Around the Country 43

Science and the Educated American 48

Academy Projects 49

Academy Meeting

Torture, Privacy, and PresidentialPower in the Age of TerrorCharles Fried and Gregory Fried 64

Noteworthy 71

Remembrance 75

Condoleezza Rice at the Academy 76

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Symposium–Cambridge

in collaboration with the National Academyof Engineering, Institute of Medicine, andHarvard School of Engineering and AppliedSciences

Privacy, Autonomy and Personal Genetic Information in the Digital Age

Location: House of the Academy

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Stated Meeting–Cambridge

in collaboration with the National Academyof Engineering, Institute of Medicine, andHarvard School of Engineering and AppliedSciences

Making America More Competitive, Innovative, and Healthy

Speakers: Harvey V. Fineberg, Instituteof Medicine; Cherry A. Murray, HarvardSchool of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Charles M. Vest, NationalAcademy of Engineering


Calendar of Events

Thursday,May 5, 2011

Annual Meeting and Founders’ Day Celebration–Cambridge

An Evening of Chamber Music


SAVE THE DATE

Induction Weekend 2011September 30 – October 2, 2011

For information and reservations, contact the Events Of½ce (phone: 617-576-5032;email: [email protected]).

Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Winter 2011 1

Academy News

“The men and women we electtoday are true pathbreakers whohave made unique contributionsto their ½elds and to the world,”said Academy Chair Louis W.Cabot. “The Academy honorsthem and their work, and they,in turn, honor us.”

The 2010 Induction weekendbegan with an evening celebra-tion of the arts and the humani-ties and included a reading fromthe letters of John and AbigailAdams by new Fellow John Lith-gow, actor, author, and record-ing artist, and his wife, MaryYeager, professor of history atthe University of California, Los

Academy Inducts 230th Class of Members

John Lithgow (Los Angeles, California) and Mary Yeager (ucla), afterreading from the letters of John and Abigail Adams

Continued on page 5

Angeles. Lithgow introducedthe letters with an impassionedappeal for the support of thehumanities: “No nation, nomatter how vulnerable or em-battled, no matter how muchits health is in jeopardy, can af-ford to turn its back on the arts.In fact, those are the momentswhen the arts are the most vital,the most important, and themost in need of support.”

The evening celebration of thearts and the humanities alsofeatured musical performances.Conductor, pianist, and FellowDennis Russell Davies and

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted 228distinguished scholars, artists, and institutional and publicleaders on Saturday, October 9, 2010. Among the new membersare winners of the Nobel, Shaw, and Pulitzer prizes; recipientsof MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; and winners ofAcademy, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy awards.

Top: Liev Schreiber ’10(New York, NY); Middle:Alan Alda ’06 (New York,NY) and James Leach ’10(National Endowment forthe Humanities); Bottom:Council Cochairs GeraldEarly (Washington Univer-sity in St. Louis) and NealLane (Rice University)

2 Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Winter 2011

Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences

Academy Launches National Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences

On February 17, 2011, Academy PresidentLeslie Berlowitz announced the creation ofa national commission to bolster teachingand research in the humanities and socialsciences–½elds that are critical to culture,education, and America’s economic com-petitiveness. The Commission on the Humani-ties and Social Sciences is chaired by FellowsRichard H. Brodhead, President of DukeUniversity, and John W. Rowe, Chairmanand Chief Executive Of½cer of Exelon Cor-poration, and includes prominent Americansfrom the humanities, the social sciences,the physical and life sciences, business, law,philanthropy, the arts, and the media.

Answering a bipartisan request from UnitedStates Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Ten-nessee) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia) andRepresentatives Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin)and David Price (D-North Carolina), theAcademy created the Commission on the Humanities and SocialSciences to respond to the following charge:

What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments,universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors,and others should take now to maintain national excellence inhumanities and social scienti½c scholarship and education, andto achieve long-term national goals for our intellectual and eco-nomic well-being; for a stronger, more vibrant civil society; andfor the success of cultural diplomacy in the twenty-½rst century?

“The humanities and social sciences provide the intellectual frame-work for the nation’s economic, political, and governing institu-tions,” said Commission Cochair Richard H. Brodhead. “Theyenrich our lives and our understanding. Americans already appre-ciate the importance of math and science to our future; this Com-mission will remind Americans of the long-term importance ofthe liberal arts as well.”

Richard H. Brodhead

John W. Rowe

“Our nation’s long tradition

of research and scholarship

in humanities and social sci-

ence has been the basis for an

informed citizenry that comes

from many countries, races,

religions, and cultures, but

shares a common set of ideals,

such as liberty, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.

I am pleased that the American Academy is creating this

Commission to provide recommendations on the best

ways to maintain our nation’s excellence in humanities

and social science education, from grade-school history

classes to graduate-level economic research.”

–Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee)

“I look forward to learning

more about how we can

further strengthen the arts,

humanities, and social sci-

ences throughout the country.

Understanding where we are,

where we have been, and

where we need to go is so im-

portant, and I am pleased that the Academy is tackling

this challenge.”

–Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia)


“To preserve and build on

America’s traditions and

principles, we must have a

½rm understanding of our

unique history, culture, and

heritage. Our humanities and

social science institutions

help to foster that understand-

ing, and the results of this report will guide us as we work

to strengthen those institutions.”

–Representative Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin)

“As our world becomes more

interconnected, building a

solid foundation in the hu-

manities is of vital national

importance. It is the humani-

ties that ground, inform, and

shape our civic, cultural, and

intellectual lives. Maintain-

ing a robust capacity for teaching and research in these

½elds will help provide a context and a framework for

the most current and urgent policy debates. I look for-

ward to receiving the Commission’s recommendations.”

–Representative David Price (D-North Carolina)

Commission Cochair John W. Rowe added: “Knowledge of his-tory, an understanding of civic institutions, the ability to use evidence and to think creatively, an aptitude for cross-culturalcommunication–these are all vital attributes of a twenty-½rst-century citizen.”

“The American Academy, with its long record of stewardship andsupport for the humanities and social sciences, is well-suited to leadthis effort,” said Leslie Berlowitz. “Scholarship and education inthese disciplines enable our citizens and our government to adaptto evolving circumstances at home and abroad. They are critical toour ability to compete in a global economy.”

The initial ½ndings of the Commission on the Humanities and SocialSciences will serve as a companion to a National Academies forth-coming report on the future of the research university and ways tostrengthen the American scienti½c enterprise.

On March 7, 2011, in a speech at the annual meeting of the NationalHumanities Alliance in Washington, DC, Leslie Berlowitz describedthe goals of the Commission: “We have witnessed crises in the past,but too often our responses have been episodic and defensive. It istime to stop talking about a crisis. What we need is a sustained, long-term, deeply collaborative effort to af½rm the importance of thehumanities and social sciences to the cultural, political, and econom-ic well-being of the nation.” (The full text of her remarks may befound on the Academy website at www.amacad.org.)

The American Academy Commission will draw on past researchefforts, data from its Humanities Indicators, and the experience andexpertise of a multidisciplinary group of national leaders to rec-ommend speci½c, actionable steps to maintain the nation’s excel-lence in the humanities and the social sciences. The Commissionwill focus on education, research, and the institutions critical toadvancing the humanities and social sciences in the nation. TheCommission expects to complete its work over the next eighteento twenty-four months.

The Academy is grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation forhelping to launch the work of the Commission.


Leslie C. Berlowitz, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Richard H. Brodhead, President, Duke University, Cochair

John W. Rowe, Chairman and Chief Executive Of½cer, ExelonCorporation, Cochair

Danielle S. Allen, Professor of Political Science, Institute for Advanced Study

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy, PrincetonUniversity

Norman R. Augustine, Chairman and Chief Executive Of½cer(Retired), Lockheed Martin Corporation

Robert M. Berdahl, President, Association of American Universities

Phil Bredesen, Jr., Former Governor of Tennessee

David Brooks, Journalist, The New York Times

Louise H. Bryson, Chair Emerita, J. Paul Getty Trust

Ken Burns, Director and Producer, Florentine Films

Tom Campbell, Dean, School of Law, Chapman University; Former United States Representative

G. Wayne Clough, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution

James Cuno, President and Director, Art Institute of Chicago

Gerald Early, Professor of Modern Letters; Director, Center forthe Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

John Engler, President, Business Roundtable; Former Governorof Michigan

Drew Gilpin Faust, President, Harvard University

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President and Chief Executive Of½cer,tiaa-cref

Richard B. Freeman, Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Annette Gordon-Reed, Professor of Law, Professor of History,Harvard University

Anthony Grafton, Professor of History, Princeton University

Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania

Emmylou Harris, Musician/Songwriter

Robert M. Hauser, Professor of Sociology; Director, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison

F. Warren Hellman, Co-Founder, Hellman & Friedman llc

John L. Hennessy, President, Stanford University

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Professor of Communications; Director,Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania

John I. Jenkins, President, University of Notre Dame

John Lithgow, Actor

George Lucas, Producer, Screenwriter, Director, Founder, andChairman, Lucas½lm Ltd.

Yo-Yo Ma, Musician

Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Anthony W. Marx, President, Amherst College; President-Designate, New York Public Library

James McNerney, Chairman, President, and Chief ExecutiveOf½cer, Boeing Company

Carl H. Pforzheimer III, Managing Partner, Carl H. Pforzheimerand Co.

Earl A. Powell III, Director, National Gallery of Art

John Sexton, President, New York University

Donna E. Shalala, President, University of Miami

David J. Skorton, President, Cornell University

David Souter, Former Associate Justice, Supreme Court of theUnited States

Eric Sundquist, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

Billie Tsien, Architect, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Charles M. Vest, President, National Academy of Engineering

John E. Warnock, Chairman of the Board, Adobe Systems, Inc.

Diane P. Wood, Federal Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Pauline Yu, President, American Council of Learned Societies

Members of the American Academy Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences

Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences


pianist Maki Namekawa performed “Four Movements for TwoPianos” written by Fellow Philip Glass. Violinist and new FellowArnold Steinhardt, accompanied by pianist Maki Namekawa,performed Mendelssohn’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano in F major”(movement 2).

The program also included readings by new Fellows Henri Cole,poet and Professor of English at Ohio State University, and MarilynRobinson, novelist and professor at the Writers’ Workshop at theUniversity of Iowa, as well as by longtime Fellow Denis Donoghue,University Professor and Henry James Professor of English andAmerican Letters at New York University, who discussed “TheBlue Swallows” written by the late Fellow Howard Nemerov.

During the Induction Ceremony, actor, director, screenwriter,and new Fellow Liev Schreiber read a selection of acceptance let-ters written by Academy members George Washington, ThomasJefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Stuart Mill, Martin LutherKing, Jr., and Mary Leakey. The ceremony also included presenta-tions by ½ve new members. G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of theSmithsonian Institution, spoke on the need for improved scienti½cliteracy; Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Chancellor of the Universityof California, San Francisco, discussed translating scienti½c break-throughs for clinical gains; Robert L. Gallucci, President of theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, spoke about thebene½ts of an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving; JamesLeach, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities,alerted members to the looming crisis in the humanities; and RogerW. Ferguson, Jr., President and Chief Executive Of½cer of tiaa-

cref, explained how business should serve society.

In his address, Robert Gallucci shared his vision for America:“America and the world face challenges that demand our best in-tellectual efforts. My aspiration is for shared intelligence, an on-going exchange between our best conceptual thinkers, sharpestresearchers, and most accomplished policy-makers.”

Susan Desmond-Hellmann spoke about the challenges to improv-ing human health: “Our goal of improving human health cannot beachieved solely through disease prevention. We must do every-thing we can to capitalize on the ongoing explosion of scienti½cknowledge in order to innovate and, ultimately, to decrease painand suffering.”

The Induction weekend concluded with a program on Technologyand the Public Good. Lee C. Bollinger, President of ColumbiaUniversity, gave a keynote address on “A Free Press for a GlobalSociety.” He noted: “The world is undergoing momentous changesthrough the forces of globalization. We need a free press that issuitable to this new world. To achieve that goal, we must changeour basic concepts and develop our laws and policies to deal with

Induction: continued from page 1

Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies ’09 (Bruckner OrchestraLinz and the Linz Opera; Basel Symphony Orchestra)

Henri Cole (Ohio State University), Marilyn Robinson (University ofIowa), and Denis Donoghue (New York University)

James Leach (National Endowment for the Humanities), Roger Fergu-son, Jr. (tiaa-cref), Susan Desmond-Hellmann (University of Cali-fornia, San Francisco), G. Wayne Clough (Smithsonian Institution),and Robert Gallucci (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Induction 2010


the serious issues of access, censorship, and the capacity of the pressto provide the information we need. Only then can the press do itspart to help shape a world that will work for ends we believe in.”

Bollinger’s address was followed by two panel discussions ontechnology. Fellow Paul Sagan, Chief Executive Of½cer of AkamaiTechnologies, moderated a conversation on “Technology and Cul-ture,” which included presentations by Fellow Robert Darnton,Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard Universityand Director of the Harvard University Library, new Fellow DavidFerriero, Archivist of the United States, and new Fellow MarjorieScardino, Chief Executive of Pearson PLC.

Tom Leighton, Professor of Applied Mathematics at mit, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Technologies, and memberof the Academy Trust, moderated the second panel discussion on“Cybersecurity and the Cloud.” The panelists included FellowVinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist atGoogle Inc., new Fellow Raymond Ozzie, Chief Software Architectat Microsoft Corporation, and Richard Hale, Chief InformationAssurance Executive at the Defense Information Systems Agencyat the U.S. Department of Defense.

Speaking on personal privacy and security on the Internet, Cerfsaid, “We are now in an environment where security is hard tocome by and privacy is equally beleaguered. . . . In the end, I thinkwe all have discovered that it is still the individual computer orprogrammed component that has to defend itself, because you canwalk around the ½rewall with a virus-infected usb memory stickand thereby infect the interior of what should have been a protectedperimeter. I think we have to build much more robust and resistantsystems that are capable of protecting machines and their content.We cannot rely strictly on any external defense that is not im-plicit in the design of the devices themselves or their software.”

Moving from the discussion of individual to corporate security,Ozzie noted: “Our entire infrastructure is under constant attackby a number of different classes of actor; that is something we justhave to deal with as the nature of the environment. We cannot de-lude ourselves into thinking that we can achieve perfection, and wewill have to ½nd ways to channel resources systematically to keepthe threat level down and to rally together to address emergenciesas they come along.”

Video highlights of the 2010 Induction weekend are available onthe Academy’s website at http://www.amacad.org/events/Induction2010.

Panel on Cybersecurity and the Cloud: Raymond Ozzie (MicrosoftCorporation), Vinton Cerf (Google Inc.), Tom Leighton (mit andAkamai Technologies), and Richard Hale (U.S. Department of Defense)

Panel on Technology and Culture: Robert Darnton (Harvard Univer-sity), David Ferriero (U.S. National Archives and Records Adminis-tration), Marjorie Scardino (Pearson plc), and Paul Sagan (AkamaiTechnologies)

Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia University) and Leslie Berlowitz

Induction 2010


Top: Andrea Bertozzi ’10 (University of California, Los Angeles) and Laurence Senelick ’10 (Tufts University); Howard Fields ’10 (University ofCalifornia, San Francisco) and Ronald Hoy ’10 (Cornell University); Bottom: Martin Gruebele ’10 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign),Yitzhak Apeloig ’10 (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), William Goddard III ’10 (California Institute of Technology), Samuel Gell-man ’10 (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Joseph Francisco ’10 (Purdue University; American Chemical Society), Jerrold Meinwald ’70(Cornell University)

Induction 2010


Induction 2010

Top: Louise Bryson ’10 (J. Paul Getty Trust) and James Jackson ’10 (University of Michigan); Bruce Walker ’10 (Harvard Medical School; Massa-chusetts General Hospital) and Brian Stock ’10 (University of Toronto); Middle: Robert Darnton ’80 (Harvard University), Carl Pforzheimer ’02(Carl H. Pforzheimer and Co.), and David Ferriero ’10 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration); Joseph Polisi ’09 (The JuilliardSchool) and David Robertson ’10 (St. Louis Symphony Orchestra); Bottom: Christiane Amanpour ’10 (ABC News) and David Brooks ’10 (NewYork Times Company); Arnold Steinhardt ’10 (New York, NY)


On October 9, 2010, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences inducted its 230th class of Fellows and Foreign HonoraryMembers at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. G. Wayne Clough, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution; SusanDesmond-Hellmann, Chancellor, University of California, San Francisco; Robert L. Gallucci, President, John D. andCatherine T. MacArthur Foundation; James A. Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President and Chief Executive Of½cer, tiaa-cref, addressed the audience. Their remarks appear below.

Challenges Facing Our Global Society

G. Wayne Clough

Secretary, Smithsonian Institution

Improving Scienti½c Literacy

As I was thinking about what I might sayon this auspicious occasion, the phrase “welive in a time of rapid change” kept cominginto my mind. I kept batting it away, tryingto get it out of my mind, but I came to a pointof inertia. So I did what I do these days: Iwent to Google. I typed “we live in a time ofrapid change” into the search ½eld, and in0.29 seconds, Google returned 7,520,000examples of recent speeches and publica-tions in which that phrase has been used.

And so my mind turned elsewhere for an-other topic. It took me to the year 1780–230years ago–when this institution was found-ed by John Adams, James Bowdoin, JohnHancock, and others. I don’t know of anyway to compare precisely the pace of changebetween centuries, but we do know that the

time in and around 1780 was transformative,coinciding not only with the RevolutionaryWar but also with new ideas about individualrights and the roles of government. Scien-ti½c and technological discovery was com-ing in waves. Indeed, the very changes thatwere occurring in 1780 led to the philosoph-ical basis for the institutions that we loveand that support us today–institutions likethis Academy, our great universities, and ourmuseums. What is even more important, Ithink, is that such institutions have a vitalrole to play in our nation’s future–especiallywhen it comes to the notion of scienti½cliteracy for the general public.

Unlike the eighteenth century, today it is nolonger possible for one person, as ThomasJefferson could, to comprehend the wholeof scienti½c knowledge. We live in an era ofexponential expansion of scienti½c special-ties. Research and development is a world-wide enterprise now funded to the tune of$1 trillion. It is estimated that 1,200 exobytesof data are being created each year. (If youdon’t know what an exobyte is, it’s a lot.)This situation has signi½cant implicationsthat we need to think about, and to its credit,the Academy is doing just that.

In 1780, as the colonies fought for their in-dependence, Benjamin Franklin workedfeverishly as our top diplomat to engage ourallies to help. But as the foremost Americanscientist, he also found time to invent bifo-cals and discover the Gulf Stream. Earlier,he had created the American PhilosophicalSociety, the ½rst organization designed todisseminate scienti½c ½ndings.

Another of our founding fathers who I men-tioned earlier, Thomas Jefferson, was serv-ing as governor of Virginia in 1780. At that

time, he sought to force his alma mater, Wil-liam and Mary, to include more science inits curriculum. He didn’t succeed, but he gothis revenge by creating the University ofVirginia two decades later. Within a three-year period around 1780, Jefferson wrotethe Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom,which he later used in the design of hisuniversity and which predicates how weoperate public universities today. He alsocompleted Notes on Virginia, the ½rst natu-ral history document to be published inthe United States.

And of course, as I mentioned, John Adams,James Bowdoin, and John Hancock forgedthe idea for the Academy during the Amer-ican Revolution. They wanted to providethe right forum for scholars to exchangeviews on the arts and sciences.

At the same time, in England and Europe,science and technology entered an age ofexpansion, the age of wonder. William Her-shel developed a new kind of telescope andsaw the vastness of the Milky Way and be-yond. Scientists traveling with Captain Cookon his voyages discovered botanical andgeologic wonders. The ½rst human flight

Scienti½c literacy has become a major challenge,and the politicization of issues like evolution and climate change further lessens the possibility for constructive action.

Induction 2010


occurred in balloons, the steam engine wasinvented, and the ½rst flush toilet was de-signed. Science was changing life in all itsaspects, in ways citizens could still under-stand.

Out of this exciting time not only was ournation born, but also came the rise of pub-lic universities, public museums, and scien-ti½c societies. The great Smithsonian Insti-tution is a child of this period, arising froma gift made by an eccentric English scien-tist, James Smithson, who never set foot inthis country. All the new institutions of thistime share the principles of knowledge anddiscovery and embrace the importance ofthe scienti½c method. They reinforce theJeffersonian ideal that for the new republicto succeed, education should be widelyavailable, and that a complete educationincludes a working knowledge of science.

As opposed to a few scienti½c and engineer-ing disciplines of those days, today’s hyper-specialization means scientists know moreand more about smaller and smaller parts ofour universe. We struggle to teach sciencein a compelling way to our students in k-12,and too many of our students in universitiesand colleges take no science at all. Scienti½cliteracy has become a major challenge, andthe politicization of issues like evolutionand climate change further lessens the pos-sibility for constructive action.

Fortunately, organizations like the Ameri-can Academy are concerned about thesechallenges. Others, too, are working on theproblem, but I believe it is time for a con-certed, concentrated effort by all of us whorepresent science institutions. The very pow-er of digital communications that threatensto overwhelm us with information should

be turned into a potent tool to help us solveour problems. No one can or needs to knowit all. Rather, we should be able to accesswhat we need when we need it.

What is required is a rethinking of our in-stitutions within the context of our time.The primary values from the 1780s are stillvalid, but the way institutions serve thepublic and how they deliver informationmust change. While we are very good atdelivering speci½c knowledge to peoplewho gather in our buildings, how do weaddress the gap in general knowledge forthose who do not come to us? This is aquestion for our time, and it will take a co-ordinated national effort from all of us toanswer it.

The Smithsonian looks forward to joiningall of you in addressing this issue. It is achallenge worthy of great minds, and onethat is critical to our nation’s future.

© 2011 by G. Wayne Clough

Susan Desmond-Hellmann

Chancellor, University of California, San Francisco

Imagine What’s Possible

I want to talk about a topic I’m very pas-sionate about: the unprecedented opportu-nity that we have today to better utilize ourrapidly expanding knowledge of human bi-ology to improve human health. The healthcare dialogue that we are having in this coun-try today is especially resonant for those ofus who have chosen careers as physicians.Health care is a right. Access to care, espe-cially preventive care, is essential. We cer-tainly need to emphasize the adoption ofappropriately tested and proven preventionmodalities: childhood vaccinations, smok-ing cessation, exercise, and a healthy diet.But we cannot stop there.

Our goal of improving human health cannotbe achieved solely through disease preven-tion. We must continue to push ourselvesto do everything we can to capitalize on theongoing explosion of scienti½c knowledgein order to innovate and, ultimately, to de-crease the pain and suffering of those who,despite best efforts, are diagnosed with mal-adies for which we still do not know thecause or have an effective, preventive inter-vention. The list of such ailments is long andincludes breast and prostate cancer, lupus,multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease,Parkinson’s disease, and type I diabetesmellitus–I could go on. The suffering ofthose affected is substantial.

Induction Ceremony

The very power of digitalcommunications that threat-ens to overwhelm us with in-formation should be turnedinto a potent tool to help ussolve our problems.


In the early 1990s, I spent several years work-ing as a community oncologist, or, as myparents say, “a regular doctor.” My experi-ence treating cancer patients at that timetaught me that there were in fact some formsof breast cancer that were too aggressive tocure and some forms of lymphoma for whichthe toxicity of the therapy so greatly out-weighed the bene½ts that “watch and wait”was the standard of care for many patients,despite knowing that the disease would ul-timately progress and debilitate that patient.Every time I had to tell a patient, “I’m sorry,you have this disease, and we have nothingto treat it,” it felt like a personal failure.

And then everything began to change. Thebiotechnology industry was maturing, andmolecules that had started as brilliant, early-stage research experiments–conducted byvisionary scientists in the 1970s and 1980swho were determined to solve the myster-ies of human biology–were now showingpromise in a clinical setting. These mole-cules ultimately–wondrously–providedhope for thousands of patients.

In the ½ve years between 1997 and 2001,several breakthrough cancer therapieswere approved by the U.S. Food and DrugAdministration (fda). These therapiessprouted from our expanded comprehen-sion of certain biological puzzles, and theyuniquely targeted speci½c protein or recep-tor abnormalities in cancer cells. Finally,physicians were able to tell patients withcertain types of cancer, “You have this dis-ease, and now we have something for it–perhaps even hope for a cure.”

No longer was cancer therapy solely de-pendent on drugs that broadly targeted themost rapidly dividing cells in the body, in-cluding both malignant cells as well ashealthy human tissue, such as precursors of blood cells, hair follicles, and the liningof the gut and intestines. The substantiallydeeper understanding of the biologicalbasis of disease pathogenesis and cellularbiology had suddenly made several fatalconditions controllable, and even poten-tially curable.

This hope of “personalizing” or targetingour cancer therapy using molecular bio-markers to select those patients most likelyto bene½t was becoming a reality. Whilethese therapies aimed against speci½c tar-gets and cancer cells were not without sideeffects, we were able to avoid common sideeffects often most feared by patients, includ-ing hair loss and nausea. We now had reme-dies in our arsenal that allowed us to offer amore promising future with less pain andsuffering for patients and their families.

Where are we today, almost a decade later?Additional, dramatic scienti½c break-throughs continue to occur that further expand our knowledge of human biology.However, potential barriers are also multi-plying that can limit our ability to translatemagni½cent scienti½c discoveries into ther-apies that offer a greater bene½t without at-tendant unacceptable risk. Concerns existabout conflicts of interest between indus-try and academia, potentially increasingbarriers to bene½cial and necessary collab-orations. Required clinical trials for regula-tory approval are growing in complexityand expense. The increasingly high regula-tory hurdles create unpredictability in theapproval process and engender frighteninglabels for drug development–“the valleyof death,” for example–that diminish in-vestors’ willingness to ½nance new life-sci-ences innovations. The reality today is thatit is more challenging than ever to translatescienti½c breakthroughs into transforma-tional medicines with suf½cient evidenceto allow for the fda to approve these med-icines.

These are the challenges that are faced everyday by those individuals we call transla-tional, clinical, and regulatory scientists.

In the face of such challenges, it is essentialfor scientists at academic medical centersto push ourselves to innovate in translationalscience by increasing our ability to predictwhat will happen in the clinic; to innovatein clinical science by designing more ef½cientand effective clinical trials to provide greatercon½dence in our ability to measure clinicalbene½t; and to innovate in regulatory sci-ence by using novel approaches to ensurethat we have greater con½dence in safety andef½cacy and that we can more effectivelycommunicate our ½ndings to the public. Ineach of these areas, I want to challenge usto set the bar high–to imagine what’s pos-sible, and then make it happen.

Ladies and gentlemen, patients are waiting.These patients and their families deserve asense of urgency around using all our scien-ti½c and medical knowledge to allow eachhuman being the best chance possible tolive a full life without pain and suffering.

© 2011 by Susan Desmond-Hellmann

Our goal of improving humanhealth cannot be achievedsolely through disease preven-tion. We must do everythingwe can to capitalize on theongoing explosion of scienti½cknowledge in order to innovateand, ultimately, to decreasepain and suffering.

The reality today is that it ismore challenging than ever to translate scienti½c break-throughs into transforma-tional medicines with suf½-cient evidence to allow for the fda to approve thesemedicines.


Robert L. Gallucci

President, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthurFoundation

Shared Intelligence

The trouble with weapons of mass de-struction is that they occupy a space in thedata set somewhere between rumor, silence,and apocalypse. Working on nuclear non-proliferation, as I have, one has to make harddecisions based on slender, incomplete, andoften unreliable information. But to keepthe peace, decisions have to be made andacted upon. It is a practical craft, and I thinkan honorable one. What, you may ask, doesthat dilemma have to do with the social sci-ences? A great deal, in fact. Let me explain.

Nation-states, understandably, have to takea position on the most destructive forceavailable to humanity. Their decisions toacquire, or dispose of, or renounce nuclearweapons are also understandably at thecenter of our global security concerns. Thereare almost two hundred sovereign states,each with its own aspirations, fears, inter-nal politics, and regional relationships. It isnot possible for us to know enough aboutevery country, about every leader, or aboutevery nuance of interstate rivalry to assesshow they are likely to act. We have to makeassumptions–intelligent assumptions. Inshort, we need theory.

For my ½rst job, I was Kenneth Waltz’s teach-ing assistant as a graduate student at Bran-deis University, direly underprepared to

work with one of the most profound think-ers in political science. But that predicamenthas a way of concentrating and enlargingthe mind; it did mine. From Ken Waltz, Ilearned the power of theory, or, perhapsbetter, “systematic thinking.” (He also mademe a member of the realist school of inter-national relations, but that is another nar-rative.) Systematic thinking about how hu-manity behaves has been the core contribu-tion of the social sciences since economicsemerged from ledger books and countinghouses. The Physiocrats and political econ-omists rose above everyday epiphenomenaand found, among myriad transactions, rule-governed patterns. It was a process of radi-cal simpli½cation and also of intellectualliberation. Having a clear mental image of asocial system allows us to see and then toisolate causes and variables, testing our mod-el in the laboratory of history and events.

How does that help us better grasp interna-tional relations? In Man, the State, and War,Waltz directs us away from the nature ofthe human subject or the internal organiza-tion of particular states. Instead, he advisesus to look at the internal dynamics of theinternational system in which nations in-teract, to use a common analogy such asbilliard balls. Their color does not matter;the force and direction they carry decidethe game. We have no world government.The international system is organized onthe principle of anarchy. And in that con-text, autonomous nation-states tend tomake rational decisions: to survive, to deterothers from attacking them, to make alli-ances with stronger powers.

Similarly powerful states will act in similarways. The United States and the ussr,though quite different societies, built vastarmories, recruited client states, conductedcovert operations in tandem throughoutthe Cold War. In this paradigm, it makes

sense for North Korea, a state which is weakand failing, to seek the trump card of nu-clear capability–as it makes sense for ourallies to accept American protection or ademocratic South Africa to dismantle itsnuclear arsenal.

What does this all mean in practical terms?Simply, robust theory serves as a necessarycorrective to the stridency of facts. If we donot have a clear grasp of what is likely to bethe case, we may act on what is improbable.Nowhere is this more important than inquestions of national security.

As I said at the start, intelligence can becryptic–or plain wrong, as we have learnedto our cost. Effective security analysis de-pends on a dialogue between what seemsto be empirically established and how weunderstand the world to work. When weare clear about our assumptions, we gainclarity about the assumptions of those whodisagree with us. We can cultivate empathyas an aid to understanding. We are moreable to guard against misperception anddeflect the arguments of interested parties.Clear assumptions can be challenged, tested,and debated.

This conversation between theory and prac-tice, deduction and induction, characterizesany discipline or pursuit that is both matureand complex. And those who are practicedin it develop what Aristotle called phronesis,or “practical judgment.” Practical judgmentgrasps the big theoretical picture, has an eyefor relevant detail, and has a developed in-stinct for when either side of the equationshould be called into question. We needmore of it. We need it now in situations fes-tering in the Middle East, Northeast Asia,and South Asia, in particular.

Induction Ceremony

Effective security analysis depends on a dialogue betweenwhat seems to be empiricallyestablished and how we under-stand the world to work.

My aspiration is for “sharedintelligence,” an ongoing exchange between our bestconceptual thinkers, sharpestresearchers, and most accom-plished policy-makers.


Modern government could do with a largedose of good social science. Politics, neces-sarily, is governed by rhetoric and short-term calculations. It should be balanced bypolicy discussion that is theoretically so-phisticated and empirically rigorous.

When I left the State Department forGeorgetown’s Walsh School of ForeignService, I made it a priority to encouragemore interaction between academia andgovernment. At the MacArthur Founda-tion, I was pleased to ½nd an institutionthat had for decades valued research intopersistent social problems, fostered inter-disciplinary research networks in neglect-ed areas, and funded demonstration projectsthat had implications for government pol-icy. But we need to do more to close the gap.

It is time for more adventurous academicprograms for our students, with broader orpermeable disciplinary boundaries, and anemphasis on developing practical judgment.We need to rethink our system of tenureand academic incentives, giving credit notonly for specialized research in publicationsbut also for engagement with policy-makersand the public.

The MacArthur Foundation funds (and Iparticipate in) a promising collaborativeadventure, the Tobin Project, “an allianceof the nation’s leading academics united bya belief in the power of ideas and a sharedcommitment to using ideas to improve thelives of their fellow citizens.” It is basedright here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.America and the world face challenges thatdemand our best intellectual efforts. Myaspiration is for “shared intelligence,” anongoing exchange between our best con-ceptual thinkers, sharpest researchers, andmost accomplished policy-makers.

But in this I am preaching to the choir. TheAmerican Academy has helped pioneer inter-disciplinary thinking, links between policyand research, and attention to large social is-sues. That is one reason, among many, thatI feel honored to be admitted to the Academywith the other inductees in this class today.This is a choir I am glad to sing in.

© 2011 by Robert L. Gallucci

James A. Leach

Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities

A Looming Crisis in the Humanities

A half-century ago, the English physicistand novelist C. P. Snow delivered a contro-versial lecture at Cambridge Universitycalled “The Two Cultures” in which he la-mented the gulf between scientists and agroup he described as “literary intellectu-als.” He cited several examples: scientistswho had hardly read Dickens and human-ists who couldn’t de½ne the second law ofthermodynamics.

At the risk of exaggeration, the gulf mightbe described as illiteracy matching innumer-acy in the citadels of academia. But howeverde½ned, Snow held that the breakdown ofcommunication between the sciences andthe humanities hindered solutions to socialproblems. Assuming some legitimacy toSnow’s contention, what is the situation½ve decades later?

In many ways the science–humanities di-vision is more extreme today, as physics hasbecome more math dependent, biology andchemistry more complex, and scienti½c in-quiries more abstract. Nevertheless, from a methodological perspective, the techno-logical revolution that began with the digi-tal computer allows the humanities andsciences to share an increasing portion ofcommon ground.

Digitization of myriad objects and billionsof pages of books and manuscripts enablesthe application of scienti½c methods tovast amounts of social-science data. Just ascomputers have accelerated the mapping ofthe human genome, they allow humanitiesscholars to trace the changing meaning ofwritten phrases over time, to see the evolu-tion of a melody from a Greek chorus, andeven to build a virtual world that re-createsthe Temple at Karnak. Likewise, digitaltechnology and the Internet give scientistsan open window into the humanities.

As a consequence, the social hallmark ofour times is the emergence of a New Digi-tal Class, characterized less by occupation,birth, geographic location, and the science–humanities divide than by an individual’sdegree of curiosity, diligence, and access todigital technology. The important divisionin the new communications age is no longerthe one between science and the humani-ties. It is in the ½rst instance the growinggulf between those who have crossed thedigital divide and those who by choice, lackof access, or capacity have not; and in thesecond, between those who seek informa-tion from diverse sources with an open-minded perspective and those who chooseto rely on single-dimensioned purveyors ofviews.

The question of whether a Twittering worldwill cause greater understanding and socialintegration at the community and interna-tional level or lead to greater intolerance andsocial splintering is yet to be resolved. Whatis clear is that few revolutions in history canmatch the democratizing consequences forindividual learning of the development andspread of digital communication devices.

From a methodological per-spective, the technologicalrevolution that began with thedigital computer allows thehumanities and sciences toshare an increasing portionof common ground.


Since the Enlightenment, the issue of equal-ity has been looked upon as a political idealtied to techniques of social organizationand governmental policies of the moment.But in the modern world, access to knowl-edge is becoming as central to advancingsocial equality and opportunity across theglobe as access to the ballot box has provento be the key to advancing political rights.

Unfortunately, mastery of certain kinds of knowledge involves the most soberingquandary ever presented: whether the re-sults of scienti½c inquiry will serve the in-terests of man or jeopardize the existence ofmankind. After all, for the ½rst time in his-tory the capacity exists not only to wage warbut to destroy life on the planet. As Einsteinso presciently warned, splitting the atomhas changed everything except our way ofthinking.

The sciences cannot ignore the humanitiesany more than the humanities can ignorewhat science has wrought. Whatever dif-ferences may exist between the capacity ofscientists to explore the unknown in natureand the ability of scholars in the humani-ties to address life’s enduring questions intandem or in the wake of scienti½c advances,science and the humanities are unalterablyentangled.

Just as scienti½c endeavor is changing life onthe planet and affecting the course of man’srelationship to man, so studies in the human-ities and the creative arts are reference points,stimulating the imagination and providingcontextual and ethical perspective to sci-enti½c inquiry and its consequences.

What is so sobering about Einstein’s warn-ing is the reminder that our way of think-ing may be a stubborn constant in a worldof unprecedented change. If the most re-cent century, the bloodiest on record andthe one wracked by unprecedented “isms”of hate, is a guide, human nature has a du-eling rational and irrational dimension: avulnerability to self-centered Hobbesianbeastliness and a contrasting selfless capac-ity to stand up for shared values and thecommon good.

The power of a few to commit acts of soci-etal destruction as well as the power of acommitted few to bring about upliftingchange in the world has been underesti-mated throughout history. Today, civiliza-tion is on trial from two extremes: thepossibility that proliferating weapons ofmass destruction could be unleashed, andthe reality that the more advanced andopen a society, the more vulnerable it is toglobal terrorism. In this context, mutualunderstanding–the bridging of cultures,near and far–is the requirement of ourage. Civilization may be embellished byscience, but it requires civility to survive.

Whether violence is an integral element ofthe human condition or a learned responseis a matter of conjecture. But non-violenceis almost certainly a practice that must belearned. From an academic perspective, themost relevant disciplines for developingsocial perspective are the humanities: his-tory, literature, philosophy, linguistics,comparative religion.

Today America leads the world in almostevery academic ½eld, but a crisis is loomingin the humanities. This crisis is reflected infederal programming where research dollarsfor the natural sciences have tripled sincethe mid-1990s but have been held in checkin the social sciences. More consequentially,in an increasing number of American uni-versities the disciplines that are most asso-ciated with giving an individual the imagi-native capacity to put himself or herself inanother’s shoes are under pressure relativeto disciplines perceived to be more vocation-oriented.

There is every reason to honor the sciencesand support investigations into the un-known, be they related to the beginnings

of the universe or the extending of humanlife. Yet in the end, dark matter and darkenergy may be easier to understand in thephysical sciences than dark motives are inthe social arena.

Impelled by the implications of what Ruth-erford once described as the “heroic” ageof science, the humanities are obligated toembrace the challenges that emerge fromscience and advance a fuller understandingof our times and a deeper grasp of humannature. There is no rational option exceptto change our way of thinking, beginningwith greater tolerance. What is required isa greater willingness to consider–respect-fully–diverse views, recognizing that weall are connected and rely on each other.

Seldom is there only one proper path deter-minable by one individual, one country, orone political party. Public decision-makingdoes not lend itself to certitude. Everyonecan learn from somebody else. That is whyhumility is a valued character trait and civil-ity a central ingredient of a free society anda safer world.

© 2011 by James A. Leach

Induction Ceremony

Whatever differences mayexist between the capacity of scientists to explore the unknown in nature and the ability of scholars in the humanities to addresslife’s enduring questions, science and the humanities are unalterably entangled.

The humanities are obligatedto embrace the challenges thatemerge from science and ad-vance a fuller understandingof our times and a deepergrasp of human nature.


Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.

President and Chief Executive Of½cer, TIAA-CREF

Leadership in the Public and PrivateSectors during a Time of Crisis

Leadership, in any organization, requiresa clear understanding of the purpose of theorganization, importantly de½ned as the mis-sion it serves in society. Government agen-cies, philanthropic institutions, and mostnonpro½ts have written into their dna arequirement to improve society, whetherthrough advancement of education, allevi-ation of poverty, treatment of disease, oranother noble purpose. But what is the pur-pose of business in today’s society? In par-ticular, what is the purpose of for-pro½tbusiness?

Traditionally, the role of business is to max-imize pro½t and shareholder returns. Thisformulation indicates that the drive to max-imize pro½ts tends to maximize ef½ciency.Scarce resources are allocated to their mosteconomically productive purposes. In turn,this produces tangible bene½ts to individu-als and society in the form of jobs, wealth,and tax revenue. By this formulation, serv-ing shareholders equals serving society.

Yet there has long been a tension betweenthe bottom-line values of for-pro½t busi-nesses–along with a strictly economic

de½nition of social bene½t–and the beliefthat a company, because of its ability toharness and direct resources, can and shouldmake productive contributions to societybeyond the bottom line.

In the past two or three decades, a theory ofbusiness has emerged which holds that com-panies should maximize value not just toshareholders, but also to stakeholders, includ-ing employees, suppliers, neighbors in thecommunities in which businesses operate,and other members of society who are af-fected by decisions companies may make.As business has become more globalized,these questions have taken on even greatersigni½cance. What allegiance does a com-pany owe to the country in which it is head-quartered? Should it keep all its jobs athome? What responsibility does a companyhave for improving working and living con-ditions in the many places it operates? Howshould it think about its so-called supplychain?

Efforts to reconcile the traditional view of a shareholder-focused company with themore modern idea of a stakeholder-focusedcompany are rooted in the notion that max-imizing shareholder value depends on ef-forts to maximize stakeholder value. Bythis formulation, serving society servesshareholders.

In recent years, we have seen companiesthat fail to take this broader view of theirsocial responsibility lose substantial share-holder value. Some, such as British Petro-leum, may have an opportunity to rectifytheir mistakes, but at a great cost. Othersfailed and can never make amends.

In the aftermath of a ½nancial crisis andyears of corporate governance scandals,companies have been spurred to rebuildtrust with customers, employees, commu-nities, policy-makers, and other stakehold-ers. I believe that one way to rebuild trustis for companies to reignite their sense ofpublic mission by using their resourcesand expertise to make headway in solvingpressing social problems. My own company,which is in many ways your company, tiaa-

cref, is focused on helping individualsachieve a safe and secure retirement, a mis-sion that involves not only providing prod-ucts and services but also promoting ½nan-cial literacy.

We work with many nonpro½t organiza-tions–some of which are represented heretoday–that are contributing to the long-term ½nancial security of their employees,which is itself a laudable social purposethat should be a priority for all employers.Other companies and institutions are en-gaged in market-driven projects that willhave signi½cant long-term implications forthe way that we live: increasing the fuelef½ciency of automobiles, ½guring out howto bring alternative energy sources to mar-ket, developing lifesaving advances inhealth sciences, and using technology todeliver education in exciting new ways to a diverse student population.

The opportunities for businesses to driveambitious social advances are endless be-cause businesses have the capacity to joinentrepreneurial thinking and capital. The½nancial crisis, and many that came before,taught us that companies that pursue short-term gains without considering a broaderset of social perspectives may ultimately

I believe that one way to re-build trust is for companies to reignite their sense of publicmission by using their resourcesand expertise to make head-way in solving pressing socialproblems.

The opportunities for busi-nesses to drive ambitious social advances are endlessbecause businesses have thecapacity to join entrepreneur-ial thinking and capital.


Induction Ceremony

destroy the shareholder value they are try-ing to create. Therefore, all business lead-ers must make decisions with the broaderinterest of stakeholders, not just share-holders, in mind.

As members of the Academy, and as social-ly responsible leaders in our nonpro½t andfor-pro½t endeavors, we in Class V can cul-tivate and advance these efforts. Workingwithin our specialties, and collaboratively,we can identify ways for businesses to en-rich the life of the nation, while also deliv-ering bottom-line returns.

We can enhance business leaders’ abilitiesto recognize the broader implications oftheir decisions–and make clear that thehealth of the economic, political, and cul-tural environments in which a businessexists is essential to its ability to thrive. Byhelping advance a broad social purpose forcompanies, we can help shape how businessis conducted in the twenty-½rst century, andthereby reflect well the founding ideals ofthis Academy.

© 2011 by Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.

New Fellows Sign the Book of the Academy

Row 1: Samuel J. Palmisano (International Business Machines Corporation);Kimberly Prather (University of California, San Diego); Row 2: RobertGibbons (mit); Nicholas Lemann (Columbia University); Row 3: KarlaKirkegaard (Stanford University); Deepak Srivastava (University of Califor-nia, San Francisco; Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease); Row 4:William Rawn (William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc.); Luis Ubiñas(Ford Foundation)


Induction Symposium: Technology and the Public Good

ety. Perhaps its greatest contribution liesin its capacity for calibration: that is, theability to judge what is important and why.

In the twentieth century, the nation becameless an assemblage of states and regions andmore a national entity. The structure andinstitutions of the society shifted accord-ingly. The growth of the economy; the riseof issues with national scope, such as civilrights; and the development of new com-munications technology–broadcasting, inparticular–that enhanced national discus-sion: all contributed to the need for a freepress that could function on a national leveland was appropriate for a rising, robust, anddynamic national society. To that end, acomplex ecology of First Amendment pub-lic policy and journalism evolved. The Su-preme Court initiated a series of landmarkdecisions that ultimately provided a uni½ednational approach. Those decisions pushed

Lee C. Bollinger

Lee C. Bollinger is President of Columbia Uni-versity and Professor of Law at Columbia LawSchool. He has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1992.

A Free Press for a Global SocietyLee C. BollingerIntroduction by Neal Lane

The 1960th Stated Meeting, held at the House of the Academy on October 10, 2010

Introduction by Neal Lane

Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Senior Fellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. A Fellow of the American Academy since 1995, he currently serves as Cochair of the Academy’s Council.

The American Academy’s Induction weekend is a powerful reminder of the Academy’s potential as an intellectual force and of the respon-sibility we all share to participate actively in its work. Our program this morning is an example of the Academy’s capacity to enhanceunderstanding of tough societal issues and advance pragmatic solutions.

Today, a group of distinguished Academy members will speak to us about Technology and the Public Good. (It is worth noting that today’sdate, 10/10/10, only occurs once a century and reflects the binary code on which the Internet is based.) It should be no surprise that attwo-and-a-half centuries old, the Academy is examining issues at the forefront of new technology.

It is my great honor to introduce our ½rst speaker, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. After earning his law degree fromColumbia, he served as clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Chief Justice WarrenBurger of the U.S. Supreme Court. He later joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Law School, becoming Dean in 1987. He servedas Provost of Dartmouth College in 1994, and then returned to the University of Michigan in 1996 to become President. In 2002, he wasnamed the nineteenth President of Columbia, an institution that, like the Academy, was established before the founding of the country.While presiding over these large and complex academic institutions, Lee has remained an active scholar of the First Amendment and free-dom of press issues. He has authored numerous articles and four books, including his newest, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A FreePress for a New Century. This morning he will discuss the formation of a free press for a global society.

Presentation

The need to build a system of free pressthat is suitable (from both U.S. and globalperspectives) to the conditions of global-ization is a subject of intrinsic importance.It is also an example of how the extraordi-nary forces of globalization are reshapingintellectual ½elds. (Universities, in my view,should be thinking much more systemati-cally about this challenge, but that’s a largersubject for another day.) Today, the systemof free press that prevails in the United Statesblends constitutional law, public policy, thespeci½c conditions of markets–with respectto daily newspapers, in particular–and thedevelopment of journalism as a profession.All these elements emerged in the twentiethcentury. Like universities, the press is oneof the central institutions of a democraticsociety. At its best, the press serves the pub-lic good by disseminating information andanalysis and by functioning as a public forumfor discussing issues of importance to soci-


the boundaries of free speech and press be-yond what any nation in history had donebefore. They also articulated the importantpublic role performed by the press, locat-ing the rationales for extraordinary protec-tion in the political and social interests ofdemocracy, reason, and tolerance.

Meanwhile, public policy intervened in thenew broadcast media. With the SupremeCourt’s blessing, the federal governmentorganized a blend of private ownership andpublic-interest regulation to expand therange of voices. It also launched a publicbroadcasting system with guarantees ofeditorial autonomy. Finally, the print mediaused its revenues, especially the monopo-listic pro½ts of daily newspapers, to deepenand expand its expertise to cover the news.Journalism began to look more and morelike a profession, with standards of behav-ior that transcended interest, pro½t, andpartisanship. Private enterprise, marketconditions, state policy, and constitutionalcases–none of which could have given riseto a free press all on its own–combined tocreate the best press in the world.

***

In our current century, the conditions un-dergirding the system have shifted. Freemarkets have gone global, driving changesof enormous signi½cance throughout theworld. Some changes are good, such as im-

proved standards of living and better healthfor hundreds of millions of people; othersare bad, like climate change, or problem-atic, like the fragility of the internationaleconomy, the tensions of multiculturalism,or conflicts between modernity and otherways of life. Ours is a world driven by busi-ness and ½nance, aided as always by newcommunication technologies; in this case,

the Internet and satellite broadcasting areespecially influential. It is a world that moveswith extraordinary rapidity and that oftenresists the sunshine provided by a responsi-ble press. It is a world in desperate need ofthe kind of information that only institu-tions of journalism can provide. We there-fore need a system of free press suitable tothis new world.

I fear that the United States does not graspthe full degree to which we are becomingintegrated and interdependent with othercountries. Half of the revenues of s&p 500companies are generated outside the UnitedStates. Half the goods consumed by wealthynations are manufactured in emergingeconomies. Half of U.S. government debt is in foreign hands. What happens to thisworld? How does it evolve? What choicesdo we need to make to create the best of allpossible worlds? At the least, we shouldthink carefully and systematically aboutwhat kind of press system will provide usand others with the journalism we need toaddress these questions. As form is some-times said to follow function, so free pressfollows issues–and the issues are increas-ingly global.

Three major areas require particular atten-tion. First, the balance of interests that pro-duced our First Amendment jurisprudenceis starting to shift. For example, when TheWashington Post obtains classi½ed documentsor information, we can count on its jour-nalists and editors to feel the force of patri-otic considerations in deciding what topublish; this is not the case for those be-hind WikiLeaks. Today, when an unknownpastor in Florida threatens to burn the Koran,the hostile audience that will be aroused,and the violence that might ensue, is notwithin the same control, or on the samescale, as the threatening mob in Illinoisthat prompted one of the Supreme Courtcases of the last century. For these reasons,the Pentagon Papers case may not look quitethe same today. One thing is for sure: theSecretary of Defense’s call list will get verylong. My point is not that the case law shouldchange, but rather that the resolution wehave reached will to some extent need to bereconsidered.

Second, to design this system of free presson a global scale, our basic perspectives andassumptions must change. To the extentthat we need information about what is hap-pening in the world, the working distinc-tion in our minds between domestic andforeign press must recede; indeed, much ofwhat we need to know will come from theforeign or international press. This realityhas implications for policy. For example,access for members of the press is crucial.Restrictions on foreign journalists that existtoday in virtually all countries, including theUnited States, and are justi½ed on groundsof foreign policy or sovereignty becomeproblematic. Visa and travel restrictions oninternational journalists, or decisions bycable companies not to carry certain inter-national media, will need rethinking.

Censorship on a global scale is a third mat-ter of enormous concern. Nations through-out the world have very different ideas aboutthe role of the press and the scope of free-dom it should be afforded. In a world ofglobal communication, the reality increas-ingly is that censorship anywhere is censor-ship everywhere. In the United States duringthe twentieth century, state laws restrictingspeech and press eventually gave way to aset of national norms, with New York TimesCo. v. Sullivan being the primary case in point.A similar transformation must unfold glob-ally. A speech or essay in the United Statescan get its speaker or writer in trouble inItaly, Turkey, China, or Britain. Again, ourfundamental perspective must change. Thisis no longer a matter of nobly securing hu-man rights for the rest of the world; rather,it is a practical matter of securing the basicflow of information and ideas required toaccompany and complement the free flowof goods and services.

At the moment we need moreand better international presscoverage; the current ½nancialcrisis has caused budgets forforeign bureaus and correspon-dents to contract.

Perhaps the press’s greatest con-tribution lies in its capacity forcalibration: that is, the abilityto judge what is importantand why.

A Free Press for a Global Society


We seem hardly prepared for this new world,and our shortcomings will not be correctedby advances in technology alone. Those ofus who believe in the virtues of a very openand free press system must develop new ra-tionales and arguments to persuade thosewho do not share our intuition. For exam-ple, we might emphasize the relationshipbetween openness and sustainable and sta-ble economic growth, the latter being some-thing nearly all societies now seem to want.We will have to work toward stronger inter-national legal norms. Texts such as Article19 of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights, the International Covenant on Civiland Political Rights, World Trade Organiza-tion guidelines, and other regional treatiesprovide a place to begin.

Finally, besides problems of access and cen-sorship, we must focus on the capacity of thepress to cover the dynamic, fast-moving, andsomewhat secretive forces of globalization.It is unfortunate that at the moment we needmore and better international press cover-age; the current ½nancial crisis has causedbudgets for foreign bureaus and correspon-dents to contract. Even without this trou-bling state of affairs, however, we would

bene½t from a more focused discussion ofthe role public policy might play in bring-ing more independent and objective jour-nalism to the world–and more of it backhome to us.

***

The American population must be bettereducated than we are about global issues.Other nations, certainly, are engaged ininternational events. New public servicebroadcast systems are reaching out to theworld from France, Russia, the Middle East,and China, joining the traditional institu-tions such as the bbc World News and bbc

World Service. I believe the world would

bene½t from more American-style journal-ism and I have suggested the formation ofan American World Service modeled onthe bbc.

At present, the United States has a dual sys-tem of publicly supported broadcasting.On the one hand, there is an editorially in-dependent press with a domestic mission,namely npr and pbs. On the other is agovernment press with an internationalmission, which includes Voice of America,Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, andseveral other news organizations. In yetanother example of how the world haschanged while our policies lag behind, a1947 statute bars these government propa-ganda outlets in the international arenafrom rebroadcasting back into the UnitedStates. Whatever one thinks of these media,they will always be viewed as the voice ofthe American government. The best of freeand independent American journalismneeds to join these and other institutions,many of them private, in the new globalpublic forum. A good method to achievesuch integration, for example, would be toaugment the funding and mission of npr.

We would bene½t from a morefocused discussion of the rolepublic policy might play inbringing more independentand objective journalism tothe world–and more of itback home to us.

“It is worth noting that today’s date, 10/10/10, only occurs once a century and reflects the binary code on which the Internet is based.”


For Americans who are skeptical about pub-lic support for the press, I should reiteratethat neither theory nor experience suggeststhat a free market alone can create the con-ditions necessary for an independent, globalpress to arise. Certainly, editorial autonomyis essential to any free press. There are waysto establish that reality in practice and inFirst Amendment law. By comparison, atuniversities, where we care as much aboutacademic freedom as journalists do abouteditorial freedom, we have long maintainedour autonomy in spite of signi½cant stateand federal funding. Journalism, I believe,can do the same.

The world is undergoing momentous chang-es through the forces of globalization. Weneed a free press that is suitable to this newworld. To achieve that goal, we must changeour basic concepts and develop our laws andpolicies to deal with the serious issues ofaccess, censorship, and the capacity of thepress to provide the information we need.Only then can the press do its part to helpshape a world that will work for ends webelieve in.

Question

Could you comment on online journalismand whether you believe that a robust, open,and balanced forum could be Internet-based?

Lee Bollinger

This is a very large subject. The Internet isbringing enormous amounts of new infor-mation, opinion, and analysis to discussionof global and national issues. I think thisdevelopment is a huge plus. However, theInternet will not replace the institutions thatare devoted to the spread of information andanalysis on an independent and objective

basis. That is the domain of journalism.While it is typically thought that the citizenjournalist is one of the great new advancesof the Internet age–a view that I share–Ido not think it replaces the need for largeorganizations that have a unique range ofcapacities to go out and report on the world.

I think the other point to be made, which I offer up tentatively, is that the type of“journalism” that is not of the traditionalmedia tends to contain more opinion thanobjective reporting. Journalism is a profes-sion, just as scholarship is a profession,meaning that professional journalists arecommitted to certain norms in the waythey pursue information and truth. By thesame token, we might ask, could the cours-es, discussions, or sources of informationthat we have access to at universities be re-placed by Internet alternatives? Taking abasic economics course online does not con-nect a student to an institution devoted tothe development of knowledge about eco-nomics or laws. I think that is a huge loss.

Question

Previously, newspapers could hire robusteditorial staffs because they had the revenue.How will we replace that capacity in theInternet age? How will we accrete enoughmass, gravitas, and editorial staf½ng to sup-plement at least the blogosphere?

Lee Bollinger

The answer I’m giving in op-eds, essays,speeches, and my book is: through publicfunding. We have a mix that balances pri-vate institutions, publicly funded media,and hybrids that incorporate some publicpolicy. I would shift the nature of that bal-ance to devote more public funding to jour-nalism, in part to make up for the econom-ic losses we are experiencing.

Where we are is completely unsatisfactory.From informal conversations with membersof the American press, I understand that,apart from the ½nancial press employed byBloomberg News, we may have only twodozen full-time foreign correspondentscovering all of China. A handful has beenthere long enough to have acquired a deep

knowledge of the society. Perhaps ½ve orsix journalists have a sense of how Chinaevolved, what is going on in China, whatthe leadership is really like, and China’sviews on topics we care about, such as open-ness. Do they believe that the emergence of a free press is inevitable, or do they believethat a closed society is consistent with sus-tained economic wealth?

Those kinds of questions are immenselysigni½cant to the United States and theworld. It seems that we would want to havemany more journalists trying to understandthem, as well as more university faculty andstudent investigators. We in the universitieshave not adjusted our ½elds and our array ofexpertise to really try to understand what isgoing on in the world, China being a partic-ular example. Again, I would use publicfunding.

I have followed the press for many decades,and I have asked editors of major daily news-papers to give me a sense of the history ofthe press in this country. Leading newspa-pers started making substantial pro½ts inthe late 1970s and early 1980s, when theycame to dominate the market. That’s whenthey hired economists, lawyers, scientists,and other experts to cover subjects like thecourt or the economy. Today, newspapersare in the process of losing a good deal ofthat range of expertise. Allowing it to unfoldwithout a careful public policy review is amistake.

Question

My impression is that the First Amendmentwas originally intended to provide freedomof speech to the press so that it could criti-cize the government. But in the course ofthe last two hundred years, it seems we havemorphed that right into the freedom for in-

Nations throughout the worldhave very different ideas aboutthe role of the press and thescope of freedom it should beafforded.

Visa and travel restrictions on international journalists,or decisions by cable compa-nies not to carry certain inter-national media, will needrethinking.

A Free Press for a Global Society


dividuals to express themselves in a varietyof ways. The Internet offers a megaphonefor a good deal of objectionable speech. Isit your sense that the intent has morphed,or do you believe that freedom of speechoriginally was meant to apply not only tothe press but also to individuals?

Lee Bollinger

I think the provision was intended to applyto individuals, but we know stunningly littleabout how the First Amendment was inter-preted by the people who drafted it. Therehas been very little effort to unravel thatmystery. The ½rst Supreme Court case tointerpret the First Amendment was in 1919.Thus, freedom of speech and press as weknow them today are an invention of thetwentieth century.

And as I point out in many places, it was notan auspicious beginning. Oliver WendellHolmes wrote for a unanimous court inthree early decisions, upholding convictionsagainst people who had protested for vari-ous reasons prior to World War I. One ofthe individuals whose conviction was up-

held by the Supreme Court was presiden-tial candidate Eugene Debs. He gave a speechin Ohio in which he praised people who re-sisted the draft. That was held to be a crimesuf½cient for a presidential candidate to goto jail. While he was there, he received a mil-lion votes for president in the 1920 election.

Then the law changed. Holmes oversaw aruling on the First Amendment and religionthat resulted in strong protections for indi-viduals. During the McCarthy period, how-ever, as people were jailed for speaking aboutoverthrowing the government, the court fellvictim to the traditional notion that in a newperiod, threatened by international conspir-

acy, the government must be allowed totake action.

In the 1960s, everything changed again, withcases like New York Times Co. v. Sullivan andBrandenburg v. Ohio. Our current jurispru-dence really derives from that period, rootedin some ½ne decisions of the 1920s and 1930s.None of those cases is based on an under-standing of what the framers wanted, large-ly because, as I mentioned, there has beenvirtually no historical analysis of what theframers’ exact vision might have been. Yetwe should not readily accept the idea thatthe framers had a vision that we have alteredover time.

Why do we take freedom of speech so farin the United States? Why were neo-Nazispeakers allowed to march in Skokie, Illinois,in 1977? Four thousand Holocaust survivorslived in that community, and half the popu-lation was Jewish. We take free speech fur-ther than any other society in the world, andthat includes neighbors such as Canada andBritain. We are now in a position where ourexercise of free speech rights are not justdomestic issues; they are published global-ly, and an American can end up being pros-ecuted, as has happened, in Italy or Turkey.

This is the beginning of a whole new era, awhole new century. New York Times Co. v. Sul-livan was pivotal in recognizing that Alabamacould not have a rule that allowed people tosue freely for libel; it undermined The NewYork Times’ ability to publish a national edi-tion because it could face libel cases in theleast protective areas of the country. Now,we are facing that problem on a global scale.

For most of my professional career, I havestruggled with the question of why we havesuch extreme protection. I think it is rootedin a strategy to test our limits of tolerance inthe area of speech as a lesson or symbol ofthe need to bring tolerance to every area ofsocial interaction. I think we bend over back-ward to be tolerant because that’s the kindof character we want to have. But other soci-eties have reached very different judgmentsabout what individuals can say publicly.Germany, for example, does not allow neo-Nazi speech; we can understand why cer-tain societies might establish different rules.

We are now in a global discussion aboutde½ning the parameters of free speech onan international scale.

Question

Liberty is inseparable from responsibility.How can we institutionalize responsibilityand protect the citizen from slander andlibel?

Lee Bollinger

I think we look to universities. Quality jour-nalism is a major responsibility of universi-ties and journalism schools. Under NickLemann, Dean of the Graduate School ofJournalism, Columbia is working closely onthese projects and others, strengtheningthe journalism school as a place for profes-sional development. I also think the partic-ipation of people who exhibit the best qual-ities of a professional journalist, to serveas a kind of model or example for how weshould speak and behave, is extremely im-portant.

We should value enormously the qualityof the free press that has been achieved inthis country; it’s an astonishing institution.Nurturing it, helping reshape it through thisdif½cult period, and building a free press ona global scale are great goals. In these efforts,we can work toward a culture in which de-bate is conducted on the highest possiblelevels.

© 2011 by Neal Lane and Lee C. Bollinger,respectively

Besides problems of accessand censorship, we must focuson the capacity of the press tocover the dynamic, fast-mov-ing, and somewhat secretiveforces of globalization.

While it is typically thoughtthat the citizen journalist is oneof the great new advances ofthe Internet age, I do not thinkit replaces the need for large or-ganizations that have a uniquerange of capacities to go outand report on the world.



Paul Sagan

Paul Sagan is Chief Executive Of½cer of AkamaiTechnologies. He has been a Fellow of the Amer-ican Academy since 2008.

It is a pleasure to help coordinate this panelon Technology and Culture and to be herewith our distinguished panelists. Our ½rstspeaker is Robert Darnton, Director of theHarvard University Library. He will addressthe future of the book in a digital age and

Technology and CultureRobert Darnton, David S. Ferriero, and Marjorie M. ScardinoPaul Sagan, ModeratorIntroduction by Neal Lane



Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Senior Fellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. A Fellow of the American Academy since 1995, he is Cochair of the Academy’s Council.

The ½rst of two panels this morning will consider Technology and Culture. Leading this panel is Paul Sagan, Chief Executive Of½cer ofAkamai Technologies. Before joining Akamai in 1998, he served as Senior Advisor to the World Economic Forum and was President andEditor of New Media at Time, Inc. He also was founder of two successful high-tech start-ups: Road Runnner, the world’s ½rst broadbandcable modem service, and Path½nder, one of the pioneers of Internet advertising. Mr. Sagan began his career in television news, and is a three-time Emmy Award winner for broadcast journalism. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy in 2008.

the tension between maintaining broad ac-cess to information sources and commercialinterests that seek to monetize that access.Bob has been outspoken about the impact ofGoogle’s plan to digitize books. He becamea Fellow of the American Academy in 1980.

David Ferriero, our second panelist, is theArchivist of the United States. He will speakon how digital technology affects our abil-ity to archive history and, in turn, what hap-pens to our collective memory in a digitizedworld. He was inducted into the Academyyesterday.

Our ½nal panelist, Marjorie Scardino, is theChief Executive of Pearson plc, an inter-national media company with leading busi-nesses in education, business information,and consumer publishing. The Pearsonmedia empire spans from the Penguin brandto the Financial Times, which is noteworthyfor its success online as well as in print. Shewill share her thoughts on how digital tech-nology has affected the media in general,and publishing speci½cally, and how shiftsin media brought about by digitization arechanging the way the information needs ofa democracy in the Internet era are beingserved. She, too, was inducted into theAcademy yesterday.

More than a billion people around the globeaccess the Internet on a regular basis. As wethink about the impact of technology onculture, and perhaps about the impact ofculture on technology, there are a few de-velopments to keep in mind. If websites andcountries were ranked by population, then

Facebook, with about ½ve hundred millionusers worldwide, would be third, behindChina and India and ahead of the UnitedStates. E-book sales represent only about 1percent of book sales worldwide, but Ama-zon recently reported that its e-book salesnow lead hardcover book sales in the UnitedStates. Fifteen years after the introductionof consumer broadband services, videoconsumption over the Internet is about 1percent of video viewing in the home. But

Soon, Internet use via mobiledevices will outpace use bypersonal computers. This shiftindicates that access to informa-tion is about to expand globallyto levels that have never beforebeen seen in human history.


only in the past few years has the averagehome in almost every developed part of theworld been able to access the Internet atspeeds capable of supporting video qualityequal to that of television. Just this summer,for example, the bbc reported that 5 per-cent of World Cup viewing on television inBritain was done over the Internet–½vetimes the average–even though the eventwas free to watch on television in everypub, not to mention every home, in thecountry.

We will discuss the risks of having all con-tent digitized and controlled by a few cen-tralized entities, public or private. But it isalso true that digitization of records andWeb access have made more informationavailable to more people than at any othertime, at least for now. Soon, even if that ac-cess becomes limited in some ways, Inter-net use via mobile devices will outpace useby personal computers. This shift indicatesthat access to information is about to ex-pand globally to levels that have never be-fore been seen in human history.

At the same time, this flood of digital infor-mation is not washing across the landscapein an even manner. A year ago, I served as amember of the Knight Commission on theInformation Needs of Communities in aDemocracy. We held hearings across thecountry, heard testimony from a very widearray of groups and individuals, and con-cluded that the time had come for new think-ing and aggressive action to improve theinformation opportunities available to theAmerican people. We wrote that America isat a critical juncture in the history of com-munications. Information technology is

changing our lives in ways we cannot easilyforesee, and as dramatic as the impacts havebeen already, they are just beginning. Thedigital age is creating an information andcommunication renaissance, but it is notserving all people–certainly not all Ameri-cans–and communities in an equal way. Itis not serving the democratic process fully.How we react individually and collectivelyto this democratic shortfall will affect thequality of our lives and the very nature ofour communities.

As humans, we have some habits that arehard to break. Some are useful because theycreate patterns that we can recognize andthat help us sort out our world. As we turnto Bob Darnton, we should consider howthe digitization of information affects ourtrust in what we see, read, and hear. It isone thing to examine a scienti½c text, forexample, or to hold a researcher’s log bookin our hands, but what happens when thatauthoritative work is transformed into bitsthat can disappear online or perhaps bechanged without our knowledge? Whathappens not just to our notion of the libraryin the digital future, but to our notion ofaccess to information?

Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer Uni-versity Professor and Director of the UniversityLibrary at Harvard University. He has been aFellow of the American Academy since 1980.

In preparing for this panel discussion, wewere instructed to think of three wishes that,if granted, would in some way improve thecurrent situation with regard to technology,culture, and the public good. My top wish isfor the creation of a national digital library.I think this country needs a digital librarythat would be the equivalent of or greaterthan the Library of Congress. This resourcewould take our entire cultural heritage intoliving rooms, community colleges, and smallinstitutions, everywhere in the country andeverywhere in the world.

The basic idea is straightforward: to givepeople access to our cultural heritage andto close a gap that has existed, certainly,since the invention of the printing press–that is, the gap between those who have ac-cess to books and knowledge and those whodo not. This is not a utopian fantasy; a con-ference held at Harvard last weekend dis-cussed the real possibilities and modalitiesfor creating a national digital library. Wecan get the job done. A coalition of founda-tions could easily cover the costs; a coalition

The digital age is creating aninformation and communica-tion renaissance, but it is notserving all people and com-munities in an equal way.


Technology and Culture

of research libraries could provide the ma-terial; and a coalition of leaders from ourcultural institutions, especially in Washing-ton, could mobilize support. Thus, my num-ber-one wish is that all the material in allour libraries (and not just print materials,but other forms as well) would be madeavailable to American people everywhere.

Wish number two is for open access. It iseasy to say that we are in favor of the democ-ratization of knowledge, but the fact is thatknowledge is very unevenly distributedthroughout the country. An ideal handeddown to us from our founding fathers (grant-ed, we don’t know what their exact inten-tions were when they developed the Bill ofRights and the Constitution) is to create arepublic of letters. In this republic, every-one would have access to the printed word,and everyone would exchange ideas with-out inhibition.

Open access is a way to make that idealpossible. In the current system, we face amajor problem: we, the scholars, producethe research. We write it; we serve on theeditorial boards of journals that publish it;we act as referees for those journals; andthen we buy back the product of our ownlabor at ruinous prices. Of course, we don’tpay for it ourselves–our libraries do. Butthe result is a tremendous disequilibriumin the world of knowledge. Many journalsubscriptions cost libraries $20,000 a year;

a yearly subscription to the chemistry jour-nal Tetrahedron is $40,000. The economicimbalance is simply impossible for librariesto sustain. We have a major crisis, not justin library budgets, but a crisis that rever-berates throughout the world of learning.It affects university presses in particularbecause libraries are cutting back on thepurchase of monographs in order to main-tain expensive journal subscriptions. Theresult is that postdoctoral scholars cannotget their work printed in some subjects.

Open access publishing of scholarly jour-nals is a way to correct this basic imbalance.At Harvard, we passed an open access reso-lution whereby all Harvard professors arecommitted to making their scholarly articlesavailable in an online, open access reposi-tory. They can opt out; nevertheless, thescholarly production coming out of Har-vard is now available free of charge aroundthe world. We are also subsidizing profes-sors’ publication costs up to $1,000 a year.We hope to create a new kind of journal,whose expenses will be paid at the produc-tion end rather than at the consumption orsubscription end. We want to change theequilibrium in scholarly publishing, certain-ly for journals, and maybe even for books.

I have a third wish that may in part be fan-tasy. For many disciplines, our Ph.D. pro-grams are broken. It no longer makes senseto follow the nineteenth-century model weinherited from Germany, which requiresPh.D. candidates to publish a dissertationas a book. In Germany, scholars are stilldigging into their pockets to publish booksthat sit unread on shelves in German librar-ies. We have a similar system here, and itneeds rethinking. In my view, Ph.D. thesesshould be published online rather than asbooks. University presses should not bemaking de facto tenure decisions; in fact,the tenure system needs to be restructuredas well. By reimagining Ph.D. programs, wemight open up career possibilities to youngerscholars in a way that is no longer feasiblegiven the economic and institutional reali-ties of academic life today.

David S. Ferriero

David S. Ferriero is Archivist of the United Statesat the U.S. National Archives and Records Admin-istration. He has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 2010.

Many of you may not know what theArchivist of the United States does, so Iwill start by telling you exactly what myresponsibilities are. The Archivist is therecord keeper of the government and hasbeen performing that function since F.D.R.

created the National Archives. The Archivesare located in forty-four facilities aroundthe country, from Anchorage, Alaska, toAtlanta, Georgia, and include the thirteenpresidential libraries. We have a collectionof more than ten billion pages of paper, fortymillion photographs, miles and miles of½lm, and growing terabytes of electronicinformation. We are governed by the Fed-eral Records Act and the Presidential Rec-ords Act, which determine exactly whatkinds of materials come into the Archives.

My number-one wish is thatall the material in all our libraries (and not just printmaterials, but other forms as well) would be made avail-able to American peopleeverywhere.

In my view, Ph.D. thesesshould be published onlinerather than as books.

Attempts to save our collec-tions, and thus our history,have a checkered past.


Attempts to save our collections, and thusour history, have a checkered past. At theend of the Continental Congress, JeremiahClark of New York was one of a number ofdelegates who suggested that the journalsof the Congress be destroyed, lest they fallinto the wrong hands. Wiser minds pre-vailed and left the decision up to GeneralWashington, who decided that we shouldpreserve those journals for posterity. But itwas not until F.D.R. came into of½ce that theArchives was established as an institution.Roosevelt appointed Robert Connor, a his-torian at the University of North Carolinaat Chapel Hill, to be the ½rst Archivist of theUnited States.

Connor’s job was to create the National Ar-chives. He assessed the situation in Wash-ington and discovered that the recordsaround the government had not been wellpreserved. They had been stored in deposi-tories fraught with hazards and exposed todirt, rain, sunlight, theft, and ½re. Somewere infested with silver½sh, cockroaches,rats, mice, and other vermin. In one depos-itory crowded with government archives,Connor described the most prominent ob-ject in the room: the skull of a dead cat pro-truding from under a pile of valuable records.If a cat with nine lives to risk could not sur-vive the conditions of research in the depos-itories of our National Archives, Connorremarked, surely the poor historian withonly one life to give to his country mightbe excused if he declined to take the risk.

I am happy to report that when I took overin November 2009, I did not face the samescenario. But I would posit that I am in avery similar position with regard to the mi-gration to electronic records. Every agencyin the government, along with the WhiteHouse, is using electronic records in a vari-ety of modes, leading me to wonder whetherwe are losing our memory. I think it is safeto say that we are, just as Connor inheriteda situation where much of our nationalmemory had been lost.

As of 1996, the Presidential Records Act hasrecognized electronic information as record.Since then, we have collected all the emailmessages from the White House, including,for instance, 220 million messages from theGeorge W. Bush administration. The Fed-eral Records Act, however, has not acknowl-edged electronic information. The ½rst billto do so, introduced into the House in 2010,is dead. For all 254 agencies within the fed-eral government, if you can believe it, thecurrent guideline for preserving records is“print and save.” Electronic mail and elec-tronic records systems are utilized, of course,but the legislation is not in place to requiretheir use.

At the National Archives, we are creatingthe Electronic Records Archive. This facil-ity will ingest all of the electronic recordsand email messages from government agen-cies and the White House. It will make thoserecords available in perpetuity, just as thepaper collection is, and open and availableto the public twenty-four hours a day, fromanywhere in the world. It is being tested nowby thirty-½ve agencies and will be in full useby those agencies next year. My wish is forthe agencies to recognize the importance ofboth the records they are creating and thesystems by which that information will besaved.

Having grown up in university environments,I can tell you that the situation in the agen-cies is very similar to the situation on cam-puses, where records management is usuallyassigned to the most junior person in a de-partment. It’s a part-time job, or it’s tackedon to a full set of other responsibilities. The

person in the position is poorly trained;there is a lot of turnover. In other words,not much attention is paid to the records.In the federal government, there is no jobdescription for a records manager. The Rec-ords Management Council–the poor folkssaddled with this responsibility–have nevermet with their counterparts on the informa-tion technology side, the Chief InformationOf½cer (cio) Council. The Records Man-agement Council and the cio Council mightas well be in two different cities.

The very ½rst joint meeting of those groups,to take place on October 20, 2010, at theNational Archives, is a collaboration be-tween the Chief Information Of½cer of theUnited States and me. I am con½dent thatwe will make progress. That said, a reportthe Archives released at the end of Septem-ber, which was based on a self-assessmentby government agencies, showed dismalresults. Of 254 agencies asked to respond toa set of questions about where they are interms of electronic records development,80 percent reported that they are at moder-ate to high risk of not being able to saveelectronic records adequately.

Every agency in the govern-ment, along with the WhiteHouse, is using electronicrecords in a variety of modes,leading me to wonder whetherwe are losing our memory.


Marjorie M. Scardino

Marjorie M. Scardino is Chief Executive ofPearson PLC. She has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 2010.

Given that the more learned members ofthis panel have discussed the arc of historyand its preservation, I want to focus my re-marks on what I see as history’s ½rst draft:newspapers. Over the life of this republic,newspapers have played an important partin educating us as citizens. The impact thedigital world is having on citizenship re-lates to the way newspapers themselves aretransforming.

The last couple of years have witnessed afeverish amount of talk about the death ofthe newspaper. Though possibly a littlepremature, I think that prediction is prettysolid. If you are referring to that thing onpaper that’s folded and presented to youevery morning without fail, then I agree withthe prediction. But if you mean the functionof the newspaper, the idea of a newspaper,is becoming obsolete, then I can’t agree.

But if you try not to call it a newspaper, if in-stead of calling it the pejorative “newspaper,”you call it “a report of everything that hashappened in the world and what it means toyou today,” then that sounds pretty crucial.In fact, it seems to me it’s never been moreimportant. It’s just that it has changed form.

It used to be said that freedom of the pressbelonged only to those who owned one. Now,a large portion of the world does. With ac-cess to a computer hooked to a network, wehave virtual printing presses. We have theability to create our own newspapers–ourown reports of what is happening in theworld that is meaningful to us. We can blogit. We can tweet it. We can put up our viewsfor our thousand friends on Facebook. Wecan make videos and podcast them or postthem on YouTube. We can send broadcastemail messages with curated links. There isan astonishing number of ways for peopleto create their own newspapers.

I believe we choose such a path for our news,as many people have, because we trust ourcircles of friends, our informal networks,and our particular sets of sources. We trustour friends and acquaintances because wehave experienced their level of expertise andcan take a bead on what they do or do notknow. We trust some bloggers we have readfor a while because we know they aren’t rav-ing loons. In short, we have chosen who totrust and who interests us.

Individually created networks and aggrega-tions can be effective. They can give us amultidimensional view of the world thatmight not be available to us otherwise. Theyare arguably much better than having justone source, even if that source is The NewYork Times or the Financial Times. They alsoforce us to roam around and test views.

Yesterday I was speaking with Jim Leach,Chairman of the National Endowment forthe Humanities, who mentioned a studyshowing that people who create their ownnews services by looking at various sourcesclick on not only the sources sympatheticto their views, say, the right-leaning web-sites, but also the left-leaning ones. We don’t

often see this kind of experimentation bycitizens today.

But is this sort of news gathering adequateto inform citizenship? For that, I think theyhave a couple of problems being able to sus-tain democracy, help construct a nationalstory, and provide information we can trust:

1) News in that form–with many voices andinconsistent protocols for reporting–leavesall the re½ning and authentication to us, theindividual consumers of news. We have towork hard to ½gure out which sources totrust, and that requires either longitudinalexperience with a source or a lot of digging.It’s probably a good exercise for us as citizensto validate our own information.

2) But the fact is, most of us don’t have thoseskills, that kind of time, or the right perspec-tive. For instance, almost all the reports andanalysis we can gather are pure opinion, notfact. Democracy is based on the idea that allopinions have equal weight. But the onesthat generally enlighten us, that underpinand convince us to approve of those opin-ions, are based on facts, which are muchharder to come by than opinions.

a) First of all we have to ½nd them, andthen con½rm them, often at their pri-mary sources.

b) Then we have to look for the patterns inthat kaleidoscope of information. Thefacts may be nothing more than amuse-ments if they can’t be mapped into a con-cept–a useful context–to help us solveproblems or take action.

c) Then there’s the publishing piece–dis-seminating our conclusions to others, be-cause networks demand to be fed as wellas to be consumed. At one time, distri-bution was costly. But getting materialout to others has become very easy to do.

It used to be said that freedomof the press belonged only tothose who owned one. Now, alarge portion of the world does.

We have to work hard to½gure out which sources totrust, and that requires eitherlongitudinal experience witha source or a lot of digging.



Independent news-gathering works if wetake seriously the job of con½rming what istrustworthy, and if we take the time to dis-cern meaningful patterns. But there is ahigher hurdle to clear, and a much morecomplicated one. That is, are the individualnetworks that we create and that de½ne ournews able to achieve their task? Are theyable to scrutinize the power structure andthe people who inhabit it? Can they goadus into action and help us bring reforms toour society and our government–the typeof reforms that have taken us along as ademocracy for so many years? That is thefundamental task because that, most of all,is the power of citizenship: to be free, able,and willing to start a movement that fun-damentally changes the premises of a gov-ernment.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, MalcolmGladwell posed the question: can Internet-devised services help create a political move-ment? He concluded that the loose ties madethrough Internet sources are not strongenough to inspire social movements thattruly change governments and policies. Hecentered his story on the 1960 lunch countersit-ins in North Carolina, which began whenfour good friends decided in their studentdorm room one night that they were goingto create a movement for civil rights; theywere going to sit in at the Woolworths inGreensboro until they were served.

That protest started a monumental changearound the country. Within two weeks,those four young people had inspired simi-lar sit-ins by seventy thousand people, pri-marily in the South. Gladwell’s premise wasthat the four people who undertook the ½rst

sit-in knew it would be physically, emotion-ally, and intellectually dangerous, but theyalso could be certain that they would sup-port each other. They had strong ties andknew they all were committed to the con-cept; therefore, they were able to bringabout the sort of change that took courage.Gladwell interviewed many of the peoplewho had participated in the movement.Roughly 25 percent had joined merely be-cause they heard about the idea, and that 25percent generally checked out of the move-ment fairly early. His point was that whilesocial networks are good at creating partic-ipation, they do not create the strong, cohe-sive motivation needed to drive an importantmovement.

Gladwell’s article also talked about recentnetwork-based political movements in Mol-dova and Iran that reportedly were sparkedby online or mobile Internet connections.According to his work and to others whohave reported on the topic, what happenedin those movements, particularly in theIranian movement, was that American andEnglish-speaking journalists sorted throughthe blogs and tweet posts, most of whichwere in English, and picked out what wasgoing on. However, if the movement’s co-ordinators were using Twitter to mobilize,the posts should have been written in Farsi.Gladwell concluded that the movementwithin Iran in fact had little to do with socialmedia.

Gladwell’s message, and the message I pro-pose, is that when the status quo absolutelymust be changed, loose connections don’twork very well. Members of these kinds ofnetworks don’t have the real motivation toput their lives and livelihoods on the line.There are enough ties to pass the word, butthose ties are not strong enough to get peo-ple to mount the barricades.

Gladwell stated it this way: “The instru-ments of social media are well suited tomaking the existing social order moreef½cient. They are not a natural enemy ofthe status quo. If you are of the opinion

that all the world needs is a little buf½ngaround the edges, this should not troubleyou. But if you think that there are stilllunch counters out there that need inte-grating it ought to give you pause.”

Information and understanding about theworld is what provokes us to sacri½ce. Pub-lic journalism exists to help people whothemselves can’t scrutinize power struc-tures with much effect.

I was not told to have three wishes; I wastold I had to have three solutions. But whatI have are merely a few general suggestions:

1) First, information and understandingabout the state of the world–the world ofour immediate circumstances–mostlyprovokes us to sacri½ce, and it ought to beconsidered when we think about citizen-ship. We must educate people to be citizens.In Britain, the schools teach citizenship aspart of the required curriculum. Perhapscitizenship learning should start in earnestin the sixth grade. It should be aligned tohistory; it should talk about the effects ofcitizenship on history; and it should addressthe rights and responsibilities of citizen-ship, tell how citizens can get help and in-formation, and how they can connect withother citizens to create a movement. Werarely refer to ourselves as citizens, yet weshould begin to believe that of all the goalswe have in life, being a good citizen is nearthe top of the list. Talk about it, use theword, exalt it.

2) Second, we should teach technology ed-ucation for older citizens. Some people whoare over a certain age tend to be defensive

Independent news-gatheringworks if we take seriously thejob of con½rming what istrustworthy, and if we takethe time to discern meaning-ful patterns.

Information and understand-ing about the world is whatprovokes us to sacri½ce. Publicjournalism exists to help peoplewho themselves can’t scrutinizepower structures with mucheffect.


about the fact that they are not on Facebook,or that they don’t want to use a BlackBerry.The statement “I don’t use a computer” isgenerally stated in a righteous tone, and Ihear many people say it. But we need toboost those people over the digital divide,because there are bene½ts. It is not always adivide between the rich and the poor; it is adigital divide among the generations. Help-ing citizens access all of the available tech-nology, and helping them use it better, willmake it more useful for everyone.

3) Finally, the world of professional news-gathering is changed. We need to look forways to authenticate that news-gathering,for newspapers, which are not immune toprejudice and subjectivity, as well as for allthe sources we ½nd on the Internet. In the

United Kingdom, we have the Media Stan-dards Trust, a small organization that hasbeen funded by a couple of the founda-tions represented in this room. The web-site journalisted.com, a project of theTrust, posts journalists’ stories by point ofview and topic to make transparent jour-nalists’ outlooks or prejudices. The Trustis also authenticating stories with its ownversion of the Good Housekeeping Seal ofApproval. If we hope to make sense of allavailable information, we need to have thiskind of help in sifting through the manysources of news. Teaching citizenship; ini-tiating technology education for citizens;and developing means to determine qualityand objectivity: those are my three, if notsolutions, then at least wishes.

Discussion

Paul Sagan

David, you talked about losing our culturalmemory. On the other hand, in a world ofsocial media, almost everything we do seemsto be recorded and may never go away. Legalscholar Jeffrey Rosen wrote recently in TheNew York Times Magazine on the fear of theend of privacy. How do you reconcile thosetwo sides?

David Ferriero

I am often asked this question, especiallywith regard to presidential email. The the-ory is that only those email messages thatare declared records–the of½cial businessof the White House–are true records that

should be saved. I would argue that weshould save all email messages. Everyonewho uses email knows that it combinespersonal and business correspondence.Why force a human, or a machine, to makedecisions about what should and shouldnot be considered a record?

I am concerned about the research scholarone hundred years from now who wants toknow how technology was being used in theWhite House during past administrations.If we do not have access to all that content,then we will not be able to provide an answer.We should keep as much as we can.

The world of professional news-gathering is changed. We needto look for ways to authenti-cate that news-gathering, fornewspapers, which are not im-mune to prejudice and subjec-tivity, as well as for all thesources we ½nd on the Internet.Im

age

© L

este

r Le

fkow

itz/

Cor

bis



Paul Sagan

We have a different method in Massachu-setts. All executive branch email messagesare kept, and what happens in the legisla-ture is not subject to disclosure and can bedeleted. The legislature voted and decided

that while the governor and the executivebranch should be held completely to task,it is important for legislators to be able tohave private discussions. Be that as it may,this arrangement may or may not be fair.

Bob, you have made a very bold proposalfor creating access to everything. There areothers who would subsidize access throughadvertising, or perhaps some other modelin the future. Can both initiatives evolve atthe same time–and let the best one win–or, if we do not move more quickly on theacademic and the public initiatives, is therea risk of being overtaken by commercialendeavors?

Robert Darnton

Certainly, academic and commercial digiti-zation projects can be developed simulta-neously. Every major research library hasimportant digital projects. Research at Har-vard found that twenty-one countries aredeveloping a national digital library that is at least in its embryonic stage. We even

found one about to be born in Mongolia.Digitization is a major development; it isnot, as I put it, a utopian fantasy.

Meanwhile, of course, the ground is beingoccupied by commercial enterprises. Pub-lic and commercial fronts do coexist, butthere is indeed a risk that the commercialenterprises will simply take over. They havethe money, the technological skill, and somewonderful enterprises, but the basic goaland responsibility of, for example, GoogleBook Search is to make money for its share-holders. If you look carefully at the settle-ment that was developed between Googleon the one hand, and the authors and pub-lishers who sued Google on the other, youwill ½nd that it is full of all kinds of clausesthat are going to restrict access to informa-tion. I’m a great admirer of Google, but Isimply do not think that Google Book Searchadequately ful½lls the need of the citizenryto be informed and to have access to its cul-tural heritage. I think we need to digitizetexts ourselves.

What is striking is its feasibility. One greatthing about Google Book Search is thatGoogle has shown it can be done. Certainly,all the foundations that gathered at Harvardlast week seem to agree that a digital librarycould be ½nanced. The technology is there;the money is there. Is the will there? Thatis the major question we face.

Paul Sagan

Marjorie, I’m sure, is concerned about re-sponsibility to shareholders. In his talk on“A Free Press for a Global Society,” Colum-bia University President Lee Bollinger re-ferred to the monopoly business model thatsubsidized much of journalism for ½ftyyears. Alex Jones at Harvard has referred to it as the subsidy for journalism, whichhas been shattered, if you look no furtherthan Craigslist. What business models willdominate the next period of journalism?

Marjorie Scardino

Let me start with what I know best. The Econ-omist and the Financial Times share one basicbelief: that is, simply, the reader’s moneyshould always be balanced with the adver-tiser’s money. We should never be more de-pendent on advertisers than we are on thepeople who read the publication. That pol-icy has given us a wide space in which towork. In a challenging environment for ad-vertising, we have found other ways to bemore dependent on our readers. The prem-ise is that if your news organization or blogis something that people really want or need,and you need money in order to sustain it,then they will pay you for it. We’ve certainlyfound this business model to work with theFinancial Times.

I don’t believe that public funding is a viablemodel. The government that we have is themedia’s main object of scrutiny. If the gov-ernment is funding journalism, I do not be-lieve the media will be able to preserve itsobjectivity.

Other models that have worked over timeare those that set up a trust. The PoynterInstitute, for example, owns controllingstock of the St. Petersburg Times Company.The newspaper changes hands without anykind of formal gain, and money is directedtoward training journalists at the Institute.The trust is a good model, but it’s not sus-tainable if the newspaper doesn’t makeenough money to keep it going. Similarly,The Economist has a trust so that no one can½re the editor–not the chief executive orthe board. Only a few trustees who do nothave any economic interest at stake can

Certainly, a digital librarycould be ½nanced. The tech-nology is there; the money isthere. Is the will there? That isthe major question we face.

I would argue that we shouldsave all email messages. Every-one who uses email knows thatit combines personal and busi-ness correspondence. Why forcea human, or a machine, tomake decisions about whatshould and should not be con-sidered a record?


make that decision. That model works forindependence, but depends on the free mar-ket to sustain it. Those are the markets I’dbank on.

Paul Sagan

Speaking as a former newspaper reporter, Ido not see the economics of traditional printjournalism as sustainable. I think you agree,the blogosphere is wonderful in many ways,but it lacks professionally trained reporterswho do investigative journalism. As muchas I admire the Financial Times and The Econ-omist, I think we are moving into a digitalworld in which the professional journalistis (at risk of ) becoming extinct. At the sametime, we need some form of investigative,independent journalism. How will the freetrade work, given that revenue-earners suchas the want ads, which used to overwhelm-ingly ½nance newspapers, have now goneonline?

Marjorie Scardino

Our journalists do a lot of investigative work,and some put their work on blogs as well ason paper and online. We try to produce adynamic paper that allows you not only toread the summary in the paper but also toread deeply into contributors’ blogs or othersources. Everyone in the paper is involvedin working on creating this, and then usingelectronic means to disseminate it. Commer-cially, it would be preferable not to have toprint a pink paper and deliver it to a half-million people around the world every day.We certainly could sustain investigativejournalism via electronic dissemination.

One of the problems with newspapers andjournalism is that monopoly proprietorstook all of the margin they made; they didnot reinvest it in anticipation of the nextwave of journalism. That said, there is plentyof professional journalism to be had as longas we can pay people to do it.

Question

Marjorie, you mentioned that governmentneeds to be scrutinized by the media, but itseems more and more that business, whichoften has a signi½cant role in governmentactivity, needs to be scrutinized as well. Yetit is business that, through advertisements,funds much of the press. How do you bal-ance this reality if you would prevent thegovernment from helping fund journalism?

Marjorie Scardino

The journalist’s job has always been to af-flict the affluent in one way or another, andI agree business is more often the targetthan government right now. But the basictenet of every great journalistic organiza-tion is to be indifferent to the reaction ofadvertising. I don’t know any great news-papers that have failed to stand by that tenet.A big ibm advertising spread in the middleof the newspaper doesn’t mean that thepaper will refrain from criticizing ibm onthe front page.

Government has more power. Governmenthas the power to strike your license; in the-ory, it has the power to stop your delivery.It has all kinds of powers that the law wouldwithhold from private business. In that way,I think that newspapers were initially setup to scrutinize government, and I thinkthat is still their largest and most dif½cultjob.

Question

Two factors seem to have led to the hugegrowth of redundancy in email correspon-dence. One is the Listserv, which sends the

same message to maybe hundreds of thou-sands of people. The other is that when youhit the reply button, you often send notonly your message, but the preceding fourhundred messages. These exchanges makethe idea of saving everything seem counter-productive. Is it feasible to ½nd a way to pre-serve only the nonredundant information?

Paul Sagan

Software actually solves that problemthrough de-duplication technology. Itkeeps one copy of each thread because it isexpensive to store things, despite decreasesin storage costs. It keeps the original piecesand deletes the redundant pieces.

David Ferriero

The more complicating factor is email at-tachments. We started collecting emailmessages in the Reagan White House, andthe software to read those attachmentsdoesn’t exist anymore. In the ElectronicRecords Archive, we have created the facil-ity for the system to recognize the nature ofthe attachment and use a plug-in that willtranslate the ½le into something that canbe read today.

Question

I have two questions for Bob Darnton re-garding academic publishing. The ½rst re-lates to quality. Today, there are two modes:the open access mode and the traditionalpay-for-access mode. My experience withthe latter is that some of the long-standingjournals commit a great deal of time and ef-fort to upholding the quality of the journalthrough heavy edits of articles and modernauthentication technology like CrossCheckto eliminate plagiarism. Plagiarism is be-

If the government is fundingjournalism, I do not believethe media will be able to pre-serve its objectivity.

I think we are moving into adigital world in which theprofessional journalist is (at risk of) becoming extinct.



coming an increasingly important issue, asplagiarists are able to download articles on-line, cut and paste from them, and submitthem to journals. We are seeing this phe-nomenon on editorial boards.

Second, with regard to open access, youmentioned transferring the cost to publishthe article from the consumer to the pro-ducer. For scholars who work at Harvard,that may be easy to do, but how would thesystem work at a university that is not wellfunded, or in a country where the cost of,say, $1,500 to publish an article in an Amer-ican journal may be prohibitive for somepeople? Can you address those issues?

Robert Darnton

The most successful open access journals,notably those in medicine, such as the ar-chive PubMed Central, have funds set asidefor contributors who cannot pay the pub-lishing fees, including provisions for schol-ars in other countries. The economic costvaries from discipline to discipline. Manyscientists automatically receive a publish-ing component in research grants.

The point is that this model should travel,and it is traveling. We’ve created an organi-zation known as core, to which quite afew universities now subscribe. The transi-tion cannot happen overnight, but as thenumber of open access journals increases,the center of gravity begins to shift. With acooperative effort, we can cover the costsof subsidizing the production end, as is hap-pening in ½elds like physics and the healthsciences. As this model becomes widespread,the whole terrain will likely shift so thatmonopolistic price gouging will graduallydisappear.

Now, that may sound pious and far-fetched,but when we look at hit rates for open ac-cess journals, it becomes clear that they areconsulted so widely that the sheer prestigeattached to famous journals like Cell andNature will not be enough to sustain them.We have to address this problem as well,but the solution is not simply that such re-sources will be a luxury for the more well-endowed universities. The collective effortthat is already being made shows consider-able promise.

As to quality, we need top experts to serveon the editorial boards of open access jour-nals. We need more advocates like HaroldVarmus, who has led the way in obtainingsupport from top scientists for open accessjournals. There is a ways to go, but it is hap-pening.

© 2011 by Neal Lane, Paul Sagan, RobertDarnton, David S. Ferriero, and MarjorieM. Scardino, respectively

The basic tenet of every greatjournalistic organization is tobe indifferent to the reactionof advertising.

Newspapers were initially setup to scrutinize government,and I think that is still theirlargest and most dif½cult job.



Cybersecurity and the CloudVinton G. Cerf, Richard Hale, and Raymond E. OzzieTom Leighton, ModeratorIntroduction by Neal Lane



Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Senior Fellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. A Fellow of the American Academy since 1995, he is Cochair of the Academy’s Council.

Tom Leighton, Cofounder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies, will lead our panel discussion on Cybersecurity and the Cloud.He is also Professor of Applied Mathematics at mit and has been a member of mit’s Computer Science and Arti½cial IntelligenceLaboratory since its inception in 1996. A preeminent authority on algorithms for network applications, he holds numerous patents in-volving content delivery, Internet protocols, cryptography, and digital rights management. From 2003 to 2005, Dr. Leighton served onthe President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, during which time he chaired the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity.He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and he has been an active Fellow of theAmerican Academy since his election in 2003. He serves as a member of the Academy’s Trust.

Tom Leighton

Tom Leighton is Professor of Applied Mathemat-ics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyand Cofounder and Chief Scientist of AkamaiTechnologies. He has been a Fellow of the Amer-ican Academy since 2003 and serves as a memberof the Academy’s Trust.

dod communications and information re-main secure against cyberattack. So whenthe bad guys are trying to steal our country’ssecrets, Richard’s job is to make sure they arenot successful. This is obviously an enor-mous, and enormously important, task.

The third member of our panel, Ray Ozzie,has founded and led several successful high-tech companies, including Iris Associates,where he created Lotus Notes and led thedevelopment team. He now serves as ChiefSoftware Architect at Microsoft, where hedirects technical strategy, product architec-ture, and development of the company’snext-generation software services platform.He was elected a member of the AmericanAcademy in 2010.

We have decided to divide our discussioninto two parts: the ½rst will deal with indi-vidual privacy and security; the second willfocus on corporate and government secu-rity, with particular attention to militaryuses of the Internet, both offensive anddefensive. We will start each topic with abrief statement from the panelists, then wewill have a discussion with questions fromthe audience.

Here to discuss cybersecurity are seniorleaders from three of the most powerful in-stitutions in the world: Google, Microsoft,and the Pentagon. Both Al Gore and our ½rstpanelist, Vint Cerf, are Fellows of the Amer-ican Academy; only one of them inventedthe Internet. Vint is well-known as a fatherof the Internet because of his pioneeringwork on the architecture and basic proto-cols that make the Internet what it is today.In recognition of his contributions, he hasreceived every possible prize, including theTuring Award, the National Medal of Tech-nology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,and the Japan Prize. Vint is currently VicePresident at Google, where he also has thetitle Chief Internet Evangelist. He was electeda member of the American Academy in 1995.

Next to Vint is Richard Hale. When it comesto cybersecurity, Richard is ½ghting on thefront lines. As the Chief Information Assur-ance Executive for the Defense InformationSystems Agency, Richard oversees cyberse-curity for the agency that runs all the net-works for the Department of Defense (dod)and the military. He is responsible for coor-dinating the design and implementation ofa defense-in-depth strategy to ensure that


Individual Privacy and Security

Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf is Vice President and Chief Inter-net Evangelist at Google Inc. He has been a Fel-low of the American Academy since 1995.

Maybe I should start by reminding every-one what Scott McNealy, cofounder of SunMicrosystems, said some time ago: thereisn’t any privacy anymore; get over it. I hopethat is not true. But I think we are now in anenvironment where security is hard to comeby, and privacy is equally beleaguered.

On the security side, I tend to think of thecurrent Internet environment as compara-ble to a very complex ecosystem. It is notcentrally controlled; it is made up of a widerange of organisms and institutions. Theequivalent of dna, the software that allowsthe Internet and its components to inter-work is also quite varied; it is not all stem-ming from the same source. As a conse-quence, assuring any kind of security isdif½cult.

When Internet design was ½rst being for-mulated, I was not thinking much aboutthe future enterprise use of it. At the time, I thought every computer would have to

defend itself, not unlike the telephone sys-tem, whereby any instrument can call anyother instrument. I foresaw a similar systemfor computers on the Internet: any computerwould be able to send traf½c to any othercomputer on the Internet, but if one com-puter did not want to communicate withanother, then it did not have to. That viewdid not anticipate the denial-of-service at-tack, which is the classic problem of some-one overwhelming your computer, not withanything subtle but simply with too muchtraf½c. On the other hand, it seemed like areasonable tactic that you could use crypto-graphic means to authenticate the origina-tor of the traf½c and then reject it on thegrounds that it did not match anything yourecognized.

As the Internet evolved, and as it enteredthe enterprise environment, the notion of½rewalls and perimeter defenses came along.Yet in the end, I think we all have discoveredthat it is still the individual computer or pro-grammed component that has to defend it-self, because you can walk around the ½re-wall with a virus-infected usb memorystick and thereby infect the interior of whatshould have been a protected perimeter. Ithink we have to build much more robustand resistant systems that are capable ofprotecting machines and their content. Wecannot rely strictly on any external defensethat is not implicit in the design of the de-vices themselves or their software.

Richard Hale

Richard Hale is Chief Information AssuranceExecutive at the Defense Information SystemsAgency of the U.S. Department of Defense.

I will begin by telling a quick story. My fa-ther-in-law is retired from the military, somy in-laws get their health care throughthe military health insurance program.That also means they often receive healthcare at military facilities. When they haveproblems, we can visit any military-runhospital in the Washington area becausethe military has put medical records intothe cloud. We can go into any of these hos-pitals, and all their test results over the lastten years are graphed. This centralizationof test data is a fantastic development forcare because you can spot trends.

From a privacy point of view, I want the peo-ple who are caring for me to have access tothat kind of information. If we can broadenaccess, then there is an incredible amount ofdata for researchers to ½gure out what corre-lates with what, what works, and what doesnot.

We have to build much morerobust and resistant systemsthat are capable of protectingmachines and their content.We cannot rely strictly on anyexternal defense that is not im-plicit in the design of the devicesthemselves or their software.


At the same time, one of my jobs, and of mycolleagues at the dod, is to try to keep asecret. It turns out, when everything is con-nected to everything else, keeping a secretis an extremely hard task. What we are try-ing to do is ½gure out how to keep informa-tion within some community that needsaccess to that information. Yet it is dif½cultto de½ne community with any precision be-cause, in the example of health care, thatcould be anyone involved in my care or anylegitimate researcher who needs access tomy health information.

Given the technology fertility that Vint men-tioned, and given the large number of peo-ple involved, it is very hard to guarantee thatprivate data will not be exposed. And onceexposed, whether by accident or maliciously,it is gone. The tension between access, pri-vacy, and security is a real challenge at themoment.

Raymond E. Ozzie

Raymond E. Ozzie is former Chief SoftwareArchitect at Microsoft Corporation. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 2010.

Privacy and security are such nuancedtopics, and in many cases, we become con-fused as to whether we are talking aboutthe privacy of data–the information thatwe create and that we consume–and traf½canalysis: looking at metadata or at the pat-terns surrounding how we do things andwhat we do. Both aspects are extremelyvaluable in different contexts and in differ-ent forms.

Many of us came into the pc industry be-fore there was all this information flowingaround on wires. Early on, many of us werevery idealistic about how personal comput-ing could lead to empowerment and how wecould use technology to help individuals.

In the early pc era, we brought norms fromthe physical world into the pc world. Wheth-er it was Apple with Macintosh, Microsoftwith Windows, or Linux, we brought thefeelings of trust and privacy from physical½le cabinets onto your desktop. So eventhough Windows Update connected toMicrosoft’s services to keep Windows

functioning optimally, and even thoughevery word you typed (if you were using oursoftware) might have gone into MicrosoftOf½ce, we established a trust relationshipthat our software, even though it was con-nected, was not monitoring your keystrokes.As a result, users did not have to worry aboutwhat traf½c analysis we were performing onthe desktop, or what leakage of data mayhave been occurring.

For some reason, that basic relationshipchanged in a services world. As an industryand as users, we made a conscious choice tothrow all that out the window, even thoughwe could have brought the privacy and se-curity norms from the earlier pc era intothe service environment. Right now, we aremoving into a world where everything thatyou believe you have exclusive custody of isbeing shared; indeed, you are putting it intojoint custody with a service provider. This

development raises two questions: Whattrust relationship do you want to have withyour service provider? What are the regu-lations and who are the stakeholders thatyour service provider is subject to that youmay or may not like?

For example, many people are unaware ofthe fact that Microsoft, as a service provider,is required to scan the images that are storedin our service. Even if we do not use the traf-½c or the data, we are obligated to monitorfor such things as child pornography and toact accordingly if discovered. However, oncewe have built these monitoring capabilitiesinto our services in order to ful½ll one regu-lation, other regulators can come along, any-where worldwide, and say, “Since you’vealready built it, why don’t you use it for thisother purpose?”

It is very hard to guaranteethat private data will not beexposed. The tension betweenaccess, privacy, and security isa real challenge at the moment.

Right now, we are moving intoa world where everything thatyou believe you have exclusivecustody of is being shared.

Cybersecurity and the Cloud


It is an interesting and different world thatwe are entering. For some reason, we feelthat it is permissible in this world (right now,at least) to allow service providers, such asMicrosoft, to change their terms of use bysimply changing an end-user license agree-ment on a Web page somewhere. We are inonly the early stages of creating the normsthat will take us forward for many, manyyears. In my opinion–and it is a very unusu-al thing to say–we need to start thinking

more about compartmentalization. Whetheras a business or an individual, you should besuspect of putting all your data in one placeor in one tool, of putting all your data onlineversus in a collection of duplicated memo-ries, such as usb memory devices. In ourcurrent situation, you cannot implicitlytrust any emergent online service.

I think we also need to become much moreaware as a society of what we are walkinginto from a tracking perspective. Everyoneprobably is beginning to realize that everywebsite he or she visits is leaving a trail ofgolden crumbs that entrepreneurs and busi-nesses want to monetize in one way or an-other. But I do not think that people havean understanding of the degree to which,at least in the United States, webcams orsecurity cameras are monitoring them. Re-cently it was estimated that in the UnitedStates, you are exposed to roughly two hun-dred recording cameras per day.

People do not talk about the fact that Blue-tooth phones are being tracked. There aremany tools and sites in existence that trackshoppers through malls, from store to store.These tools know when you are a repeatvisitor just browsing. These new mecha-nisms are creeping up on us, and I thinkwe all could do society a favor by increas-ing the level of conversation about them.

As an industry, service providers are beingrequired to put ports in our systems to im-plement snooping as a service for a varietyof third parties. I would encourage opendialogue about how we implement suchthings, and conservatism in how quicklywe race forward, because there are unin-tended uses of these systems and tools.Once they are integrated, insiders or othergovernments might use them. We do not yetknow exactly how these tools will be usedat the metadata or data level.

Tom Leighton

The privacy conversation involves the needsof the individual versus the needs of somecollective, whether it is government or someentity trying to sell you a product. We alllike personalization; for example, the loca-tion-based services on an Android phone,an iPhone, or a BlackBerry are very cool.The phone knows where you are, and it triesto tell you about what is around you. Some-times it tells those people around you aboutyou. In either case, the goal is to provideyou with a better experience or to sell yousomething more ef½ciently.

Snooping as a service, including the businessof wiretapping, stimulated a great deal ofdebate some years ago in terms of whetherthe government ought to have a snoopingport in commercial cryptography. The tech-nology had been the old clipper chip thatsome of you will remember, but wiretappingdoes not mean the same thing that it used to.Today when government or law enforce-ment wants to ½gure out what a bad guy isdoing, it asks Microsoft to build monitor-ing into its system. Then, for a variety ofreasons, that monitoring could be used bysomeone else for some other purpose. Thatother entity may not be a government, Mi-crosoft, or even a Microsoft insider; theremay be weaknesses that allow that monitor-ing to be used by almost anyone in the world.We need to consider what bounds we shouldset in enabling these kinds of services.

Vinton Cerf

The point here is that mechanisms that arewell-intentioned, but that may not have ad-equate access control, can be used by othersthan those for which the devices were in-tended. The electronic cookie is a good il-lustration of how a tool can start out withgood intentions and then morph into some-thing more threatening.

Cookies, at least as used in the Internet con-text, started out as a very practical businessissue. When I was at mci in the early 1990s,we began to explore the use of the WorldWide Web, and we built something calledthe mci Mall (which ultimately was not acommercial success). We approached Net-scape Communications to license theirservers and browser software, which wethen distributed so that people could ac-cess this shopping mall service.

I realized even then that I did not know howmany people would use the service, and Iwas worried about the fact that the Web isa kind of stateless engine. I was concernedthat people would get partway throughtransactions and then things would break,or they would abandon a transaction onlyto come back later. I did not want to havemy servers swell with huge amounts of in-formation, some of which might have nolonger been of any use. Instead, I wanted tostore whatever the state of the transactionwas on the machines that people were usingin order to access the service.

So John Klensin and I debated how to storethe state of these transactions on the client’smachine as an ef½ciency measure, because

Whether as a business or anindividual, you should be sus-pect of putting all your data in one place or in one tool.

Snooping as a service, includ-ing the business of wiretapping,stimulated a great deal of de-bate some years ago in termsof whether the governmentought to have a snooping portin commercial cryptography.


everyone who came to the system broughtwith him a computer with memory, storage,and communication capacity. That is wherethe idea of cookies came from. I certainlydid not anticipate the uses that we now seewith various forms of cookies and trackingmechanisms.

Tom Leighton

You raise a fascinating challenge, and I wouldlike to push you to suggest possible solutions.Ray and Vint represent companies that, be-cause of their pervasive software and ser-vices, are capable of capturing a tremendousamount of knowledge and tracking by theindividual user. In some cases, they use theseabilities for the purposes of advertising orgenerating search results. The government,

of course, is not without its own power tocollect information, and it does so for dif-ferent reasons. As you made clear, there areunanticipated consequences of these abili-ties. How do we set up rules for use? More-over, how do we set up rules in an interna-tional environment where other govern-ments may have very different views aboutwhat is permissible in this regard?

Vinton Cerf

One aspect that often does not receive muchrecognition in discussions like this is thatthe decision to protect privacy is not merelya technical one; it is sometimes a decisionmade as a corporate policy. For example, atelephone company collects a huge amountof information for billing purposes: which

numbers were called, how long each calllasted, when the call was made, and so on.Such details are treated as protected infor-mation, but that is a corporate decision (onethat may be backed by legal precedent).

In the case of Google, we consider much ofthe information we have to be private, thuswe do not share it with anyone. We certainlyuse it, but as I have often tried to point outto people, we do not care about who you are.We care about patterns and about trying tomatch the patterns we see with the adver-tisements that may be of interest. Our the-ory is that advertising that is actually ofinterest is more likely to be perceived as in-formation rather than annoying advertising.

A company has to make a decision aboutwhat to do with the information it accumu-lates. Google considers that information tobe private; therefore, we do not transfer it tothird parties. Transparency–making surethat people know what kind of informationis accumulated, what is done with it, andwhat they can do about removing it–be-comes a very important element in the de-bate, resulting in the privacy dashboardsand similar tools that Google and othersare building. Emphasizing transparency isvery important because it relates to thequestion of trust. You cannot have thiskind of business unless you can establish a trust relationship.

Raymond Ozzie

The single biggest thing we can do is increasetransparency. We need to explain how thetools we use work–how websites work ingeneral–in terms that regular people canunderstand.

Mechanisms that are well-intentioned, but that may nothave adequate access control,can be used by others thanthose for which the deviceswere intended.

Imag

e ©

Les

ter

Lefk

owit

z/G

etty

Imag

es



As an example of the challenge we face inimproving transparency, consider Micro-soft’s Internet Explorer 8. The group thatbuilt the browser put in a feature thatshowed, very plainly, all the entities thathad some degree of tracking ability when auser visited a particular Web page. Theuser could bring up a page, and the browserwould concurrently show you, for example,multiple advertisers, an advertising net-work, a third-party tracking company, andan analytics company. The browser couldprovide this information for every page vis-ited. This transparency is extremely scarybecause it overturns people’s view that whenthey go to a website, it is only the brand ofthat website, and the site is taking responsi-bility for its actions. Instead, they see thatthere are many companies getting little gold-en crumbs from them.

Advertisers did not want this level of trans-parency, so there ended up being a middleground, a private browsing mode that pro-vides some of this information and allowsyou to block things–but it is not the defaultsetting. As this example makes clear, thedefaults and norms that we end up with re-garding transparency will always be decidedthrough some combination of what citizenswant, what governments want, and so on.

There is a lot going on that people do notunderstand, but much of it is not for ill will;there are economic motivations, for exam-ple, behind certain actions. Still, there is alot of data being accumulated, and many ofthe companies accumulating it are not asstable as, say, Microsoft or Google. When acompany is in ½nancial stress, suddenly itcan relicense, changing the terms on thedata that it has already accumulated anddoing things with it that might not havebeen in the scope of their original intent.

Vinton Cerf

Furthermore, when a company goes intobankruptcy, some things are treated as as-sets that were not thought of as assets before.

Richard Hale

A lot of money can be made by understand-ing us better as consumers and citizens, sowe are being tracked like crazy. The develop-ments that allowed these tracking capabili-ties to flourish have sprung up very rapidly,and as yet there are no norms for them.

The dod is tiny on the scale of the Internet,but it is still a big place. As we try to keepsecrets, we try also to have some notion ofaccountability for access to information.Even though the dod is maybe four millionpeople, our task is easier within our smallerstructure than in the vastness of the Internet.But extending our scope to include even justcoalition partners, we increase the chancethat secrets will not be properly kept.

Accountability, therefore, becomes imper-ative. It involves ½rst coming up with normsand methods to evaluate the trustworthinessof an organization or individual. Then it re-quires transparency–being able to see ex-actly what is going on–in order to holdsomeone or some entity accountable tothose norms. For individuals, we have im-plemented cryptographic identity creden-tials that are much stronger than things likepasswords so that we can hold individualsaccountable for access to private or secretinformation. Without getting into argu-ments about national id cards and similarmeasures, I do think we somehow need toincrease and improve accountability.

Vinton Cerf

However, I cannot help but observe thateven agencies with the most secret of infor-mation run into the basic problem of need-ing to trust individuals. Some of the mostserious security breaches have been a con-sequence of individuals choosing to releaseinformation: WikiLeaks, for example. Nomatter how hard you work on the technol-ogy side, you still have to trust people, whichsometimes does not work.

Question

My question is not about access to securedata–data that are classi½ed or itar (Inter-national Traf½c in Arms Regulations) re-stricted data–but rather access to nonsecuredata for academic and similar researchersworking on 6.1 contracts with the dod. I

have had a lot of experience with this in thelast ten years, and I ½nd that there is oftenan internal political barrier in terms of ac-cess to information. For example, jieddo

(Joint Improvised Explosive Device DefeatOrganization) might own sets of data (his-torical data) on insurgent activity, and it iswilling to give the data to researchers whoare directly connected to the organization.The Army Research Of½ce might be fund-ing a project to study the same kinds of ac-tivity, but it cannot get access to the data toput it in the hands of researchers it supports.I have seen this problem with the DefenseThreat Reduction Agency and the NationalGeospatial Intelligence Agency. It is com-partmentalization of unclassi½ed data, andthe barriers that are set up are impedimentsto those of us trying to do basic research.Could you comment on that?

Richard Hale

I have faced that problem as well, and it canbe very situational. Often, data are thoughtto be somehow sensitive, and therefore arenot made entirely public. What happenedwith the Internet is that everything beganto be published by anyone in the world, with

Accountability involves ½rstcoming up with norms andmethods to evaluate the trust-worthiness of an organizationor individual. Then it requirestransparency in order to holdsomeone or some entity ac-countable to those norms.


everyone seeing everything. We frequentlyhave debates about whether we would putanyone at risk by revealing information.With some of the data we collect–as wemonitor the dod networks for people try-ing to cause mischief, for example–wesimply do not have the authority to givethat data to anyone.

I do not have a good answer for you exceptto say that the government (at least the timesI have been involved) struggles in good con-science with the question of whether it canrelease information. We all want to get bet-ter eyes on our problems, and thus releasinginformation is generally in the government’sinterest.

Vinton Cerf

I want to make another related observation;it is not speci½c to your problem, but it isrelated to the notion of privacy. We treatcourt records as public records, and thereare a number of other things that we treatas public records. In my view, we have beensatis½ed to call them public records because,in the past, it has not been all that easy toaccess them. You had to show up at a par-ticular building, get access to a ½ling cabi-net, and maybe get somebody to reproducethe public record. When you put records indigital form and they are widely and instan-taneously available on the Internet to two

billion people, it is possible to argue thatmaybe they should not be public recordsbecause, for example, court cases have per-sonal information in them, such as addressesand phone numbers. Our concept of “pub-lic record” could easily morph, simply as aconsequence of the environment in whichthose records now exist.

Question

You talked about the importance of estab-lishing a trust relationship with these largecompanies and the role that transparencyplays in that. I think that is only part of thestory, however, because the consumer hasvery little power here. When you turn onthe browser and have this scary experienceof discovering what is really happening,you have the choice as an individual to optout of the game. But that has a tremendousdisadvantage: the individual has no bargain-ing power. It seems to me that if we care atall about this trust relationship, it is goingto take more than transparency.

If you go to a site like dictionary.com andlook up a word, dictionary.com will tell thepeople trying to develop a behavioral modelof you what word you just looked up. Thatis the degree to which you are being trackedby what I will call this conspiracy of web-sites. Should we worry about this situation,and if so, how could the debate be institu-tionalized, because we as individuals haveno bargaining power?

Vinton Cerf

You mentioned one thing that I think is veryhelpful, and that is, it is not just the searchengine companies that do this kind of track-ing. Any website you go to is capable of put-ting a cookie on your machine and using it.

The fact that Internet activity is trackeddoes not necessarily translate into what isbeing done with that information. I wouldrespond by saying that maybe we need tothink seriously about how users can say, “Idon’t want to be tracked.” Google is experi-menting with just that, with private brows-ing modes and tools of that nature. Peopleshould not have to know so much in orderto remove their “trackability.”

Raymond Ozzie

Ultimately, there are some personal bene½tsfor individuals, not just advertisers, thatarise from tracking. I’m not sure how manyof you have used the new version of the

Kindle, but if you highlight a given passageas you are reading an electronic book, itshows you that, say, thirty-½ve other peoplehighlighted the section. At ½rst, you won-der why that little squiggly has shown upunder the text. But after a while, you cometo appreciate the feedback that it is givingyou. We are contributing that informationand getting value out of it.

This is a balancing of equities, and I thinkthat transparency is step one. If people real-ize there is something going on, then theymay become curious and want to knowmore. For example, if people knew therewas as much Bluetooth tracking as there is,would there be legislation dedicated to thisissue? I do not know the answer, but I thinka general awareness of something like thiswould be the ½rst step in determining ac-tions or outcomes.

Corporate and Government Cybersecurity

Tom Leighton

Let’s move on to our second topic, corporateand government cybersecurity, with timefor more questions at the end. This topic isimportant to each of our panelists becauseevery major corporation and branch in themilitary is the target of cyberattacks de-signed to steal its con½dential information.Perhaps even more frightening is the re-cent Stuxnet virus, which affects controlsystems for utilities–nuclear power plantsin particular. It has been speculated in thepress recently that Israel and/or the UnitedStates may have been behind the Stuxnetvirus in an attempt to derail Iran’s nuclearprogram.

Our concept of “public record”could easily morph, simply asa consequence of the environ-ment in which those recordsnow exist.

Ultimately, there are somepersonal bene½ts for individu-als, not just advertisers, thatarise from tracking.



This speculation raises several interestingquestions. For example, is the offensive useof cyberattacks by governments legitimateduring peacetime? If so, what are the con-sequences? Are treaties and regulationsneeded, or even technically possible? Per-haps more important, now that a virus thataffects control systems for nuclear powerplants has been unleashed, how comfortablecan we be that utility operations in thiscountry are safe? Is a devastating cyberat-tack against the United States now reallypossible? If so, what can we do about it?

Raymond Ozzie

We are in the beginning of a signi½canttransformation for all organizations. As Isaid before, with regard to individuals, wefairly rapidly brought the norms from thephysical world, and a viewpoint of how wecompartmentalize our information, to theonline environment. Businesses are justbeginning to embrace the notion of cloudcomputing: that is, taking many of thethings they have done within their datacenters and putting it online, relying onservice providers to take care of it. They areputting their data in the custody of someother entity.

Each time that you analyze the risk modelassociated with how to manage the data inyour systems, it becomes a bit more nuancedwhen you involve more and more thirdparties or more jurisdictions. For example,Microsoft, as a cloud computing provider,was well aware of threat models related topeople watching and snooping online whendata were flowing among our data centers.In the initial designs of our data centers,however, we were not thinking too muchabout the threat model that would require

us to protect our employees in countrieswhere they, their employers, or their fami-lies could be threatened if they did not pro-vide physical access to data to some localof½cial who desired access. Many of thesechallenges can be addressed–for example,by using technology that makes data cen-ters as disposable as possible or by usingencryption technology–but the fact is weare in the early days of transition to thesekinds of models.

There are differences in regulations betweenvarious countries: in terms of where theircitizens’ health records must be kept, wherecompanies must keep their ½nancial records,and so on. In many ways, this asymmetryresembles the asymmetry in crypto-regula-tions that existed a number of years ago.Some of it will simply take time to iron out,but we need to have more conversationsaround the issues.

Our entire infrastructure is under constantattack by a number of different classes ofactor; that is something we just have to dealwith as the nature of the environment. Wecannot delude ourselves into thinking thatwe can achieve perfection, and we will haveto ½nd ways to channel resources systemat-ically to keep the threat level down and torally together to address emergencies asthey come along.

The Stuxnet virus is a very interesting case.The nature of the virus is such that it as-sumes it is targeting systems that are notconnected to the Internet. It assumes thatthe infection will somehow get to the in-tended device by someone casually takingsomething from a usb memory drive andthen using it on a disconnected logic con-troller machine. Viruses are traveling bythat model, but as an industry, we have notconceptualized updating our software sothat it can transmit ½xes to patch the sys-tems by that same model. Stuxnet is causinga number of us to rethink the fact that every-thing really is connected: the keyboard con-trollers in the keyboards, the systems them-selves, the ½rmware that is in them. Thereis no such thing as a disconnected system,

so from an architectural perspective, wehave our hands full in terms of coming upwith a solution.

Richard Hale

Having systems that we thought were dis-connected but really were not goes back along time. Early computer viruses werepassed around on floppy disks; the com-puters were not yet connected, but therewas a channel between them. Puzzling outwhat all those channels are, and trying to½gure out how to control them, is part ofour problem today.

One of my jobs, and that of my colleaguesin the dod who work on issues related tocybersecurity, is to make business processesdependable in the face of those who wantto disrupt them. In other words, we wantwar-½ghting to work even when someoneis trying to interfere with the informationor the information infrastructure. Some-times this means being able to carry on inspite of a problem; other times, it is work-ing very quickly to recover when a problemoccurs. Whether ½ghting a war or doing re-lief work in Haiti, where we collaboratewith nontraditional partners (Cuba andChina, for instance), I want people on dod

missions to be able to depend on informa-tion and on the information infrastructurewhen someone is interfering with it. I thinkthat cybersecurity problems with industrialcontrol systems are closely related to this.

So I would suggest that dependability is animportant aspect of security. We talkedabout trustworthiness earlier; now we aretrying to ½gure out if we can depend on thesystems that are exposed to this environ-

Every major corporation andbranch in the military is thetarget of cyberattacks designedto steal its con½dential infor-mation.

Stuxnet is causing a number ofus to rethink the fact that every-thing really is connected: thekeyboard controllers in the key-boards, the systems themselves,the ½rmware that is in them.


ment. At the dod, we have a notion thatmaterials and supplies the dod buys forwar-½ghting need to work in a realistic op-erational environment: your tank has to beable to work properly even when people areshooting at it; it needs to be designed tohandle whatever the threat. In general sys-tem design or application design, we do notyet have the notion that everything is hookedto everything else and that anyone can takea whack at us. Thus we have not gotten ourheads around the concept that we need tobuild systems for a realistic operational en-vironment. Every computer science depart-ment needs to teach realistic operational en-vironment, all the time, or we are never goingto have the dependability we hope to have.

Vinton Cerf

One way to characterize the problem is likethis: the good thing about the Internet isthat everything is connected; the bad thingabout the Internet is that everything is con-nected. Much of the horsepower behind var-ious forms of attack comes from laptops,desktops, and personal computers that havebeen penetrated. In the early stages of theInternet, when laptops and desktops wereless prevalent, attacks were typically againstlarge time-sharing machines, and they werefairly subtle attacks: a packet would be sentthat led to a buffer overflow, causing codeto be executed that should not have been, ata level of privilege that it did not deserve.Eventually, the operating system itself wouldbe penetrated.

What is happening now in the evolution ofthe Net is that we have several billion devicesonline. Many of them are laptops, desktops,pads, and, increasingly, mobile phones. Theyuse the World Wide Web as their principalmeans of interaction and of gathering data.

The Web works by allowing browser soft-ware to go to a particular machine on theNet, download a ½le, and then interpret andrender it in some way. In the past, render-ing involved only text and imagery, but to-day it might include Java script, Java code,Python, or some other high-level language.The suf½ciently naive browser will simplyinterpret the code and do whatever it says–which may be something like “take this lit-tle piece of information, store it down herein the operating system, and change this½le name to something else, and then do afew other little things.” In the process, itcompromises the machine.

Naive browsers and operating systems thatallow browsers to operate at too high a levelof privilege lead to a collection of infectedmachines that become part of the BotNetarmies. We have work to do to make thesemachines a lot less vulnerable to this kindof attack. Once you have a BotNet armyavailable, then you can do a lot of fairly badthings with it, including distributed denial-of-service attacks, which, independent ofany subtlety, simply overwhelm the targetand render it useless. The very basic issuehere is our ability to design highly resilientsystems that can defend themselves by rec-ognizing what is acceptable and what is not.

Tom Leighton

One topic we have not covered yet is cyber-crime. It is a very big business today andgrowing rapidly; it is estimated that indus-tries are losing billions of dollars a year be-cause of it. For all the problems we havewith privacy, many of the protocols on theInternet protect the anonymity of cyber-criminals. Is it possible to make the Inter-net safe, or are we stuck with cybercrime asa large and growing problem? To make itsafe, do we face further loss of privacy onthe Internet?

Richard Hale

We have to begin by making the Internetnot as vulnerable as it is. In the ancient daysof the Internet, everyone was a friend, andas a result, the basic underpinning of the

Internet did not consider that bad guysmight exist in any deep way. This meansthere is now a lot of opportunity for mis-chief amidst the billions of people on theInternet, facilitated by anonymity and alack of accountability. I think we need toincrease accountability.

We also need to improve the notion ofidentity. We can reduce cybercrime bymaking it easier for me as an individual to½gure out whether a person is someonewith whom I want to interact or tradecredit card numbers. Right now, we getprecious few reliable cues in that regard,and we need to ½x that. We may not be ableto trace back to the individual, but our ef-forts may dampen the ease with which badguys can make money from cybercrime.We will not eliminate cybercrime by devel-oping the appropriate social and technicalmechanisms to deal with it, but we will re-duce it to some manageable level. We willdrive some of the opportunity out of thesystem.

Raymond Ozzie

Many of the attacks going on right now are,at their roots, social engineering attacks.For example, people might be confusedabout who has sent them an email mes-sage, but they click through anyway, get to a website, think that it is an authorizedplace to buy something (after all, it lookslike a valid website), and supply their creditcard information. The more successful theInternet is in terms of how far it is embracedin society for online commerce, the broaderthe attack area for criminals.

There is a lot of technology that we canbring to bear that we have not even begunto do yet. One of the beauties of now hav-ing a critical mass social network on theInternet is that we can give you hints whileyou are browsing as to whether the com-munity believes this is a real website: infor-

The very basic issue here is ourability to design highly resilientsystems that can defend them-selves by recognizing what isacceptable and what is not.

We have to begin by makingthe Internet not as vulnerableas it is.



mation on how many people have transactedon this website, and how many of yourfriends or friends of friends have donesomething on the website. We have ½guredout how to give people these sorts of cuesin real life, such as getting a recommenda-tion from a friend. I do not think that wehave even scratched the surface yet in termsof the good things we can do with simplecues in our normal browsing activities onthe Internet.

Vinton Cerf

I still think it is important that we be ableto take actions and do things anonymously.On the other hand, I think it is extremelyvaluable to be able to demand strong au-thenticity of a party, if you feel the need forit. Take, for instance, a scenario in which Iencounter Ray on some website. We do notknow each other, but we begin to exchangeinstant messages. Somewhere along the line,Ray says he would like to borrow $250,000.Pretending that I have $250,000 to loan Ray,my ½rst reaction might be, I think I need toknow a little bit more about you; who areyou besides this bank account to which youwant me to wire money?

I can imagine asking Ray to supply me witha number of bona ½des. He might send mea digitally signed object stating that he hascertain assets and that he is prepared to repayme. At that point, I do not know for surewhether the things that Ray digitally signedare true, so I might turn to Richard, who, let’ssay, runs a service that keeps track of people’scredentials. He can con½rm for me that Rayhas the assets that he claims to have.

My suggestion is that, as tools become avail-able to enforce strong authentication, theydo not necessarily need to be applied acrossthe board under all circumstances; but theyneed to be available so that you can decide

whether you want to continue a transactionif you do not have a stronger sense of whatis going on. I think of that as the analogueof the software that tries to be more resis-tant in the face of a highly corrosive environ-ment. I do not see any other paths availableto us in such a rich ecosystem that incorpo-rates the general public, which is always go-ing to have some element in it that is inter-ested in doing things that are in some waysharmful to other citizens.

Question

As a professional who is involved in chil-dren’s health care issues and as a father,one of the things that concerns me is theissue of what I call social cybercrime, in-volving bullying in the teenage years thatchildren cannot get away from and that hasresulted in numerous suicides. In spite ofthe privacy that is necessary, I wonder ifthere is a better way, at least for the under18 age group, to track individuals who areinvolved in such social cybercrime: for ex-ample, by requiring some traceable log-inmethod.

Vinton Cerf

This sounds like a virtual cuff of some sort,akin to the ones we use for people on housearrest that feature a gps receiver or a radiodevice to con½rm their whereabouts. Let merespond by retargeting the question just abit. One of the things your question suggeststo me is the notion of auditing. This is dif-ferent from painting a big mark on some-one’s forehead to indicate that he has beeninvolved in cybercrime. But auditing couldbe very helpful, and a combination of au-diting and strong authentication can helpus, at least, detect that something has hap-pened that is not acceptable. I would arguethat we might ½nd some bene½t in that par-ticular tactic.

For example, you are in a strange city andyou have a health problem that is acute.When you get to the emergency center, youare probably less worried at that momentabout privacy than you are about making

sure that everyone who is responsible forhelping you recover from your health inci-dent has access to all the information he orshe needs. But it is also fair to say that afterthat crisis is over, you probably do not wantall those people to continue to have accessto all that information. It would be disap-pointing if it were the case that there wereno way to provide ephemeral rights to ac-cess information.

Thinking about mechanical devices or me-chanical access control, what you want isthe ability to authorize access to some in-formation, but not necessarily forever. Inthe health care space, that would be anotherway to close down the potential for abuse.Credit cards have a similar character: theyexpire. One of the good things about theexpiration of a credit card is that if it isbeing abused, it cannot be abused after ithas expired.

Raymond Ozzie

I do not have a solution to the problem thatyou have stated, but the most effective tac-tic that I have seen to address those issues,as opposed to logging and auditing after thefact, is to have proactive members of thecommunity identify and monitor the forumsthat are likely to be dangerous zones for kids.It depends on the direct involvement of acommunity participant, and it has been veryeffective in many of the online forums.

Vendors are in a very dif½cult position be-cause, often, they create general-purposetools that are subsequently repurposed.Furthermore, they cannot monitor everycommunication forum. In many cases, thecommunity needs to become much moreinvolved. Vendors can and should makewarning buttons that signal inappropriate

I think it is extremely valuableto be able to demand strongauthenticity of a party, if youfeel the need for it.

The more successful the Inter-net is in terms of how far it isembraced in society for onlinecommerce, the broader the at-tack area for criminals.


content or that report offensive actions.But I would suggest that the solution is 80percent social and community/20 percenttechnology, as opposed to vice versa.

There will continue to be all sorts of newtypes of communication and sharing tools,and there is not one mechanism to hit themall. For example, Chat Roulette, which wasa fad a short time ago, was built by one per-son and took off like wild½re. The inappro-priate things that happened in that environ-ment could not have been controlled in thesame way an online forum might have been.We have to stay on top of situations like thisone and treat them as the community prob-lem that they are.

Richard Hale

I would add only that technologies do existfor strong authentication if we were to de-cide on that as the norm for dealing with asituation like online bullying. Among otherfactors, our decision to pursue that normmight be influenced by the fact that we knowbullying sometimes happens less when bul-lies know people are watching them andknow who they are.

Question

It might be useful to think about the placeswhere controls occur for cybercrime be-cause, in fact, there is a real variety of prob-lems out there. There is the person on eBayor Craigslist trying to sell you a Coach bagthat turns out to be a piece of junk. In thatcase, it is just a breach of contract in a sense.Then there is everything from the theft ofcredit card information, to people raidingyour bank account, to widespread Internetfraud, to child pornography.

It strikes me that some things may need tobe done at the level of the isp in order tofacilitate government’s ability to obtain asearch warrant or to gain some sort of legit-imate access. Could focusing on the isp

help with the challenge that cybercrimearises from a variety of places: sometimesat the website or the vendor level; some-times through third parties? How do youdecide on the optimal place for controls?

Vinton Cerf

I have a very visceral reaction to the ideaof trying to control behavior and contentissues at the low level of the isp. Downthere, where the packets are flipping backand forth, the packets do not know whatthey are carrying or how they are carried;the router has not a clue. If you care aboutcontent, you should be operating at a placein the architecture where content is visible.

Consider one approach that Google hastried. When Google crawls through theWorld Wide Web to build our index, we usea program that downloads each Web pageand then scans it, trying to ½nd all the hyper-links and words on the page in order to buildthe index. Simultaneously, the program triesto detect whether there might be malwareon the page. It is a program that is doingthis, and so it is only as smart as a programcan be–which is often not terribly smart.But whenever we ½nd the possibility of mal-ware on a page, we make a note of that.

When someone is using our search engine,if he attempts to go to one such site, we putup an interstitial Web page. It is bright redand warns the user that he may not want togo to the page because we think it containsmalware. The user, though, is free to cut andpaste the target into the browser address barand go there anyway; we cannot stop that.

We have worked to set up an organizationcalled StopBadware.org, which is a non-pro½t spun out of the Berkman Center forInternet and Society at Harvard University.If someone complains that his website hasbeen marked inappropriately, the StopBad-ware folks will carry out an evaluation. And

almost all of the time, there is somethingwrong, even though the party did not pur-posefully put anything on the page; it gotthere because security controls were notadequate.

I think you have to be very thoughtful aboutwhere you apply some of these controls. Insome cases, the volume of things that go onis so high that it is impossible to predeter-mine a solution. YouTube is a good example:twenty-four hours of video are uploaded toYouTube per minute, and there is no way tokeep track of all that. Therefore, the idea ofwarning buttons or notices, as well as take-down, is extremely helpful, because if thegeneral population is capable of telling youthere is a problem, then you can respond.

Raymond Ozzie

Google and Microsoft, as two vendors, clear-ly have scale issues that some service provid-ers do not. The best suggestions that I haveseen so far are, again, a combination of so-cial, technical, and community mechanisms.There are certain things that are black andwhite: you get a takedown request becausesomething is legally inappropriate, and wecan take clear action in that case. But thevolume of requests that we get that we re-ally do not know what to do with is increas-ing. There are photographs or materialsthat, in one jurisdiction, in one country, inone nation or culture, are perfectly appro-priate, but that in others are not. We areprojecting our services out to the world, sodealing with takedown requests by variousgroups is a fairly challenging task.

© 2011 by Neal Lane, Tom Leighton, VintonG. Cerf, Richard Hale, and Raymond E. Ozzie,respectively

Technologies do exist forstrong authentication if wewere to decide on that as thenorm for dealing with a situa-tion like online bullying.

A combination of auditingand strong authenticationcan help us detect that some-thing has happened that isnot acceptable.



Around the Country

StanfordJanuary 5, 2011–Stanford UniversityStated Meeting–The Future of Our Research Universities: Challenges and OpportunitiesSpeaker: John Hennessy

San FranciscoJanuary 6, 2011–University of California, San FranciscoSusan Desmond-Hellmann, Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, hosted a reception for Fellows.

John Hennessy (Stanford University) and Paul Brest (Williamand Flora Hewlett Foundation)

Susan Desmond-Hellmann (University of California, SanFrancisco) and Arthur Rock (Arthur Rock & Company)

George Shultz (Stanford University) and Persis Drell (StanfordLinear Accelerator Center)

Randy Schekman (University of California, Berkeley) and RichardScheller (Genentech, Inc.)


Around the Country

Los AngelesJanuary 11, 2011–UCLA Chancellor’s ResidenceChancellor Gene Block and Mrs. Carol Block hosted a reception for Fellows from Southern California at their residence.

Los AngelesJanuary 12, 2011–Residence of Aileen Adams and Geoffrey CowanAileen Adams and Geoffrey Cowan welcomed Chairman Louis Cabot and a group of Fellows to their home.

Fred Kavli (Kavli Foundation), Gene Block (University of California,Los Angeles), Geoffrey Cowan (University of Southern California),and Louis W. Cabot (Cabot-Wellington, llc)

Louis W. Cabot (Cabot-Wellington, llc) and GeoffreyCowan (University of Southern California)

Gene Block and Carol Block

Gordon Davidson (Mabery Road Productions), Kent Kresa (NorthropGrumman Corporation), and Geoffrey Cowan


ChicagoNovember 13, 2010–Northwestern University School of LawStated Meetings–Reproductive Rights and CENSORED!–The First Amendment, Sex, and Obscenityin collaboration with the Chicago Humanities FestivalSpeakers: Geoffrey Stone, Reva Siegel, Gerald Rosenberg, Christine Stansell, Martin Redish, and Amy Adler

Geoffrey Stone (University of Chicago Law School) and RevaSiegel (Yale Law School)

Midwest Regional Committee: Gerald Early (Washington University in St. Louis), Geoffrey Stone (University of Chicago Law School), DianeP. Wood (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit), John Mark Hansen (University of Chicago), Leslie Berlowitz (American Academy),John Katzenellenbogen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (University of Wisconsin-Madison), RobertWald (University of Chicago), François Abboud (University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine), and Robert Rosner (University of Chicago)

Martin Redish (Northwestern University School of Law) and Amy Adler(New York University School of Law)


Around the Country

New YorkDecember 8, 2010–New York University School of LawStated Meeting–The University and the CitySpeakers: John Sexton, Robert M. Berdahl, Jared L. Cohon, and Ruth J. Simmons

BostonSeptember 16, 2010–Boston UniversityStated Meeting–The Great American UniversitySpeaker: Jonathan Cole

Robert M. Berdahl (Association of American Universities), Leslie Berlowitz (American Academy), John Sexton (New York University),Ruth J. Simmons (Brown University), Matthew Santirocco (New York University), Richard Revesz (New York University School of Law),and Jared L. Cohon (Carnegie Mellon University)

Jonathan Cole (Columbia University) and Robert Brown (BostonUniversity)

Henry Rosovsky (Harvard University) and Jonathan Cole


CambridgeSeptember 27, 2010–House of the AcademyStated Meeting–Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of TerrorSpeakers: Charles Fried and Gregory Fried

Gregory Fried (Suffolk University) and Charles Fried (Harvard Law School)

CambridgeNovember 10, 2010–House of the AcademyStated Meeting–The Financial Crisis & Economic PolicySpeakers: Robert M. Solow and Benjamin M. Friedman

December 15, 2010–House of the AcademyStated Meeting–Holiday Concert: Celebrating theMusic of American Academy ComposersPerformers: Yehudi Wyner and Richard Stoltzman

Yehudi Wyner (Brandeis University) and Richard Stoltzman(New England Conservatory of Music)

John Y. Campbell (Harvard University), Benjamin M. Friedman (Harvard University), Robert M.Solow (mit), and Peter Temin (mit)


New Publication

Science and the Educated AmericanAre colleges and universities adequately preparing students tobe engaged citizens in an increasingly technological world? Whilefewer than one-third of American undergraduates major in thenatural sciences, mathematics, or engineering, nearly all studentstake at least one science-related course in college. These coursesvary widely and often do not give students–science and non-sci-ence majors alike–the level of scienti½c literacy they will need tomake informed decisions about scienti½c or technical problems.

The essays in Science and the Educated American: A Core Component ofLiberal Education describe speci½c courses and concrete strategiesfor curricular reform. They also offer spirited defenses of the valueof science to the liberal arts curriculum.

The articles in this volume identify several common themes:

· Twenty-½rst-century citizens must have a sense that scienti½cliteracy is fundamental to full participation in and enjoymentof contemporary life.

· If members of the public do not have a basic level of scienti½cliteracy, even the best science journalism and communicationwill not equip them with the ability to make informed decisionsabout science issues.

· Science courses belong in the liberal arts curriculum for thebene½t of both science and non-science majors.

· The teaching of science to science and non-science majors shouldconvey the limits of science and the dangers of misapplying it.

· Science and the humanities have much more in common thanis generally appreciated.

Science and the Educated American describes ways to help institutionsof higher learning instill a curiosity in students about science andan appreciation for its profound impact on everyday life. The volumeexamines the challenges of and opportunities for teaching sciencein a general education context and considers how to encourage non-science majors to gain a better grasp of science.

This volume is edited by Jerrold Meinwald (Goldwin Smith Pro-fessor of Chemistry Emeritus at Cornell University) and John G.Hildebrand (Regents Professor of Neurobiology at the Universityof Arizona, Tucson).

As Meinwald and Hildebrand note in their introduction, “If properlyplanned and taught, a curriculum enriched by a set of science coursesthat have been designed for all liberal arts students, independent oftheir major interests, would go a long way toward producing the sci-enti½cally literate, well-educated population that is essential forAmerica to retain the leadership position it has enjoyed in the past.”

Contributors to Science and the Educated American include: Jon Clardy(Harvard Medical School), Diane Ebert-May (Michigan State Uni-versity), Martha P. Haynes (Cornell University), Robert M. Hazen(Carnegie Institution for Science and George Mason University),John G. Hildebrand (University of Arizona, Tucson), Sally G.Hoskins (City College of the City University of New York), ChrisImpey (University of Arizona), Darcy B. Kelley (Columbia Uni-versity), Eugene H. Levy (Rice University), David R. Liu (HarvardUniversity), Jerrold Meinwald (Cornell University), Jon D. Miller(University of Michigan), Jennifer L. Momsen (North DakotaState University), Richard A. Muller (University of California,Berkeley), Don M. Randel (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), FrankH.T. Rhodes (Cornell University), Elena Bray Speth (Saint LouisUniversity), James Tre½l (George Mason University), and BrianN. Tse (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).

Science and the Educated American is available on the Academy’s web-site at http://www.amacad.org/publications/scienceSLAC.aspx.

The Academy is grateful to the Simons Foundation for supportingthe publication and dissemination of this important volume andthe Academy’s ongoing work in science, technology, engineering,and mathematics education.


Academy Projects

Another project flips on its head the much-studied topic of the public’s understandingof science. The Academy study considersthe reverse: scientists’ understanding ofthe public. The point, of course, is that thecapacity of scientists to secure funding fortheir research and to provide scienti½c ad-vice that policy-makers will pay attentionto depends on an understanding of the so-cial implications and the likely public re-sponses to their work and to the policiesthat might result, in areas such as healthand medicine, for example. Through a se-

ries of case studies, this project brings to-gether scientists, journalists, policy-makers,and others to explore these issues. Thissummer, the Academy published Do Scien-tists Understand the Public?, a paper by authorChris Mooney that describes some of theproject ½ndings. It generated a great deal ofpress coverage and conversation in the sci-ence blogosphere and elsewhere.

A related, recently completed Academyproject explored the role the media play ininforming the public about the scienti½cand technical components of pressing chal-lenges facing society: climate change, en-ergy, national security, health and medicine,to name a few. This study was led by Don-ald Kennedy, president emeritus of Stan-ford University and former editor-in-chiefof Science, and Geneva Overholser, director

Initiative for Science, Engineering, and Technology

Neal Lane

Neal Lane is Malcolm Gillis University Professor,Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and SeniorFellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Pub-lic Policy at Rice University. He was elected a Fel-low of the American Academy in 1995 and servesas Cochair of the Academy’s Council. He alsoserves as Cochair of the Academy’s Initiative forScience, Engineering, and Technology.

Charles Vest, of the National Academy ofEngineering, and I are the cochairs of theAcademy’s Initiative for Science, Engineer-ing, and Technology, which is an umbrellafor Academy projects in the area of scienceand technology policy. One such project isan examination of how science is taught tonon-science majors at U.S. colleges anduniversities, addressing such questions as,what are the goals of the science curriculumat liberal arts colleges? Are those goals ap-propriate? Are they being met? The studycommittee, chaired by Jerrold Meinwald ofCornell University and John G. Hildebrandof the University of Arizona, has worked incollaboration with provosts, deans, and fac-ulty from institutions around the country.Later this year the Academy will publish avolume, Science and the Educated American: ACore Component of Liberal Education, that willinclude examples of the best practices andrecommendations for higher educationleaders.

of the journalism program at the Universityof Southern California. By convening agroup of scientists, science journalists, andpublic information of½cers, the Academyexamined the sometimes conflicting culturesof journalists, who value timeliness, speed,simplicity, and clarity, and scientists, whograpple with and embrace nuance and evolv-ing states of knowledge. The project resultedin an edited volume, Science and the Media,which was published earlier this year; thisvolume and all other occasional papers pub-lished by the Academy are available on theAcademy’s website (www.amacad.org/publications/occasional.aspx).

Another project under the Initiative focuseson the future of the Internet, and DavidClark will talk more about it a bit later inour program today.

The Academy is well suited to take on thework of these projects (and many others)because of its independence, which gives itthe latitude to explore issues that the Fel-lows believe are important to pursue andthat some other organizations might not beinterested in or willing to take on. The sec-ond distinctive feature of Academy studiesis their interdisciplinary nature. By draw-ing on experts from virtually all academicdisciplines as well as leaders in the profes-sions–public affairs, journalism, the arts,business–the Academy examines issuesfrom a multidisciplinary, cross-institutionalperspective.

In 2008, the Academy organized just such across-disciplinary group to assess Alterna-tive Models for the Federal Funding of Sci-ence. It was chaired by Nobel Laureate andchemist Thomas Cech, who headed up theHoward Hughes Medical Institute beforereturning to research and teaching at theUniversity of Colorado. There are regularcalls from many quarters for more federalfunding of research. The Academy commit-tee began its work with a different question:regardless of the size of the pie, what strate-

By drawing on experts fromvirtually all academic disci-plines as well as leaders in theprofessions–public affairs,journalism, the arts, andbusiness–the Academy exam-ines issues from a multidisci-plinary, cross-institutionalperspective.


Academy Projects

gies can we adopt to maximize the impactof the government’s extensive investmentin research? After twelve months of work,the Academy produced a report, AdvancingResearch In Science and Engineering, which hascome to be known as the arise report.

In answering the question of how to makefederal support for science more effective,the committee chose to focus on just twoprimary issues: support for early-career in-vestigators and support for high-risk, high-reward (sometimes called transformative)research. There isn’t time this morning togive a detailed summary of our ½ndings andrecommendations, but I encourage you tohave a look at the report on the Academy’swebsite. (There are hard copies available,too.) The signi½cant thing about this reportwas the enormous impact it had in Wash-ington. And not all such reports–many ofyou know this from personal experience–can boast having had such impact.

For example, targeted funding for earlier-career investigators and transformationalresearch was contained in the stimulus leg-islation that Congress passed and it was inthe 2009 budget. The same was true for Pres-ident Obama’s ½rst two budget requests. Ineach of the past two years, the directors ofthe Of½ce of Management and Budget andthe Of½ce of Science and Technology Policy,where I once had a desk, sent a memoran-dum to all executive branch departmentsand agencies underscoring the White Housecommitment to these priorities. And duringthe past two years, several agencies–theNational Science Foundation, National In-stitutes of Health, Department of Energy,darpa, and other key science and technol-ogy agencies–have strengthened existingprograms to focus on these areas. (I mightnote that it was fortuitous that Steven Chuwas a member of our committee. It was nota recommendation of our report, but thePresident appointed him Secretary of En-ergy.) The Academy was not the ½rst orga-nization to raise the issues explored inarise, and at least two federal agencies,

the nsf and nih, have been strugglingwith them for a very long time. But it isclear that the arise report helped get theattention of top-level policy-makers.

In carrying out the study that led to thearise report, we recognized that therewere important matters we were not ableto address. Thus, the Academy has orga-nized a second phase of the arise project,which Venkatesh Narayanamurti will de-scribe.

© 2011 by Neal Lane

The Impacts of Federal andIndustry Funding of Science,Engineering, and Medicine on American Universities–arise ii: Overview

Venkatesh Narayanamurti

Venkatesh Narayanamurti is Director of the Sci-ence, Technology, and Public Policy Program atthe Belfer Center for Science and InternationalAffairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is alsothe Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology andPublic Policy and a Professor of Physics at Har-vard University. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in 2007 and serves as amember of the Academy’s Council.

As you just heard from Neal, two years agothe Academy began a study to explore thecurrent models for the federal funding ofscience, under the leadership of Tom Cech.Neal was one of the committee memberswho shaped that study and has been a tirelessadvocate for its recommendations. I thinkhe deserves a lot of credit for its success.

About a year ago, Neal and I, along withLeslie Berlowitz, President of the Academy,Randy Schekman, from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, who was also a mem-ber of the study committee, and Keith Yama-moto, of the University of California, SanFrancisco, began to think about the nextphases of the arise study to address someof the initial report recommendations. Inparticular, we focused on the committee’sconclusions that research universities must


accept a greater responsibility for facultysalaries and that they should shoulder alarger share of the cost for new facilities.(Some of you may have read “OverbuildingResearch Capacity,” an editorial in Science byBruce Alberts. This issue is a very seriousone at medical schools but also at some en-gineering schools.)

As the relationship between engineering,biology, medicine, and the physical sciencesbecomes increasingly important, we alsorecognized the need to bring the medicaland engineering communities together toidentify lessons learned on both sides. Spe-ci½cally, there is a need to share best prac-

tices in order to create a new paradigm toreplace the current funding model. Thismodel is unsustainable, carrying as it doesboth salaries and capital costs on the backsof agency budgets. Therefore, we need toexamine the long-term impact of both re-imbursement policies and funding mecha-nisms and propose ways to improve them.This effort must necessarily be a collabora-tion between universities and government,with some new compact perhaps being de-veloped.

Keith Yamamoto and I are leading this newarise follow-on study, and we have a largenumber of excellent colleagues supportingus in this work, including many members ofthe Academy. Our study group is investigat-ing the sustainability and systemic effectsof current funding policies, beginning withan examination of the relationships between

the university and two integral stakehold-ers: federal funding agencies and industry.It is clear that this new compact betweengovernment and universities needs to bedeveloped; but as we thought about this re-lationship, we realized that there is anothercritical counterpart, namely, the relationshipwith private industry. As a result, we haveorganized the committee into two separatesubcommittees: one focusing on the govern-ment/university relationship, and the otheron the university/industry interaction. Eachsubcommittee will be led by either Keith orme along with one or two cochairs.

We also have an intermediate group look-ing at issues related to conflicts of interest.We know there are conflicts of interest, es-pecially in the medical arena, but we alsoknow that collaborations with industry canbe important in academia. Thus, this groupis working to develop effective and action-able recommendations and to arrive at anagreed upon set of policies for managingconflicts of interest.

Over the next year, the committee will meetwith key stakeholders before developing itsrecommendations for the funding systemand the future scienti½c enterprise. Our hopeis that these meetings will focus and enrichour ½nal report, increasing the likelihoodthat it will have a positive impact on fund-ing policies and mechanisms and, in turn,ensuring that American universities remainrobust intellectual centers.

© 2011 by Venkatesh Narayanamurti

Our study group is investigat-ing the sustainability and sys-temic effects of current fundingpolicies, beginning with an ex-amination of the relationshipbetween the government andthe university and between theuniversity and industry.

arise II


“Many really interesting and importantproblems are not going to be solved by asolid-state physicist or a biochemist; theyrequire input from many ½elds. Universi-ties are in the very privileged position ofhaving people who are experts in every½eld you can think of.”

–Robert Birgeneau

American industries rely heavily on col-laboration with the academic science andengineering communities and have an im-portant stake in the vitality of researchuniversities and their role in creating a well-trained workforce. The arise ii studygroup is exploring the impact of currentscience funding policies, beginning with anexamination of the relationships betweenthe university and two critical stakehold-ers: federal funding agencies and industry.

On January 6–7, 2011, the arise ii com-mittee held a meeting at the University ofCalifornia, San Francisco. The workshopfocused on the university-industry partner-ship and included presentations from severalindustry representatives who have createdor strengthened industry partnerships withacademia. The panelists included StevenFreilich, Director of Materials Science andEngineering, Central Research and Devel-opment, at DuPont; Richard Scheller, Exec-utive Vice President of Research and EarlyDevelopment at Genentech; Larry Sumney,President and Chief Executive Of½cer atthe Semiconductor Research Corporation;and Ellen Williams, Chief Scientist at bp.

The panelists discussed how industry canfoster research collaborations with the uni-versity. Although each speaker representeda different industry sector–chemical, bio-medical, engineering, and energy–theiroverall message was essentially the same:industry-university collaboration is vitalfor innovation. If the partnership betweenuniversities and industry is well managed,it can lead to successful research outcomesand create a pipeline of the next generationof researchers.

During the workshop, Robert Birgeneau,Chancellor of the University of California,Berkeley, spoke about technology innova-tion centers at universities, speci½cally theEnergy Biosciences Institute–a unique col-laboration between the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley; the Lawrence Berkeley

ARISE II Workshop: The University-IndustryPartnership

Academy Projects

“I think the most important thing that theSemiconductor Research Corporation doesis to bring industry into the university andto work with students.”

–Larry Sumney

National Laboratory; University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign; and bp. Birgeneaustressed the importance of the university,with its breadth of researchers, in provid-ing the basic research that forms the foun-dation of future technology. He emphasizedthat by working together, universities andindustry have the potential to address a se-ries of challenges facing our society.

The meeting also included a presentationby Aled Edwards, Director and Chief Exec-utive Of½cer of Structural Genomics Con-sortium and Banbury Professor of MedicalResearch at the University of Toronto. Ed-wards offered a different perspective on theuniversity-industry partnership. The Struc-tural Genomics Consortium (sgc) is apublic-private partnership dedicated topromoting the development of new medi-cines by carrying out basic science researchrelevant to drug discovery. The sgc cur-rently has 241 collaborations with compa-nies and universities from around the world,and all of the work produced by the sgc ispublished in the public domain; there areno intellectual property or con½dentialityagreements. Edwards argues that this novelpublic-private relationship allows research-ers to address interesting questions thatare not normally considered high prioritiesfor most sources of research support.

The arise ii committee will next meet inlate March to review the content, structure,and preliminary recommendations of thestudy.


particular, the social-science research com-munity. The gap between the energy-policycommunity and the social-science researchcommunity, with a few notable exceptions,is both wide and deep. The purpose of ourproject is to begin to span that chasm.

Six broad issues constitute the intellectualframework of the project; they are designedto be bridging issues, issues that, on theone hand, are important for energy policybut, on the other, depend substantially onsocial-science content for their solution.The kinds of issues we expect to addressinclude questions such as:

·What are the barriers to achieving a work-able social consensus on climate and en-ergy policies, and how can these barriersbe overcome? Any of you who followedthe climate argument for the last few yearsknows that is something of a challenge.

·How will climate policy and transforma-tion in the energy system affect the be-havior of individuals and communities?We know there is public resistance togreen technologies such as windmills.We know that people do not behave inthe way that neoclassical economics saysthey ought to. A whole series of issues related to behavior needs to be addressed.

·How do the rules we live by have tochange? Do we need new rules for newtechnologies, and do some of the oldrules we live by become out of date asnew technologies are introduced?

·What governmental framework will bestsustain climate and energy policy overthe long run? What happens to the stan-dard federal structure of the United Stateswhen state and local governments havemore to do with the answer, as they dowith regard to climate, than they have inthe past? And how do you build a durableyet adaptable framework that can last fordecades but can still take account of newinformation as it is developed?

·How will America’s response to climatechange affect our relationship to othercountries? The collapse of negotiationsat the Copenhagen Summit in December2009 makes clear that we need a new in-ternational strategy.

·What will be the effect of changing theenergy system on other physical systems,including ecosystems, land use, and watersupply? In other words, how can thischange be achieved in the context of sus-tainable development?

While these are fairly broad issues and weare not going to try to solve them, our ob-jectives in this project are twofold: one, tohelp policy-makers in the area of energyunderstand how social science can helpsolve their problems; and two, to build asocial-science research agenda that is di-rected toward helping solve energy prob-lems. We expect three main products: aconference next spring that will be a low-hanging-fruit sort of affair, to take the op-portunities for both energy policy and asocial-science research agenda and get themon the table as quickly as possible; a con-ference report a year later, in 2012, to gointo more depth on the same issues; and,½nally, two issues of Dædalus in 2012 to re-port on many of these same questions. It isa reasonably ambitious agenda, I think, butthere is room for optimism. We have dis-covered that the government is interestedin these issues, including the energy-policycommunity. The social sciences that wehave reached out to seem to be interestedas well and are pleased to hear about thestudy.

Our objectives in this projectare twofold: to help policy-makers in the area of energyunderstand how social sciencecan help solve their problems;and to build a social-scienceresearch agenda that is directedtoward helping solve energyproblems.

The Alternative Energy Future–Legal, Social, andEconomic Considerations:Overview

Robert W. FriRobert W. Fri is a Visiting Scholar and SeniorFellow Emeritus at Resources for the Future. Hewas elected a Fellow of the American Academyin 2010.

Those of you who follow the debate aboutalternative energy know that many studiesof energy and climate change, including tworecent ones by the National Academies–America’s Energy Future and America’s ClimateChoices–have gone over that area in muchdetail. While they disagree on a few items,in general these studies conclude that lim-iting future greenhouse gas emissions andadapting to the inescapable change in theclimate to which we are already committedwill require a transformational change inour energy system. Thanks to billions ofdollars spent by public and private sourcesover the last thirty years, policy-makershave a very good idea of what that techno-logical and economic transition is going tolook like, and it’s a huge task.

But transformational change in the deeplyembedded technological and economic in-frastructure that is the current energy systemwill require a societal transformation thatis equally profound, both to overcome theinevitable barriers to changing the energysystem and to adapt to a new energy systemas it emerges. Here, policy-makers are lesswell served by the research community, in


Initiative for Humanities and Culture: Data Project

Francis C. Oakley

Francis C. Oakley is President Emeritus andEdward Dorr Grif½n Professor of the Historyof Ideas at Williams College. He was elected aFellow of the American Academy in 1998.

The history of the Academy has been anoble one in its support of the humanities.Those of us who have been involved withthe National Humanities Center, for exam-ple, remember the central role the Academyplayed in creating that organization, as itdid for many other agencies that supportthe humanities in America. It is my missionthis morning to assure you that this greateffort on behalf of humanistic studies con-tinues in full force.

In 1998, responding to the quintessentiallyhumanistic imperative to know thyself, theAcademy launched its far-reaching, three-pronged Initiative for Humanities and Cul-ture. First, it established the Visiting ScholarsProgram that Pat Spacks will speak about.Second, it committed itself to publishing aseries of pertinent volumes and occasionalpapers. But it is my task to dwell at some-what greater, if not unconscionable, lengthon the third prong of this humanities initia-tive. It involves an attempt to provide for thehumanities a structure of statistical data: aset of indicators paralleling the thirty-year-old Science and Engineering Indicators publishedbiannually by the National Science Founda-tion that has served our colleagues in the

natural and social sciences so very well, in-forming decision-making by academics,educators at large, and national policy-makers alike.

Launched in January 2009, after a multi-year planning process, the online HumanitiesIndicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org)gives scholars, policy-makers, and the gen-eral public the ½rst comprehensive statisti-cal picture of the state of the humanitiesnationwide. It includes seventy-four indi-cators, two hundred tables and charts, andinterpretative essays covering ½ve data areas:primary and secondary education; under-graduate and graduate education; fundingand research; the humanities workforce;and the role of the humanities in American

life. The site is constantly updated with newdata, and since March 2010, the Academyhas added new data stemming from theHumanities Departmental Survey, whichprovides a unique snapshot of Americanuniversity and college humanities depart-ments at the end of the ½rst decade of thetwenty-½rst century. Since its unveiling in2009, the Humanities Indicators website hasrecorded more than 1.2 million hits origi-nating from one hundred countries.

That fact notwithstanding, I have a sinkingfeeling, as I describe this great and challeng-

The third prong of the Acad-emy’s humanities initiativeinvolves an attempt to providefor the humanities a structureof statistical data: the onlineHumanities Indicators givesscholars, policy-makers, andthe general public the ½rstcomprehensive statistical picture of the state of the humanities nationwide.

Academy Projects

The Academy is a great platform for thiskind of study. Of course, the reputationand convening power of the Academy isterri½c, but two things have really impressedme. One is the breadth of membership,which has allowed us to reach out to allkinds of disciplines and bring them into aroom together–a hard task in most set-tings. But most important is the intellec-tual freedom that we have been offered topursue this strange agenda and to see justwhere it takes us.

© 2011 by Robert W. Fri


ing enterprise, that it may come across asdull old stuff, the enervating rattle of somevery dry old bones. That may well be so. Iwould wager, however, that no one whohas had the experience of trying to assessand write about the state of humanisticstudies nationwide–no one who, in thisexperience, has felt caught in a cross½re ofsweepingly negative attacks and bereft ofany easy access to the sort of factual dataneeded if one is to make what is sometimesdisparaged nowadays as a reality-based as-sessment–is unlikely to feel anything butgratitude for the assistance that the Human-ities Indicators has ½nally made so readilyavailable. Glancing back in this connectionto the late lamented culture wars of the1980s and 1990s, one should not too easilyforget that the discussion was enveloped ina fog of confusion and misinformation thatseemed to shroud humanistic endeavors,whether in relation to what was purportedto be going on in higher education, in ourprimary and secondary schools, or in Amer-ican society at large. Data deprivation wasthe order of the day.

Data concerning issues as fundamental asthe number of students enrolled nation-wide in courses devoted to the humanitieswere either entirely lacking, or were incon-sistently assembled, hard to access, poorlydisseminated, unwittingly ignored, androutinely underutilized. As a result, gener-alizations con½dently advanced about thehumanities–those supportive in nature noless than the negative ones–were all toooften characterized by a woolly species ofdisheveled anecdotalism punctuated un-helpfully from time to time by momentsof truly cranky but attention-grabbing dys-pepsia. That, of course, was counterpro-ductive then, and it would be counterpro-ductive today. It simply won’t do, especiallynow that we have at our disposal in the Hu-manities Indicators a user-friendly mode ofaccess to many of the most pertinent facts.For what these data reveal (thinking nation-ally now) is a complex and highly nuancedpicture that, while it certainly points out thedanger of any business-as-usual attitude,

should equally inhibit any tendency towardthe all-too-common Apocalypse Now genreof educational commentary.

Time permits me to put just one shred offlesh on these somewhat ungrateful bones.Somehow we may not be surprised to ½ndout that a higher percentage of Americansdemonstrate poorer literary skills than docitizens of any other Western industrializednation, or that America’s book-reading ratesfall below those of Britain and Sweden. Butit may surprise us to ½nd out that, at thesame time, the United States has one of thehighest percentages of highly literate adults,or that the nation’s book-reading rates arewell above those of many other Europeannations, not excluding Italy, France, andGermany.

The generalizations we choose to makeabout the state of the humanities nation-wide, then, really should be nuanced enoughto reflect properly this sort of complexityin the picture that the data all too oftenreveal. So, all praise to the Academy fortaking the ambitious initiative that nowenables us to respond to that astringentimperative.

© 2011 by Francis C. Oakley

Visiting Scholars Program

Patricia Meyer Spacks

Patricia Meyer Spacks is the Edgar F. ShannonProfessor of English Emerita at the University ofVirginia. She was elected a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy in 1994 and served as the Academy’sPresident from 2001 to 2006. She is Chair of theAcademy’s Visiting Scholars Program.

Unlike the other Academy activities thatyou have been hearing about, the VisitingScholars Program focuses speci½cally andpurposefully on groups of non-Fellows,groups that may well supply Fellows of thefuture. Conceived in 2000, the program gotunder way in 2002, thanks to the efforts ofLeslie Berlowitz, who developed supportfrom a consortium of colleges and universi-ties now known as the University Af½liates.The ½rst year produced 110 applications;for this year’s class, there were 300.

Each class has been very small: six to eightpost-docs and assistant professors who showpromise of becoming leaders in their ½elds,invited to spend a year at the Academy towork on book projects. They are suppliedwith of½ces and computers and with oppor-

The Visiting Scholars Programis unusual, possibly unique, insupporting only early-careerscholars and in providing sys-tematic help for the tasks theyhave undertaken.


tunities to interact with Academy Fellows.The scholars come from a range of disci-plines in the social sciences and humanities:history (including the history of scienceand of education), art history, literature,anthropology, sociology, and law, amongothers. After their year at the Academy, theytend to do very well. Out of ½fty-nine schol-ars before this year, ½fty-six have securedfull-time positions at universities and re-search institutions, which is a remarkablerecord in these times. New jobs secured bylast year’s Visiting Scholars included ap-pointments at Johns Hopkins, Barnard, andRutgers. Of the ½fty-nine former scholars,nine are now associate professors, and twohave received tenure. Members of the grouphave published more than seventy books.

But such data do not tell the whole story.They suggest that the program has beensuccessful, but they do not indicate how. I want to use my few minutes to talk aboutwhat actually goes on while the scholarswork at the Academy. Like all successfulresidential fellowship programs, the onehere fosters close connections among itsparticipants. The Visiting Scholars Program,however, differs from many others by beingso small. The scholars typically bond early,forming an interdisciplinary communitydedicated to helping one another ful½ll theirimmediate aspirations. (This year they havealso formed a winning trivia team.) Theyread one another’s work, provide counsel onjob letters and job talks, and discuss theirown and each other’s projects–all of thisarising organically and spontaneously be-tween the scholars. The of½cial arrange-ments for the year, however, further thesame ends. During the fall, every otherweek brings an informal speaker: an editorfrom a university press, a literary agent, ex-perts on digital work in the humanities andsocial sciences, and local scholars willing totalk about their own work and about theprocesses of producing it. Lively discussioninevitably follows the presentations.

The scholars themselves plan the alternateweeks in conjunction with me as chair of the

program. For the last two years, they haveagreed to focus mainly on problems thatarise in the effort to write what are usually½rst books. We discuss the content of whatthey are doing but also the dif½culties thatarise in doing it. One possibility that we havethought of for this year is a session on foot-notes. How does one cut down on themwhile still remaining true to the imperativeof situating individual work in the contextof ongoing discussions? What sort of infor-mation belongs in notes? How does oneavoid alienating an audience by includingtoo many notes? Last year, we read togethera book about how to turn a dissertation intosomething publishable and spent a sessiontalking about it. One suggestion for this yearis that we join in reading some theoreticalworks about various ½elds in the humanitiesand the connections among them. Whateverthe speci½c activities, they turn out to focuson how to write a book.

The Visiting Scholars Program is unusual,possibly unique, in supporting only early-career scholars and in providing systematichelp for the tasks they have undertaken.That systematic help, in conjunction withthe spontaneous support that members ofthe group offer one another, enables themto work better and to have a richer sense ofwhat their work entails. It is always fascinat-ing to see how their elevator speeches–theone-minute summaries of what they aredoing–change in the course of the yearthey spend here. Those summaries typicallybecome much richer, much more nuanced,and usually much more complicated. Goodbooks have issued from the program already,and I expect more to follow.

This imaginative expansion of the Academy’straditional concerns draws on Fellows bothto select the scholars and to participate indiscussions with them. I hope you will let usknow if you are interested in ½lling eitherof these roles.

© 2011 by Patricia Meyer Spacks

The Global Nuclear Future

Scott D. Sagan

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Codirector ofthe Center for International Security and Coop-eration at Stanford University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy in 2008.

The Academy’s Initiative on The GlobalNuclear Future has brought Academy mem-bers from many academic disciplines andprofessions together with signi½cant Wash-ington and international policy-makers toaddress a single but very complicated ques-tion: will the expected spread of nuclearpower around the world also create the fu-ture spread of nuclear weapons? The projecthas entailed both research and policy-impactactivities. The research has resulted in twospecial issues of Dædalus (Fall 2009 and Win-ter 2010) and a set of occasional papers,Shared Responsibilities for Nuclear Disarmament:A Global Debate and Multinational Approachesto the Nuclear Fuel Cycle. The policy-impactactivities have involved workshops, meet-ings, and brie½ngs, including with NationalSecurity Council staff, with House and Sen-ate staff on Capitol Hill, with of½cials fromthe national laboratories, and with interna-tional scholars, government of½cials, andnuclear industry representatives in the Mid-dle East and Southeast Asia.

Figure 1 shows which states have nuclearpower today (listed in black) and which areaspiring nuclear power states. At one of theproject meetings, we discussed the obvious

Academy Projects


geographic spread of countries that haveasked the International Atomic Energy Agen-cy (iaea) for assistance; we noted that itwould be interesting to look at their eco-nomic standing as well, to get a sense of howlikely it is that they will achieve their objec-tives. Further, one participant pointed outthat we should also study the political con-ditions within each state, focusing on thecharacteristics that will influence how safe-ly and securely they will be able to operatenuclear facilities. Looking at the countrieslisted in Figure 1 in terms of their ability tocontrol corruption, we see that existing nu-clear power states have higher abilities to

control corruption than do aspiring nuclearstates (see Figure 2). According to the WorldBank, political stability is de½ned by thelikelihood of insurrections or other seriousviolent uprisings within the state. We alsohave measures of government effectiveness,regulatory quality, and the state’s scores re-garding its status as a democracy or autoc-racy. On all these issues, aspiring states lookquite different from existing nuclear powerstates, giving us a sense of the challenge weface in decreasing the likelihood that thespread of nuclear power will have securityproblems attached to it.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The Academy’s Initiative onThe Global Nuclear Future hasbrought Academy membersfrom many academic disciplinesand professions together withsigni½cant Washington andinternational policy-makersto address a complicated ques-tion: will the expected spreadof nuclear power around theworld also create the futurespread of nuclear weapons?



Academy Projects

The democracy versus autocracy score isinteresting in another way, as Figure 3 illus-trates. Many countries have tried to getnuclear weapons or have started nuclearweapons programs and then ended themfor a variety of reasons. Scholars in the pastlooking at this fact noted that both democ-racies and non-democracies have nuclearweapons. Likewise, both democracies andnon-democracies have started nuclear weap-ons programs and ended them. According tothose scholars, regime type–that is, whethera country is democratic or not–is not allthat important. The data shown in Figure 3suggest that this dismissal of the idea thatdemocracies behave differently than non-democracies regarding nuclear weapons iswrong. In Figure 3, each gray dot indicateswhen a country joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt), thereby com-mitting itself not to seek or acquire nuclearweapons. All democracies, marked in gray,that had nuclear weapons programs butended them and then joined the npt havenot cheated on their commitment not toseek or acquire weapons or to restart theirprograms. The countries that signed thenpt but subsequently cheated by having a

what kinds of mechanisms could, in a polit-ical sense, improve the institution and theoverall nonproliferation regime.

But the security of our global nuclear fu-ture also depends on what technology isdeveloped. What will the next generationof nuclear power plants look like? Whatwill improved safeguards and safety mecha-nisms look like from a technological per-spective, and how will we ensure that thebest technologies are exported and some ofthe ones that are more dangerous are notexported? What is the appropriate mix ofnew national laws and changing interna-tional regulations that will be required?We need strong networks of collaborationbetween social scientists, physical scien-tists, engineers, and lawyers to addressthese critical issues.

© 2011 by Scott D. SaganFigure 3

secret nuclear weapons program were allnon-democratic. Although we do not havea full understanding of the influences ofdemocratic polity on keeping internationalagreements, this ½nding is a valuable onethat we want to explore in more detail mov-ing forward.

Will the spread of nuclear power lead tothe spread of nuclear weapons? We have aclear, simple answer to that complex ques-tion: it depends. It depends in part on whichstates with what types of governments de-velop nuclear power. It also depends onthe global political institutions that provideexport rules, inspections of new facilities,and safety and security guidelines. Will newinstitutions for the management of nuclearpower be created and sustained, broken orstrengthened over time? We need socialscientists and physical thinking about theseissues. We need meetings such as the onethe Academy sponsored on the occasion ofthe npt Review Conference in May 2010,gathering three past presidents of the npt

Review Conference, the current presidentof the Conference, and our project leadersto talk about how to improve the npt and



Steven E. Miller

Steven E. Miller is Director of the InternationalSecurity Program at the Belfer Center for Scienceand International Affairs at the Harvard KennedySchool. He was elected a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy in 2006.

We live in a world that has a certain set ofnuclear attributes, and that world is chang-ing. We are heading into a different world,leading us to ask the broad question, howwill we be able to live safely and fruitfully inthat new world–or, if you are more cynical,will we be able to live safely in that world?

Today, there are 438 nuclear power reactorsdistributed across roughly 30 countries.About half that nuclear capability is in threecountries: the United States, France, andJapan. The 30 of the existing nuclear powerstates tend to fall within the list of nato

countries, plus Russia, Japan, and China.In the last several years, 60 additionalcountries have approached the Interna-tional Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) andexpressed an interest in pursuing nuclearpower. If all those dreams came true, wewould triple the number of nuclear powerstates. This possible outcome, however, is avery long timeline phenomenon, lookingforward three or four decades from now.But that will be a very different world.

If the most extravagant visions presentlyforecast were to come true, in about 30 yearswe would be living in a world with 500 or600 additional nuclear reactors spread

across dozens of additional countries, manyof which currently have no nuclear technol-ogy and very little capacity for handling nu-clear technology. We are seeing a changingpattern in the demand for nuclear power fora variety of reasons having to do with climatechange, energy security, and changing eco-nomics of energy, among others.

We try to distinguish between spread–theincrease in the number of countries withnuclear technology–and expansion–therapid growth of nuclear power in countriesthat already have it. Expansion can raisesome problems of its own, in particular,when the result is a very small number ofvery large programs. For example, of the60 or so reactors under construction today,half are accounted for by two countries,China and South Korea. Spread leads to amuch larger number of small programs,greatly increasing the geographic scope ofthe nuclear issue.

Moreover, in the past the nuclear technol-ogy suppliers consisted of a tiny numberof advanced industrial states–the UnitedStates, France, Japan–and those supplierswere selling mostly to countries such asFinland or Belgium. The most recent deal,consummated in December 2009, involvedthe Korean Electronic Power Company,kepco, in a twenty-year $40 billion dealwith the United Arab Emirates. The nextcontroversial deal coming down the pikeinvolves China’s selling two reactors to

Pakistan. What these deals represent arethe signi½cant changes on both the demandside of nuclear power and the supply sidethat may tax our ability to manage thisprocess.

The Academy project asks, particularly onthe nonproliferation front, what do we needto do now in order to ensure that the worldwe end up living in harvests the bene½ts ofnuclear power while minimizing the poten-tial adverse consequences? Will existingrules and institutions be suf½cient? Thoseof you who follow these questions know thatthe iaea is widely criticized as being inad-equate to its purposes today. How adequateis it going to be in 30 years, in a world wherenuclear technology is much more widelydistributed? Are the legal frameworks thatcurrently exist durable and effective enoughto cope with the additional pressures of amuch wider distribution of nuclear tech-nology? Overall, there is this broad ques-tion: will the npt system–a collection oftreaties, laws, norms, a variety of ancillaryinstitutions, all clustered together in whatwe call the global nuclear order–be ade-quate to the task of protecting us from thedangers of the world into which we seemto be heading?

The Academy project recognizes that anyeffort to strengthen or improve the npt

regime will require the assent, buy-in, andfull participation of nuclear newcomers.Currently, there is among the newcomersa substantial coalition of the disaffected;many of them do not share the same wor-ries as the Western nonproliferation com-munity and do not buy into our remedies.Thus, one prominent strand of our projectis to reach out to the nuclear communitiesin places like the Middle East and South-east Asia, where the appetite for nuclearpower is nearly ubiquitous. We hope, ½rst,to build ties with them, understand theirpoints of view, and respect and give properacknowledgment to their interests; and,second, to develop a frame of convergentinterests demonstrating a shared global in-terest in creating a safe and secure nuclear

This Academy project asks,particularly on the nonprolif-eration front, what do we needto do now in order to ensurethat the world we end up living in harvests the bene½tsof nuclear power while mini-mizing the potential adverseconsequences?


order, one that is better able to manage thesurge in nuclear technology that we foresee.

To this end, the Academy held a meeting inAbu Dhabi in December 2009 that broughttogether those Middle Eastern players in-terested in nuclear power (which is justabout all of them). We have a meeting inNovember 2010 in Singapore, as SoutheastAsia is the other region where the nuclearappetite is nearly universal. Our meetingsand project activities build from what nowexists–a Western nonproliferation com-munity–to what we think needs to exist: a global nonproliferation community.

© 2011 by Steven E. Miller


Robert Rosner

Robert Rosner is the William E. Wrather Distin-guished Service Professor in Physics and Astron-omy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.He was elected a Fellow of the American Academyin 2001.

The rational basis for any revival of nu-clear energy is to meet concerns about op-erational safety, security, and, in the case ofprograms that have an international flavor(as the nuclear issue obviously does), nu-clear proliferation. Are we doing all that wecan in these areas given the ongoing nuclearrenaissance that has become evident inter-nationally, even if less so here in the UnitedStates?

In the United States, operational safety atnuclear plants has been excellent. But whatabout the nations that do not have the hu-man or technical infrastructure to supportdomestic nuclear power but are buying nu-clear power plants nonetheless? What arethe rules by which we can be sure that theseplants will be operated safely? We knowthat serious operational problems in onecountry–think of the Ukraine–can affectpublic relations elsewhere and lead to re-strictions on nuclear power, even in loca-tions where safe operations have tradition-ally not been an issue.

We have discussed this challenge with util-ity operators in the United States as well asFrance and Japan, and it turns out to be ex-

tremely dif½cult to arrange for a meaning-ful conduct of operations–that is, one thathas consequences of some signi½cance forviolations. The International Atomic EnergyAgency (iaea) does have some (arguably,relatively ineffective) enforcement powersin the realm of nuclear security, but it reallyhas none in the realm of nuclear safety. Take,for instance, the so-called 123 Agreements.The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 provided aframework for cooperation in the nuclearenergy realm between the United States andany other country, laid out in Section 123 of

the act and called “Cooperation with OtherNations.” For this reason, such cooperativeagreements are commonly referred to as 123Agreements. This framework represents atrade: cooperation in providing nuclear ex-pertise in return for agreement, for example,not to enrich uranium fuel, not to reprocessspent nuclear fuel, and, ½nally, to returnspent fuel to the provider–that is, not toaccumulate spent fuel in the host country.

On principle, these agreements offer thepossibility of enforcing standards in nuclearsecurity and nuclear safety; in practice, ithas not been simple to conclude such agree-ments. The United States did conclude suchan agreement with Abu Dhabi, for example,but is struggling in its negotiations on anagreement with Jordan. A key element toeither success or failure in these negotiationsseems to be the ambitions a particular nationhas for engaging in the nuclear fuel cycle.For example, nations that have exploitable

The rational basis for any revival of nuclear energy is to meet concerns about opera-tional safety, security, and, inthe case of programs that havean international flavor, nuclearproliferation. Are we doing allthat we can in these areas?

Academy Projects


uranium resources tend to be loath to signaway the right to make large pro½ts on fuelenrichment and possible fuel fabrication–which, by the way, they are allowed by theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt).

Where does this leave us? In the 1950s and1960s, the United States was in a unique po-sition as the acknowledged technical leaderin things nuclear. Many nations still regard-ed America as a relatively benevolent super-power. Both of these facts, unfortunately,have dramatically changed, and especiallyin the latter area. There is substantial re-sentment about being lectured by America,a concern raised repeatedly at the Academymeeting in Abu Dhabi. There is distrustbased on substantive departures by theUnited States from its very own standardsas expressed in the npt; think of the treatyAmerica signed with India. And we seem tobe losing our technological edge in nuclearpower. Note that, for example, the majorvendors of nuclear power plants today arefrom France, Japan, and South Korea, withRussia not far behind. In the wings are Chinaand India, both of which have very seriousambitions in this area.

What about the United States? Westing-house is now owned by the Japanese. ge isno longer able to build plants on its ownand is also partnering with the Japanese.We have some start-ups in the United Statesthat are exploring drastically new designs,but these will probably not see commercialuse for at least a decade or more, probablymore like twenty years. Our large construc-tion ½rms, such as Bechtel, do have stronginvolvement in building nuclear plantsabroad, but it tends to be on the civil con-struction end of things.

The nuclear renaissance one sees abroadis certainly not happening in the UnitedStates, so as a result, we are in danger ofresting much of our nuclear design exper-tise on the work done at the weapons labsand within the naval reactor program, thatis, within programs that are largely classi½edand not open to public scrutiny. This is not

a promising development as we look forwardto the future and think about America’s rolein dealing with the spread of nuclear mate-rials and nuclear weapons worldwide in atransparent fashion. Whether or not you arein favor of nuclear power as a componentof a new carbon energy future, you do needto think carefully about the unintended con-sequences for the United States to step outof nuclear power in a world where nuclearpower does not seem to be disappearing.

© 2011 by Robert Rosner

International Agreements to Limit Cyberattacks

John D. Steinbruner

John D. Steinbruner is Professor of Public Policyat the School of Public Policy and Director of theCenter for International and Security Studies atthe University of Maryland. He was elected aFellow of the American Academy in 1992.

The Academy’s project on InternationalAgreements to Limit Cyberattacks is in veryearly stages of conception. I will be presump-tuous enough to imagine what the projectmight ultimately conclude, but I am imag-ining. The actual results are yet to come.

Let me begin with a memorandum that waswritten in 1944 by Vannevar Bush and JamesConant to Henry Stimson, who was thenSecretary of War. They explicitly recognizedthe massive threat potentially posed by bio-technology. They described the science onwhich that was based. They doubted itwould be a feature of the then-ongoingwar, but they warned that in the aftermath

There are very good reasons to worry about a massivelydestructive use of cybertech-nology. The practical questionis: can we count on naturalrestraint or will we need orga-nized protection?


Protecting the Internet as aPublic Commons

David D. Clark

David D. Clark is a Senior Research Scientist atthe MIT Computer Science and Arti½cial Intelli-gence Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in 2002.

For a number of years, the Academy hasbeen interested in the security of cyberspace.This interest is a natural outgrowth of theAcademy’s broader interest in security, butthe issues of cybersecurity, or, more speci½-cally, the security of the Internet, are differ-ent from other sorts of security. Moreover,the area of cybersecurity is poorly under-stood, even though it is currently receivinga lot of attention in the press and in Wash-ington.

There are a number of ways to view the is-sues of cybersecurity. Right now, Washing-ton is caught up in the framing and rhetoricof national security, which leads to vocabu-lary such as cyberattack, cyberdefense, cyber-war (whatever that might be), the “standingup” of a “cybercommand,” and philosophiesof cyberdeterrence. The interest in deter-rence arises by analogy to nuclear deterrence,of course, but the two domains have almostnothing in common.

A second view of cybersecurity is that ofeconomic activity and globalization. Thisview captures issues such as internationalcrime and industrial espionage. The latteris a pressing problem right now, as we are

it would be a major international problem.They recommended organized transparencyunder the United Nations as the best avail-able means of fending off the possibility ofbelligerent development of this technology.In that same memorandum, they implicitlyalluded to a similar emerging problem withregard to nuclear weapons.

Their recommendation was not enacted foreither of these technologies at that time.Nuclear weapons have been massively de-ployed in deterrent confrontation and stillare. Biological weapons have been massivelyexplored but not actively deployed. (It is asigni½cant difference.) Neither has beenused in warfare since World War II, leadingto the evident question, does Murphy’s lawapply here? Is the deterrent effect inde½nite-ly reliable in both of these technologies or isit susceptible to catastrophic breakdown?Conant and Bush, in 1944, were very worriedabout catastrophic breakdown. We have notyet experienced it, but that does not guar-antee that we are inde½nitely protected.

What does this have to do with cybersecu-rity? We are in a comparable situation toConant’s in 1944. We can see, perhaps withslightly less clarity than he had, very goodreasons to worry about a massively destruc-tive use of cybertechnology. The practicalquestion here is whether we can count onnatural restraint, which so far has protectedus in these other areas, or whether we needorganized protection? Will the spontaneousevolution of defensive technology in thisarea come to dominate offense? Can the in-herent deterrent effect of potential destruc-tion compensate for defensive advantage,or is there a set of rules that will establish adefensive advantage?

Over the past year, I have chaired a panelfor the National Academy of Sciences ondeterring cyberattacks. From listening tomany people explore these questions, I wouldsay that few argue that defensive advantagecan be established by technical means. Thecommon statement is that there is no tech-nical solution to this problem. Moreover,

few are willing to argue that deterrent tech-niques can be reliably effective, and thereis an evident danger of perverse dynamicsdriven by reciprocal fear. It is consideredprudent under such circumstances to ex-plore formal agreements establishing pro-tective rules. It is widely assumed that anyagreement would have to be global in scope,yet also widely accepted that it could notbe comprehensive. The process of cyberex-ploitation on the Internet is too well in-grained to imagine its eradication anytimesoon.

The presumption is that any effective pro-tection would have to focus on acts of de-struction. One can imagine an agreementthat would formally prohibit destructiveattacks on critical infrastructure targets:power grids, navigation services, ½nancialclearing market mechanisms, emergencyresponse systems, and health care delivery –all of which, I might add, are extremelyvulnerable to deliberate destruction. Thenotion is that, along with formal prohibi-tion, there would be active internationalmonitoring of attempted violation and col-laborative development of protective pro-tocols. To ensure protection at a higherstandard than we currently have, thesefunctions would have to be separated fromthe normal Internet, admittedly a large anddif½cult enterprise. The point would be toengage major states in discussion of thispossibility.

At the moment, although there is someloose discussion going on, the idea of pur-suing actual formal prohibition has notbeen seriously explored. The primary ini-tiative now is vested in U.S. Cyber Com-mand, which is not inclined to engage ininternational discussions. The envisagedproject will attempt to sensitize society tothe scope of the cybersecurity problem andencourage more constructive organizationof protection.

© 2011 by John D. Steinbruner

Academy Projects


seeing state-sponsored industrial espionagedirected at the United States, which (by ournorms) is against the rules of fair play. Butin the global game, there are few rules andfew referees.

Most of these issues, aside from internation-al crime, are not of daily concern to us asindividuals as we use the Internet. Severalof us urged the Academy to take a differentand person-centered view of cybersecurity,a positive view centered on the Internet asa global commons. This viewpoint invitesquestions about what motivates people to

use the Internet, how the right sort of dis-course can be encouraged, what causes peo-ple to hold back from participation, and soon. Of course, some of the other views re-late to this approach: for example, the fearof criminal activity, much of which is indeedinternational, is a very real concern when itcan directly affect us.

One vehicle we are using to address theseconcerns is a Dædalus issue, slated for Fall2011, which will include contributions thatexplore aspects of the global commons ofthe Internet. Let me mention a few of thetopics that the papers will consider.

For those of us who think the Internet is awonderful invention, a nagging question iswhy everyone doesn’t agree with us. Almost25 percent of the U.S. population does notuse the Internet. What de½nes these unbe-lievers? Some answers are obvious: thosein the bottom socioeconomic tiers raisequestions of cost, for example. The older

age cohorts are less fluent in Internet-speakand are involved less. But there is a cross-cutting theme that all age and economicgroups express: the Internet is of no valueto them. Our concern here is not just thedesire to have everyone join in our point ofview, but that these people will be more andmore disenfranchised as the world movesonline. There are many jobs today for whichyou can apply only online. Paper tax formsare almost a thing of the past. As more andmore services and societal functions moveonline, pushed, among other factors, bylower cost, how should we think aboutthose who hold out?

For the individual, the issues of security donot center on concepts such as cyberwar.They center instead on the fear of fraud andidentity theft, the loss of personal informa-tion, and other sorts of personal fears. Anobvious question is whether the Internetcan be made secure against these person-ally threatening concerns. The honest an-swer is no. The Internet is a reflection ofthe real world, and we can no more lockout con men and other sorts of trickstersfrom cyberspace than we can from the realworld. Every behavior, good and bad, willbe reflected from the real world into thecyberworld.

The correct question is more like this: canwe make the Internet safe enough that weshould be willing to go there? It is the samequestion we ask when we decide whetherto take our children to the park. A park isnot totally safe, and if we tried to make ittotally safe, it would be so constrained andrepressive we would not want to go therebecause it would be no fun. When we thinkabout whether the park is safe, we ask our-selves two related questions: is it safeenough, and do I know enough to makethat judgment accurately? The issue withthe Internet is as much the second questionas the ½rst; how can we tell when we acci-dentally go to a “bad neighborhood”: adangerous website, a misleading bit ofemail spam, and so on? In the real world,we help each other sort out these issues; weshare social cues and experiences. We have

The goal of this study is tofocus the “security discourse”on those issues that relate tohow the Internet can empowerthe individual and can providea “safe enough” experiencethat the user is willing to par-take of that experience.

socially centered means to develop modelsof trust. But in the Internet of today, eachof us is more on our own, and this needs tochange. A framing of security that relatesto the individual rather than the war-½ghtermust be that of shared experience and build-ing a communal sense of trust. “Trust” is acritical concept here.

Another way to think about security, whicha paper in the upcoming Dædalus issue willexplore, is by analogy to public health regu-lation. Since bad software on one computer(the kind of code we call “malware”) canlead to infestation of other computers ifthey interact–we don’t call those programs“viruses” for nothing–a model and set ofregulations that balance individual freedomwith collective obligations to prevent thespread of malware seem to make sense.This is a very different way of thinking aboutsecurity than you would get from the mili-tary or intelligence community, but it willbe a useful point of view in the larger Inter-net context.

A number of other topics will be discussedin the Dædalus issue. For example, what isthe shape of political participation on theInternet? What are the institutions and or-ganizations that can foster our view of theInternet as a commons? (We can discussnational security at the United Nations, butwhere should we advocate for the emergenceof a global civil society?)

I will leave you with a high-level thoughtabout this study and the papers that willresult from it: the goal is to take back the“security discourse” that today is centeredaround the language and posturing of war,defense, and deterrence, to focus it on thoseissues that relate to how the Internet canempower the individual and can provide a“safe enough” experience that the user iswilling to partake of that experience. I thinkthis is a suitable and worthy goal for thisAcademy and its fellowship.

© 2011 by David D. Clark

Protecting the Internet


Academy Meeting

Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of TerrorCharles Fried and Gregory FriedIntroduction by Michael Boudin

The 1957th Stated Meeting, held at the House of the Academy on September 27, 2010

Introduction by Michael Boudin

Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Fellow of the American Academy since 1999

It is a particular pleasure to introduce two very good friends, Charles Fried and Gregory Fried. Father and son have coauthored thebook Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Charles is a graduate of Princeton University, OxfordUniversity, and Columbia Law School. His career is centered around Harvard Law School, where he has held two named chairs insuccession, taught a range of subjects, including constitutional law, and written a succession of books and articles, some of which have a decidedly philosophical slant. From 1985 to 1989, he served as Solicitor General of the United States. From 1995 to 1999, he was aJustice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. He is also a distinguished appellate lawyer and was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in 1997.

Gregory graduated from Harvard College, obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is currently Chair of theDepartment of Philosophy at Suffolk University. He has acquired a number of distinguished fellowships and has published manyscholarly writings, including a book on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He has not yet held a high government of½ce, but at hisage, neither had Charles.

The events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror have focused attention on how far governments and individuals can go to protectdomestic and national security. These questions recur in every age, but the perspective from which they are answered is often different.The fashionable modern view is a utilitarian perspective, which asks whether the bene½ts outweigh the costs in any decision. Withrespect to torture, Charles and Gregory reject that perspective. They have mostly joint views, although there is a discrepancy or two.To begin our discussion, I have a question for the authors.

Because It Is Wrong examines immoral behavior by high government of½cials, focusing on the use of torture, the invasion of privacy,and instances in which presidents act illegally. All three issues are connected to the Bush administration, though it is not alone. Somemight think that the gravest devastation of the last eight years was wrought not by illegal or unethical behavior, but by the Iraq War.The planning and execution of the invasion of Iraq are viewed as serious mistakes in judgment. Is bad statesmanship in securitymatters arguably much worse than illegality and immorality?


Gregory Fried

Gregory Fried is Professor and Chair of the Depart-ment of Philosophy at Suffolk University.

Bad statesmanship can do enormousdamage to a nation, but we focus in ourbook on matters of principle, not speci½cimprudent acts. Undermining matters ofprinciple, in my view, has a longer-lastingdeleterious effect on the character of a na-tion than a single miscalculation in diplo-matic or military affairs.

Michael Boudin

Could you summarize for the audience themain point of the book?

Charles Fried

We start by looking at the difference be-tween behaviors that are illegal becausethey are wrong and those that are wrongbecause they are illegal. Torture, on onehand, is illegal because it is wrong. Unwar-ranted wiretaps and the surveillance ofcyberspace, among other violations of lawssuch as the Foreign Intelligence Surveil-lance Act (fisa) that the Bush administra-tion engaged in after 9/11, were wrong be-cause they were illegal.

Many people are reluctant to admit thattorture is an absolute prohibition. Absoluteprohibitions make people nervous, even ifthe choices they make in their own livesadhere to such prohibitions. This tendencyis shown by the fact that people who havethis decent and correct instinct cast aboutfor empirical arguments for why torturenever works: it provides wrong answersmore often than it provides right answers;the results are unreliable; or the same in-formation can be obtained in other ways.Those arguments make me nervous becauseas empirical facts, they may be correct muchof the time, but they are not correct all thetime. When this is the case, the temptationto allow torture creeps in.

Torture is a very old prohibition. In theLieber Code of 1863–the ½rst code of con-duct for war developed by any nation–Presi-dent Lincoln af½rmed that it is proper tokill combatants and admissible, if regret-table, that noncombatants be killed as aresult of so-called collateral damage. Whathe stated with great clarity, however, is thattorture and cruelty are absolutely forbidden.In recent years, the Catholic Church–thatgreat torturer–has admitted a similar ab-solute pronouncement: in the encyclicalVeritatis Splendor of 1993 from Pope JohnPaul II.

How do we make a case that something isabsolutely wrong? In our book, we ½rstmake the argument graphically. We show a painting by Leon Golub, a stark, strikingpainting of someone being tortured. Thenwe discuss what happens in torture. But inthe end, we understand that this is not anunanswerable argument. As my dear friend,the late political philosopher Bob Nozicksaid, “A good argument is not like a machine

We look at the difference between behaviors that are illegal because they are wrongand those that are wrong because they are illegal.

Charles Fried

Charles Fried is the Bene½cial Professor of Lawat Harvard Law School. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1997.

The two problems are very different. Badstatesmanship is hard to avoid and frequent-ly encountered. Grossly immoral behavioris something we can avoid. We know whatshould be avoided on moral grounds. Wecan be told what to avoid. On the other hand,to wag a ½nger at a president and say, “Beprudent, be wise,” is an injunction withouta lot of content, however much we wouldwish that injunction be followed.


Academy Meeting

Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da), Flagellation of Christ. S. Domenico Maggiore, Naples,Italy. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource.

gun. It does not physically disable you fromobjecting.” We do not try to machine-gunour audience into agreement.

What we do show is that the absolute pro-hibition is reasonable. It is in line with manyof the beliefs that guide us; we do not thinkthat everything has a price. Prohibition ontorture is not a goal. In other words, we donot try to have as little torture as possible.Such a scenario is the premise of Lenin’sargument: “Let’s have a little torture today,so that we have much less torture in the fu-ture.” Rather, the prohibition is a constraint.In the pursuit of goals, there are trade-offs,as the utilitarians like to say. The constraintsare the borders–the limits–within whichthose goals are pursued. To quote my heroonce again, Lincoln said, “As I would not bea slave, so I would not be a master.” As Iwould not be tortured, so I would not be atorturer. Survival is not simply a matter ofphysical survival; what we survive to bematters. Respecting the absolute prohibi-tion against torture describes the kind ofhuman being that it is worth trying to be.

Gregory Fried

Although we state that, unlike torture, vio-lations of privacy such as surveillance andeavesdropping are wrong because they areillegal, we are not making a purely relativis-tic argument about the latter. We believethere is a core value of privacy. Any decentsociety that respects fundamental principleswill give its people some refuge of privacyto which they may retreat; that is a necessityof the human condition. However, the con-tours of that region of privacy must depend

somewhat on the traditions of the societyin question as well as the level of technolog-ical progress in that society. A society with-out telephones, recording machines, or theInternet is very different than one that usessuch technology. For a state to employ itsinvestigative and prosecutorial powers, itsduly appointed of½cers must have somecapacity to invade the established zone ofprivacy. We believe, therefore, that whileprivacy is an important value, it is not anabsolute one. In that sense, it differs fromthe prohibition on torture.

The third main subject of our book is exec-utive authority. Our work on the ½rst twotopics led us to the realization that the worldafter 9/11, which has pushed us into thesedivisive questions on surveillance and tor-ture, has also ushered in a crisis in how theAmerican people relate to the concept ofexecutive power. That crisis is embodied bysome of the arguments the Bush adminis-tration made, particularly in its defense oftorture. To what extent is any duly appointedof½cer of the law responsible for upholdingthe rule of law? In other words, is the rule of

Torture is illegal because it is wrong. Unwarranted wire-taps and the surveillance ofcyberspace that the Bush administration engaged inafter 9/11 were wrong be-cause they were illegal.


law absolute in the same way that the prohi-bition on torture is absolute? Surprisingly,we argue in our book that the answer is no:of½cers of the law are sometimes requiredto break certain laws–not all laws, but somelaws.

One example we use in the book is a storyreported in The Boston Globe in early Winter2008. A pregnant woman named JenniferDavis had the misfortune of going into laborduring rush hour, and there was a traf½c jamalong the route to the hospital. Her husbanddrove in the breakdown lane, which is againstthe law in the state of Massachusetts. Theyran into one state trooper, who saw thatDavis was in labor and waved them through.They ran into another state trooper, paused,and he waved them through. They ran intoa third state trooper, who stopped them,saw that Davis was in labor, and then wrotethem a ticket. The State Police of Massachu-setts said the of½cer had made a principleddecision based on his understanding of therule of law. They were breaking the law; hehad to write them a ticket.

Aristotle said there is a principle of equityor reasonableness in the law, and that is be-cause there is no such thing as a law that cananticipate all the possible conditions inwhich it could be applied. In the context ofJennifer Davis getting to the hospital, anyreasonable agent of the law would have saidthat Jennifer should be waved through, andthe law on driving in the breakdown laneignored. Because it is impossible to write allconceivable exceptions into the law, peoplewho have a responsibility to the law need tobe able to judge when it should be ignored.But this principle can be dangerous, too, ina liberal democracy dedicated to the ruleof law.

How do we get out of this bind? PresidentsJefferson and Lincoln provide good exam-ples. In 1807, after the Chesapeake Affair inwhich a British warship ½red on an Ameri-can warship, Jefferson faced the real possi-bility that the United States would go to warwith Great Britain in a very unpreparedstate. Therefore, he took it upon himself torequisition the funds to reequip our for-tresses and navies. In doing so, he violatedthe Constitution, which states that onlyCongress has the authority to requisitionsuch funds. He went to Congress, acknowl-edged his clear violation of the law, andasked Congress to ratify what he had done.

Abraham Lincoln acted similarly when hesuspended habeas corpus, which only Con-gress can do, at the outset of the Civil War.He recognized this violation, and Congressrati½ed the suspension. In the same way, apolice of½cer who not only waves a pregnantwoman through but escorts her to the hos-pital, should tell his or her boss, “Chief, hereare my badge and gun. If you think what Ihave done is wrong, accept my resignation.”Presumably, the chief would say, “Forgetabout it. Take your badge, take your gun,and get back to work.”

To repair the breach in the rule of law, thoseresponsible must recognize their violationsand seek reconciliation through the avenuesavailable to them.

Charles Fried

We are left with a couple of dilemmas. Whatof the situation in which the president asksCongress to ratify his violations and healthe rule of law nunc pro tunc, as we lawyerssay, and Congress does nothing? Congressrati½ed Bush’s violation of fisa, but it cer-tainly did not approve torture. Indeed, atthe insistence of Senator McCain, Congressrecon½rmed its prohibition. What happensin this case?

Greg had a wonderful idea for handling thissituation that I think is genuinely patentable.The president should say, “Look, we’ve got

to ½x this somehow, and you won’t do any-thing. I have drawn up my own articles ofimpeachment to present to the House Judi-ciary Committee.” If Congress then fails toact, he ought to relax. Bush presented thefisa case before Congress, albeit kickingand screaming. With respect to approvingthe use of torture, however, Bush sought nocongressional authorization. How is thisbreach to be healed? Gregory has one view.

Gregory Fried

It is important to underline that these areextremely dif½cult questions. Not only isthe act of torture a serious crime, but also,the theory of presidential power employedby the Bush administration is utterly con-trary to fundamental American principles.Namely, the administration advanced thedoctrine that in his role as commander inchief, the president is unable to break a lawbecause no law can stand before a presidentseeking to secure national security.

The engagement in torture and the seri-ous refutation of this country’s balance ofpowers deserve repudiation. In our system,crimes and faulty legal philosophies arerepudiated through prosecution.

Charles Fried

I am convinced that there will be no prose-cutions; indeed, there should not be. I havelived through Watergate, Billygate, Iran-Contra, the farce of Whitewater, and theMonica Lewinsky scandal, and historymakes quite clear that in a functioningdemocracy, there is a very good reason whythose who have ousted the persons beforethem should not try to put their predeces-sors in jail. If we started down that path,

We believe that while privacyis an important value, it is notan absolute one. In that sense,it differs from the prohibitionon torture.

Many people are reluctant to admit that torture is an absolute prohibition.

Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror


Academy Meeting

then those in power might be temptednever to give it up because of the risks thatwould befall them. Or, they would awaittheir chance to prosecute the next group.The process would create a terrible Ores-tian cycle.

We must remember that Vice PresidentCheney, Attorney General Gonzalez, andSecretary of Defense Rumsfeld, thoughthey authorized terrible practices on an in-admissible theory, were not Hitler; theywere not Pol Pot. They were trying to pro-tect us against enemies who did not hesi-tate to torture and kill as many innocentpeople as possible. They made bad judg-ments, which must be repudiated. But if wepursued criminal prosecutions, they wouldnot even begin until well into the secondPalin administration! Furthermore, prose-cutions might result in acquittals. Thenwhere would we be? We have to ½nd someother way. I think President Obama, whoseems to share my distaste for criminal

prosecutions in this case, ought to issue apardon to Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Gonzalez,stating that they have committed crimesbut are being pardoned. There is a prece-dent for this idea; it is what Gerald Forddid for Richard Nixon, and it was an act ofgreat wisdom and great courage. Ford’sproclamation was the best case that couldhave been made against prosecution.

Michael Boudin

The central message of your book is thattorture is absolutely wrong. Making theabsolutist argument, you begin with thedramatic reproduction of a painting thatshows fascist of½cers torturing a victim whois hung upside down, naked, in a cell; thenyou say the basis for your contention is not

aesthetic or emotional. You invoke the imageof God and quote from the Scriptures; thenyou say the argument is not premised on areligious foundation. You reject, rather flat-ly, the suggestion that it is necessary to es-tablish pragmatically that torture is alwayswrong. You believe it is wrong even if it isuseful. What do you say to someone whomaintains that your view is a personal intu-ition that he or she does not happen to share?How do you persuade that person?

Charles Fried

The chapter that discusses torture is directedat changing the reader’s intuition, and it doesthat, ½rst, evocatively, as in the examplesyou mentioned, but then rationally. The ra-tional argument is that accepting moralconstraints on one’s choices in behavior isnot unreasonable or unusual. Torture caneasily be put on the list of things that mostpeople would not do.

Gregory Fried

To return to my father’s citing of Bob Noz-ick’s wonderful line that an argument is nota machine gun, there is a point at which onecannot force people to share one’s intuition.That said, the United States has had a longtradition of eschewing torture, from theBill of Rights and its prohibition on crueland unusual punishment to George Wash-ington’s proclamation after the Battle ofPrinceton that the Hessians, who had treat-ed American soldiers with great cruelty,should not be treated with similar cruelty.

Of course, there have been departures fromthat tradition in American history. To theskeptic, I would pose the questions: Whatare the habits of thought and conduct thatare necessary to a democratic republic?What instincts and intuitions are necessaryto the people of a democratic republic? Re-pugnance against torture, I would argue,must be one of those instincts.

This is a quasi-Burkean argument in favorof the prohibition against torture. Tortureis the practice of tyrannies. If we engage in

one of the most singular habits of tyranny,we should not imagine that the utilitariancalculus of rationalists will preserve us fromit infecting all other branches of our civiclife. Torture is a powerful venom; once itenters the system, it eats away at the funda-mental habits and traits of a democraticpeople.

Michael Boudin

Imagine a scenario in which a president isfaced with a ticking nuclear bomb and avillain who says, “I’ve planted the bomb.It’s going to go off in some large city. I knowwhere it is, and you can’t make me tell you.”Couldn’t a president who failed to water-board the villain, or let loose the people withpliers to tear out his thumbnails, watch thecity explode and think that he or she hadacted immorally?

Gregory Fried

The problem with ethics is that sometimesit puts us in a position where we do not wantto be; it forces us to ask ourselves, whatwould I do in a situation like that? Thisscenario reminds me of some of the cast-away lifeboat cases of the nineteenth cen-tury, in which people ate one or more of theother people there. No one would say thecastaways had done the right thing, but theymight be excused. When people who areunder enormous pressure and strain actwrongfully, they might still be pardoned onaccount of the circumstances. But this an-swer presents a problem for our argumentbecause it seems to offer a get-out-of-jail-free card.

In this world, things pass away; but that doesnot mean we should not stand fast by ourcore principles. There are some fundamen-tals that de½ne us as a nation, and I believe

To what extent is any dulyappointed of½cer of the lawresponsible for upholding the rule of law?

Is the rule of law absolute inthe same way that the prohi-bition on torture is absolute?


that the prohibition on torture is one ofthem. We can give ourselves up in moreways than physical destruction. That’s ahard thing to hold to in the moment of di-saster, but I believe that’s where we needto take our stance.

Question

We think of torture in terms of examples wecan articulate and get our arms around, butthere are circumstances in which our ½nitethinking needs to be replaced with in½nitethinking–a magnitude of scale vastly be-yond what we normally deal with. Supposesomeone has invented an Earth-endingweapon. There is a prisoner in our midst,and we do not know for certain whether wewill get the answer required to stop thebomb if we torture him. Under those cir-cumstances, should the president insist ontorturing the prisoner for the purpose ofsaving civilization? My answer is that heshould.

Charles Fried

The hypothetical is that there would sim-ply be no world left afterwards? I want tosay I am unmoved. I don’t want to give thereasons that come crowding to my mind:What if just one continent was at risk?What if there were four hundred peoplewho might have information? There arein½nite possible circumstances. I’m in-clined simply not to go there at all, and livewith my answer. After all, the world willend, though almost certainly not in yourscenario. Maybe it is best that the worldnot end with torture.

Question

Do you understand torture to mean delib-erately inflicting tremendous pain on some-one for a purpose, to get them to do some-thing or expose information over a prolongedperiod of time?

Charles Fried

The chapter called “Bordering on Torture”confronts the dif½cult question of de½ningwhat constitutes torture. I will offer twoanswers. First, there are bound to be bor-derline questions. Take, for example, thequestion, “Are you bald?” Some people areclearly bald; some people are clearly not atall bald; and then there are the dif½cult in-between cases. Your question demands thatwe try to move beyond the ostensive de½ni-tion. Second, I see a difference between tor-ture and saying to a person who has beencaptured, “Look, if you don’t help us, youwill never see your wife and children andhome again; you will be in prison for therest of your life.” I see a difference betweenaddressing the will of the person and seekingsimply to destroy it, so that he is no longera person capable of thought or choice.

Question

Your argument seems to focus on torturethat takes place once someone is captured.Now suppose you had to kill a person to stophim from shooting and killing another per-son. Then imagine that instead of killingthe would-be shooter, you could incapaci-tate him by imposing physical pain for acertain period of time, perhaps for manyhours. If you have the choice between kill-ing the person to stop him from shootingsomeone or torturing him in that way, doyou think it would be correct to kill himrather than torture him?

Charles Fried

Yes.

Comment

I think it is torture to stop a person fromkilling someone else by inflicting terriblepain on him. Charles Fried says that thisbehavior also would be impermissible, butit doesn’t strike me as impermissible.

Charles Fried

I think we do, in fact, acknowledge that dis-tinction. In war, we have outlawed certainkinds of bullets because they cause terriblewounds that cannot be healed. We have for-bidden poison gas on the same principle.In the early 1960s, philosopher Jack Rawlssaid his most awful experience in WorldWar II was using flamethrowers to flushJapanese soldiers out of their cave. He said,“I’d rather encounter them in battle thando that.”

Comment

The two paintings that you use as centralillustrations in your book depict the kindsof torture that are not among the techniqueswe are worried about today, the ones thatgenerated your book and this conversation.The United States did not use the rack andthe screw. They used waterboarding, sleepdeprivation, sensory deprivation, and soli-tary con½nement for extended periods oftime. The Bush administration never pub-licly took the classic position of “yes, it’storture, but it’s permissible because we’retrying to save the world.” Rather, the con-sistent argument was that it wasn’t torture.Waterboarding is very bad, but the un Con-vention itself offers wiggle room, suggestingthere is a category of cruel and inhumanemethods of interrogation that are not torture.

What are the habits of thoughtand conduct that are neces-sary to a democratic republic?Repugnance against torture,we would argue, must be oneof those instincts.

Accepting moral constraintson one’s choices in behavior isnot unreasonable or unusual.Torture can easily be put onthe list of things that mostpeople would not do.

Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror


Pictures of a doctor watching somebody be-ing waterboarded would ask people to thinkabout what actually occurred and who wasresponsible, particularly in terms of profes-sional responsibility. Ultimately, we are talk-ing about the cia’s use of so-called profes-sional interrogators and whether that con-stitutes torture. If it does, then the fact thatnobody has been prosecuted is horri½c. ButI also think it’s horri½c to say that torture isdepicted by the images in your book, andso long as we are not doing that, it’s merelycruel and inhumane and therefore subjectto different modes of legal analysis.

Gregory Fried

Some of the chapters in Jane Mayer’s bookThe Dark Side help explain the genesis of theactual procedures that the United Statesused. Methodologies like sensory depriva-tion, sleep deprivation, and forcing prison-ers to stand for long periods of time wereused by the Nazis, Stalin, and North Koreato induce insanity in their prisoners–toleave them gibbering mounds of flesh. These

practices were all adopted by the people inthe Bush administration as ways of soften-ing up people to get them ready for interro-gation. They have long been recognized astorture. After World War II we executedNazis for using these “no blood, no foul”techniques.

The Jay Bybee memos of August 1, 2002,authorized not only waterboarding, whichreceives the most attention, but also stresspositions and sleep deprivation, which wereused by the Inquisition, the Gestapo, andFranco; exposure to extreme cold and heat;sensory deprivation, which was used onAmerican citizen Jose Padilla, who wentinsane as a result; putting insects into cells

with prisoners; isolation in windowless cellsfor up to months at a time; forced nakedness,diapering, and slapping; the use of dogs toterrorize prisoners; and chaining prisonersto the floor and forcing them to defecate onthemselves. According to a Senate ArmedServices Committee report, those practiceswere all directly approved at the highestlevel. All that we see in the photos fromAbu Ghraib are extensions of the tech-niques that those soldiers saw being usedby duly appointed torturers. The techniquesare incredibly insidious, and they constitutetorture by the tradition of American law.Indeed, waterboarding was considered tor-ture until the United States began to use it.

Charles Fried

The supposed benign quality of water-boarding is much belied by the fact that atleast one person was waterboarded 187times. The powers that were involved de-cided that they should use saline becausethe use of water risked causing the sub-ject’s death. The notion that waterboard-ing is not torture is unacceptable.

Gregory Fried

It has been documented that these othertechniques, including exposure to extremeheat and cold and stress positions, have re-sulted in the deaths of people in our capture.Those are serious war crimes.

Charles Fried

I would like to come back to our rough de½-nition of torture. Torture is that which doesnot seek to persuade the will, even in termsof what the ma½a would refer to as “an offeryou can’t refuse.” It is the employment oftechniques meant to destroy the will, todrive the person mad.

Question

I have criticized the premature use of tech-nologies for brain reading. But is the minda privileged island of privacy, or is it permis-sible to develop these technologies for ob-taining knowledge from guilty parties as analternative to torture?

Charles Fried

The Fourth Amendment, which embodiesour commitment to privacy, prohibits onlyunreasonable searches and seizures andsearch or seizure without a warrant. Thisstricture assumes that even your privatediaries can be searched and seized withjudicial authorization. To me, that is differ-ent from the torture that destroys you.

Gregory Fried

I think there may be a point at which we willneed a warrant to do brain scans. The caveatis that these methods are potentially so in-vasive, and so unaccountable–both in thesense of who has them and also in the senseof where they are being used and how weknow they are being used–that the publiccould reasonably sense that our island ofprivacy is being shrunk to zero, even if itisn’t really. The development of those tech-niques is extremely dangerous and wouldneed careful monitoring.

If it could save us from the situation in whicheither the world disappears into a black holeor we get world-saving information from aprisoner, I think I would prefer to have theprisoner’s brain scanned. Those yet unde-veloped techniques, wedded to other tech-niques that have been proven by manysources, may be our best bet for avoidingsuch nightmare scenarios.

© 2011 by Michael Boudin, Charles Fried,and Gregory Fried, respectively

Torture is a powerful venom;once it enters the system, iteats away at the fundamentalhabits and traits of a demo-cratic people.

Torture is that which does notseek to persuade the will. It isthe employment of techniquesmeant to destroy the will, todrive the person mad.

Academy Meeting


Noteworthy

As of press time, several Fel-lows of the Academy, listedbelow, had been nominatedor appointed to key posts inthe Obama administration:

Henry J. Aaron (Brookings Insti-tution): Chair, Social SecurityAdvisory Board

John T. Casteen III (Universityof Virginia): Member of theBoard of Trustees of the Wood-row Wilson International Centerfor Scholars

Kenneth I. Chenault (AmericanExpress Company): Member,President’s Council on Jobs andCompetitiveness

Rita Colwell (University of Mary-land; Canon U.S. Life Sciences,Inc.): U.S. Science Envoy

John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Cau-½eld & Byers): Member, Presi-dent’s Council on Jobs and Com-petitiveness

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. (tiaa-

cref): Member, President’sCouncil on Jobs and Competi-tiveness

Joseph S. Francisco (AmericanChemical Society; Purdue Univer-sity): Member, President’s Com-mittee on the National Medal ofScience

Alice Gast (Lehigh University):U.S. Science Envoy

Agnes Gund (Museum of ModernArt): Member, National Councilon the Arts

William R. Hambrecht (WR Ham-brecht + Co): Member, Board ofDirectors of the Presidio Trust

Jeffrey R. Immelt (General Elec-tric): Chair, President’s Councilon Jobs and Competitiveness

Eric S. Lander (Broad Instituteof mit and Harvard): Member,President’s Council on Jobs andCompetitiveness

W. James McNerney, Jr. (The Boe-ing Company): Member, Presi-dent’s Council on Jobs and Com-petitiveness

Stephen J. Benkovic (PennsylvaniaState University) is the recipientof the 2011 National Academy ofSciences Award in Chemical Sci-ences.

Archie Brown (University of Ox-ford) has been awarded the 2010W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize of thePolitical Studies Association ofthe United Kingdom (psa) forhis book The Rise and Fall of Com-munism. He also received the Dia-mond Jubilee Award for LifetimeAchievement in Political Studiesfrom the psa.

Theodore Lawrence Brown (Uni-versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was elected a Fel-low of the American ChemicalSociety.

Federico Capasso (Harvard Uni-versity) won the 2010 JuliusSpringer Prize for Applied Physics.

Hal Caswell (Woods Hole Ocean-ographic Institution) is the recip-ient of a 2010 Humboldt ResearchAward by the Alexander vonHumboldt Foundation.

Alexandre Chorin (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) was awardedthe 2011 iciam Lagrange Prize.

Francis Ford Coppola (AmericanZoetrope/Francis Ford CoppolaPresents, llc) is the recipient ofthe Irving G. Thalberg MemorialAward given by the Board of Gov-ernors of the Academy of MotionPicture Arts and Sciences.

Gretchen Daily (Stanford Uni-versity) is among the recipientsof the 16th Heinz Awards.

Antonio Damasio (University ofSouthern California) was awardedthe Honda Prize by the HondaFoundation of Japan.

Ingrid Daubechies (PrincetonUniversity) was awarded the 2011Benjamin Franklin Medal in Elec-trical Engineering by the FranklinInstitute.

Titia de Lange (Rockefeller Uni-versity) is the recipient of the2011 Vilcek Prize in BiomedicalScience.

Daniel Meltzer (Harvard LawSchool): Member, President’sIntelligence Advisory Board

Margaret Murnane (jila; Uni-versity of Colorado): Member,President’s Committee on theNational Medal of Science

Richard D. Parsons (Citigroup,Inc.): Member, President’s Coun-cil on Jobs and Competitiveness

Paul Sagan (Akamai Technolo-gies): Member, President’s Na-tional Security Telecommunica-tions Advisory Committee

Robert Sampson (Harvard Uni-versity): Member, Of½ce of Jus-tice Programs Science AdvisoryBoard

Laura D’Andrea Tyson (Univer-sity of California, Berkeley):Member, President’s Council onJobs and Competitiveness

Luis Ubiñas (Ford Foundation):Member, Advisory Committeefor Trade Policy and Negotiations

Elizabeth Warren (Harvard LawSchool): Special Adviser, Bureauof Consumer Financial Protection

Carl Wieman (University of Brit-ish Columbia): Associate Directorfor Science, White House Of½ceof Science and Technology Policy

Select Prizes and Awards

Nobel Prizes, 2010

Economics

Peter A. Diamond (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology)

Dale T. Mortensen (NorthwesternUniversity)

Presidential Medal of Freedom

Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hath-away)

Jasper Johns (Sharon, CT)

Yo-Yo Ma (Cambridge, MA)

National Medal of Science

Stephen J. Benkovic (PennsylvaniaState University)

Esther M. Conwell (University ofRochester)

Marye Anne Fox (University ofCalifornia, San Diego)

Susan L. Lindquist (WhiteheadInstitute for Biomedical Research;Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology)

Mortimer Mishkin (National In-stitutes of Health)

Stanley B. Prusiner (University ofCalifornia, San Francisco)

Warren M. Washington (NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research)

Amnon Yariv (California Instituteof Technology)

Other Awards

Linda Abriola (Tufts University)has been recognized in the ency-clopedia American Women of Sci-ence since 1900.

Chinua Achebe (Bard College) wasawarded the 2010 Dorothy andLillian Gish Prize.

Bruce Alberts (University of Cal-ifornia, San Francisco; Science) isamong the recipients of the 2010George Brown Award for Inter-national Scienti½c Cooperationgiven by crdf Global.

Alan Alda (New York, NY) isamong the recipients of the 2010aaas Kavli Science JournalismAwards.

Nancy Andrews (Duke UniversitySchool of Medicine) was awardedthe 2010 Vanderbilt Prize in Bio-medical Science.

David Awschalom (University of California, Santa Barbara) re-ceived the Turnbull LecturerAward from the Materials Re-search Society.

Peter Beak (University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign) was elected aFellow of the American ChemicalSociety.


Noteworthy

Toyo Ito (Toyo Ito & Associates,Architects) was named a 2010Praemium Imperiale Laureate forArchitecture by the Japan ArtAssociation.

Anita Jones (University of Vir-ginia) is the recipient of the Na-tional Academy of EngineeringArthur M. Bueche Award.

Bill T. Jones (Bill T. Jones/ArnieZane Dance Company) is amongthe recipients of the 2010 KennedyCenter Honors.

Mary-Claire King (University ofWashington) was awarded the2010 Pearl Meister GreengardPrize by the Rockefeller Univer-sity. She shares the prize withJanet Davison Rowley (Univer-sity of Chicago).

Robert P. Kirshner (Harvard Uni-versity) was awarded the DannieHeineman Prize in Astrophysics,given by the American Astronom-ical Society and the American In-stitute of Physics.

Stuart A. Kornfeld (WashingtonUniversity School of Medicine)is the recipient of the E. B. Wil-son Medal awarded by the Amer-ican Society for Cell Biology.

Robert Langer (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) is therecipient of the National Academyof Engineering Founders Award.

Leonard Lauder (Estée LauderCompanies) received the AspenInstitute’s Corporate LeadershipAward.

Joseph LeDoux (New York Uni-versity) is the recipient of a Dis-tinguished Scienti½c Award givenby the American PsychologicalAssociation.

James C. Lehrer (NewsHour withJim Lehrer) received the AspenInstitute’s Public Service Award.

Susan L. Lindquist (WhiteheadInstitute for Biomedical Research;Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology) is the 2010 recipient ofthe Max Delbrück Medal.

Yves Meyer (École NormaleSupérieure de Cachan, France)was awarded the 2010 Carl Fried-rich Gauss Prize for AppliedMathematics.

Joseph M. DeSimone (NorthCarolina State University; Uni-versity of North Carolina atChapel Hill) received the 2010Mentor Award from the Ameri-can Association for the Advance-ment of Science.

Richard Eisenberg (University ofRochester) was awarded the 2011Nobel Laureate Signature Awardfor Graduate Education in Chem-istry by the American ChemicalSociety.

Sandra Faber (University of Cali-fornia, Santa Cruz) was awardedthe 2011 Henry Norris RussellLectureship by the AmericanAstronomical Society.

Loren Ghiglione (NorthwesternUniversity) was named the winnerof the 2010 Distinguished Serviceto Journalism History Award givenby the American Journalism His-torians Association.

Carlo Ginzburg (University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles) wasawarded the 2010 Balzan Prizefor European History.

Vartan Gregorian (Carnegie Cor-poration of New York) receivedthe Aspen Institute’s Henry CrownLeadership Award.

James Haber (Brandeis Univer-sity) was awarded the ThomasHunt Morgan Medal for LifetimeAchievement in Genetics by theGenetics Society of America.

Thomas Hampson (HampsonFoundation) is the recipient ofthe Living Legend Award givenby the Library of Congress.

Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm Univer-sity) was awarded the 2010 AndersRetzius Medal by the SwedishSociety for Anthropology andGeography.

John Hennessy (Stanford Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2010Dr. Morris Chang ExemplaryLeadership Award given by theGlobal Semiconductor Alliance.

Susan Band Horwitz (Albert Ein-stein College of Medicine of Yeshi-va University) received the Life-time Achievement Award in Can-cer Research from the AmericanAssociation for Cancer Research.

Adam Riess (Johns Hopkins Uni-versity) was awarded the 2011Einstein Medal by the Albert Ein-stein Society of Bern, Switzerland.He shares the prize with Saul Perl-mutter (University of California,Berkeley).

Ronald L. Rivest (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) is the re-cipient of the James R. Killian, Jr.,Faculty Achievement Award givenby mit.

Janet Davison Rowley (Universityof Chicago) was awarded the 2010Pearl Meister Greengard Prize bythe Rockefeller University. Sheshares the prize with Mary-ClaireKing (University of Washington).

Emmanuel Saez (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) was awardeda MacArthur Fellowship.

Robert Sampson (Harvard Univer-sity) was awarded the 2011 Stock-holm Prize in Criminology. Heshares the prize with John Laub(National Institute of Justice).

William H. Schlesinger (Cary In-stitute of Ecosystem Studies) is the2010 recipient of the SustainedAchievement Award given by theRenewable Natural ResourcesFoundation.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay (HarvardUniversity) was awarded the 2010Jaap Kunst Prize.

Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)was awarded the Nicholas RescherPrize for Contributions to Sys-tematic Philosophy by the Uni-versity of Pittsburgh.

Steven Squyres (Cornell Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2010Eugene Shoemaker MemorialAward, presented by ArizonaState University.

James Stimson (University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill)was awarded the 2010 Warren E.Miller Prize from the AmericanPolitical Science Association.

John Meurig Thomas (Universityof Cambridge, UK) was awardedthe 2010 Bragg Prize Lectureshipof the British CrystallographicAssociation, the 2010 Sven Berg-gren Prize Lectureship of theRoyal Physiographic Academyof Lund, and the 2010 Ertl PrizeLectureship of the Max PlanckGesellschaft.

Harold Mooney (Stanford Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2010Volvo Environment Prize.

Jeffrey Moore (University of Illi-nois at Urbana-Champaign) waselected a Fellow of the AmericanChemical Society.

K. C. Nicolaou (Scripps ResearchInstitute; University of Califor-nia, San Diego) was awarded the2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal inChemistry by the Franklin Insti-tute.

Louis Nirenberg (New York Uni-versity) is the recipient of the 2010Chern Medal, given by the Inter-national Mathematical Union andthe Chern Medal Foundation.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Univer-sity of Wisconsin-Madison) waselected a Fellow of the Institutd’Etudes Avancées-Paris for herproject on aesthetic and militarismin comparative perspective. Herresearch focuses on its develop-ment in France.

Bert O’Malley (Baylor College ofMedicine) is the 2011 recipient ofthe Ernst Schering Prize, awardedby the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Elinor Ostrom (Indiana Univer-sity) received the Diamond Jubi-lee Award for Lifetime Achieve-ment in Political Studies fromthe Political Studies Associationof the United Kingdom.

Saul Perlmutter (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) was award-ed the 2011 Einstein Medal by theAlbert Einstein Society of Bern,Switzerland. He shares the prizewith Adam Riess (Johns HopkinsUniversity).

Francine Prose (New York, NY)was awarded the Washington Uni-versity International HumanitiesMedal.

Marcus E. Raichle (WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis School ofMedicine) is among the recipientsof the MetLife Foundation Awardsfor Medical Research in Alzhei-mer’s Disease.

Calyampudi Radakrishna Rao(C.R. Rao Advanced Institute ofMathematics, Statistics and Com-puter Science, India) is the recip-ient of the India Science Award.


Geoffrey Cowan (University ofSouthern California) has beennamed President of the Annen-berg Foundation Trust at Sunny-lands.

Alan M. Dachs (Fremont Group)has been elected Chairman of theBoard of Trustees of The Confer-ence Board.

William F. DeGrado (Universityof Pennsylvania) was named tothe Scienti½c Advisory Board ofPolyMedix, Inc.

Susan Desmond-Hellmann (Uni-versity of California, San Fran-cisco) was named to the Board ofDirectors of Procter & Gamble.

J. Larry Jameson (NorthwesternUniversity) has been named Ex-ecutive Vice President of the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania for theHealth System and Dean of theUniversity of Pennsylvania Schoolof Medicine.

Stephen M. Kosslyn (HarvardUniversity) was appointed Direc-tor of the Center for AdvancedStudy in the Behavioral Sciencesat Stanford University.

Kent Kresa (Northrop GrummanCorporation) was named Chair-man of the Board of Directors ofthe Music Center.

Michael A. Marletta (Universityof California, Berkeley) has beennamed President of the ScrippsResearch Institute.

Michael L. Norman (University ofCalifornia, San Diego) has beennamed Director of the San DiegoSupercomputer Center at the Uni-versity of California, San Diego.

Larry Page (Google Inc.) has beennamed Chief Executive Of½cer ofGoogle.

David Rockefeller, Jr. (Rocke-feller Financial Services, Inc.)was named Board Chair of theRockefeller Foundation.

Gerald Rosenfeld (RothschildNorth America; New York Uni-versity) is Strategic Advisor andVice Chairman of United StatesInvestment Banking at Lazard Ltd.

Steven Rosenstone (University ofMinnesota) was named Chancel-lor of the Minnesota State Col-leges and Universities.

David J. Weatherall (Universityof Oxford, UK) is the recipient ofthe 2010 Lasker~Koshland Awardfor Special Achievement in Med-ical Science.

E. O. Wilson (Harvard University)was awarded the Henry DavidThoreau Prize for Literary Excel-lence in Nature Writing by pen

New England.

Peter Wolczanski (Cornell Univer-sity) is the recipient of the 2011National Award in Organometal-lic Chemistry from the AmericanChemical Society.

Adam Zagajewski (University ofChicago) is the recipient of theEuropean Poetry Prize, awardedby the Cassamarca Foundation.

New Appointments

Fellows appointed to the Scienti½c Advisory Board of Immune Design

David Baltimore (California Insti-tute of Technology)

Richard Klausner (Column Group)

Inder Verma (Salk Institute)

Other New Appointments

David Bloom (Harvard School ofPublic Health) was appointed tothe Board of Directors of Popula-tion Services International (psi).

Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia Uni-versity) was named Chairman ofthe Board of Directors of the Fed-eral Reserve Bank of New York.

Gary Borisy (Marine BiologicalLaboratory) was appointed as aHead of Faculty for Cell Biologywithin Faculty of 1000 (F1000).

Alan Brinkley (Columbia Univer-sity) was named Chairman of theBoard of Trustees of the NationalHumanities Center.

Emily Carter (Princeton Universi-ty) has been appointed the Found-ing Director of the AndlingerCenter for Energy and the Envi-ronment at Princeton University.

Non½ction

Kwame Anthony Appiah (Prince-ton University). The Honor Code:How Moral Revolutions Happen.W.W. Norton, September 2010

Francisco J. Ayala (University ofCalifornia, Irvine). Am I a Monkey?Six Big Questions About Evolution.Johns Hopkins University Press,October 2010

Leo Braudy (University of South-ern California). The HollywoodSign: Fantasy and Reality of anAmerican Icon. Yale UniversityPress, February 2011

Noam Chomsky (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) and IlanPappé (University of Exeter, UK).Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’sWar Against the Palestinians. Hay-market Books, November 2010

Donald D. Clayton (ClemsonUniversity). Catch a Falling Star.iUniverse, November 2009

Antonio Damasio (University ofSouthern California). Self Comesto Mind: Constructing the ConsciousBrain. Pantheon, November 2010

Jacques d’Amboise (NationalDance Institute). I Was a Dancer:A Memoir. Knopf, February 2011

Freeman Dyson (Institute forAdvanced Study), editor. The BestAmerican Science and Nature Writ-ing 2010. Houghton Mifflin Har-court, October 2010

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Univer-sity of Michigan). Divine Art, In-fernal Machine: The Reception ofPrinting in the West from First Im-pressions to the Sense of an Ending.University of Pennsylvania Press,December 2010

Daniel A. Farber (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley) and AnneJoseph O’Connell (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley), editors. Re-search Handbook on Public Choiceand Public Law. Edward ElgarPublishing, September 2010

Eric Foner (Columbia University).The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincolnand American Slavery. W.W. Nor-ton, October 2010

Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.) hasbeen named Executive Chairmanof the Board of Google.

Larry J. Shapiro (WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis School ofMedicine) was elected Chair of theBoard of Directors of the Associ-ation of Academic Health Centers.

Margaret C. Simms (Urban In-stitute) was named to the Boardof Trustees of Carleton College.

Luis Ubiñas (Ford Foundation)has been appointed to the Boardof Directors of Electronic Arts Inc.

Susan R. Wessler (University ofCalifornia, Riverside) has beenelected Home Secretary of theNational Academy of Sciences.

Select Publications

Poetry

Charles Simic (University of NewHampshire). Master of Disguises.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oc-tober 2010

Richard Wilbur (Smith College).Anterooms: New Poems and Trans-lations. Houghton Mifflin Har-court, November 2010

C.D. Wright (Brown University).One with Others. Copper CanyonPress, October 2010

Fiction

Seamus Heaney (Dublin, Ireland).Human Chain. Farrar, Straus andGiroux, September 2010

Ward Just (Vineyard Haven, MA).Rodin’s Debutante. HoughtonMifflin Harcourt, March 2011

Steve Martin (Beverly Hills, CA).An Object of Beauty: A Novel. GrandCentral Press, November 2010

Philip Roth (New York, NY).Nemesis. Houghton Mifflin Har-court, October 2010

Garry B. Trudeau (New York,NY). 40: A Doonesbury Retrospec-tive. Andrews McMeel Publishing,October 2010


Pauline Maier (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology). Rati½ca-tion: The People Debate the Consti-tution, 1787–1788. Simon & Schus-ter, October 2010

Nelson Mandela (Nelson MandelaFoundation). Conversations withMyself. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,October 2010

Steven E. Miller (Harvard Univer-sity), Michael E. Brown (GeorgeWashington University), OwenR. Coté Jr. (Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology), and SeanM. Lynn-Jones (Harvard Univer-sity), editors. Contending withTerrorism: Roots, Strategies, andResponses. mit Press, July 2010

Martha Minow (Harvard LawSchool). In Brown’s Wake: Lega-cies of America’s Educational Land-mark. Oxford University Press,August 2010

Gary Saul Morson (NorthwesternUniversity). The Words of Others:From Quotations to Culture. YaleUniversity Press, April 2011

Guy Nordenson (Guy Norden-son and Associates). Patterns andStructure: Selected Writings 1972–2008. Lars Müller Publishers,September 2010

Guy Nordenson (Guy Nordensonand Associates), Catherine Seavitt(Catherine Seavitt Studio), andAdam Yarinsky (ArchitectureResearch Of½ce). On the Water |Palisade Bay. Hatje Cantz Verlag/MoMA Publications, January 2010

Robert B. Pippin (University ofChicago). Hegel on Self-Conscious-ness: Desire and Death in the “Phe-nomenology of Spirit.” PrincetonUniversity Press, February 2011

Eric A. Posner (University ofChicago Law School). Economicsof Public International Law. Ed-ward Elgar Publishing, Novem-ber 2010

Robert D. Putnam (Harvard Uni-versity) and David E. Campbell(University of Notre Dame).American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Simon &Schuster, October 2010

William A. Galston (BrookingsInstitution) and Peter H. Hoffen-berg (University of Hawaii atManoa), editors. Poverty andMorality: Religious and SecularPerspectives. Cambridge Univer-sity Press, November 2010

Anthony Grafton (PrincetonUniversity) and Joanna Weinberg(University of Oxford, UK). “I HaveAlways Loved the Holy Tongue”: IsaacCasaubon, the Jews, and a ForgottenChapter in Renaissance Scholarship.Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-sity Press, January 2011

Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard Uni-versity). Shakespeare’s Freedom.University of Chicago Press, No-vember 2010

Charlotte Greenspan (Ithaca, NY;Academy Scholar in Residence,2010). Pick Yourself Up: DorothyFields and the American Musical.Oxford University Press, July 2010

Edith Grossman (New York, NY).Why Translation Matters. YaleUniversity Press, December 2010

Ulf Hannerz (Stockholm Univer-sity). Anthropology’s World: Life ina Twenty-First Century Discipline.Pluto Press, August 2010

Stephen Hawking (University ofCambridge, UK) and LeonardMlodinow (California Instituteof Technology). The Grand Design.Bantam, September 2010

Thomas C. Holt (University ofChicago). Children of Fire: A His-tory of African Americans. Farrar,Straus and Giroux, October 2010

Maxine Hong Kingston (Univer-sity of California, Berkeley). I Lovea Broad Margin to My Life. HarvillPress, March 2011

Wendy Lesser (The ThreepennyReview). Music for Silenced Voices:Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quar-tets. Yale University Press, Febru-ary 2011

Theodore Ziolkowski (PrincetonUniversity). Dresdner Romantik:Politik und Harmonie. Universitäts-verlag Winter, October 2010

Commissions

Guy Nordenson (Guy Nordensonand Associates) was the lead de-signer and structural engineerwith Pelli Clarke Pelli Architectsof the Hillhouse Pedestrian Brid-ges for Yale University in NewHaven, CT.

Billie Tsien and Tod Williams(Tod Williams Billie Tsien Archi-tects) have been chosen to designPrinceton University’s new And-linger Center for Energy and theEnvironment.

Harriet Ritvo (Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology). Noble Cowsand Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Ani-mals and History. University ofVirginia Press, December 2010

Neena B. Schwartz (NorthwesternUniversity). A Lab of My Own.Rodopi, January 2010

David Sehat (Georgia State Uni-versity; Academy Visiting Scholar,2007–2008). The Myth of Ameri-can Religious Freedom. OxfordUniversity Press, January 2011

Jane Smiley (New York, NY). TheMan Who Invented the Computer:The Biography of John Atanasoff,Digital Pioneer. Doubleday, Octo-ber 2010

Robert M. Solow (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) and Jean-Philippe Touffut (Cournot Centrefor Economic Studies, France),editors. The Shape of the Divisionof Labour: Nations, Industries, andHouseholds. Edward Elgar Publish-ing, January 2011

Patricia Meyer Spacks (Universityof Virginia). Pride and Prejudice:An Annotated Edition. BelknapPress of Harvard University Press,October 2010

Jeffrey Stout (Princeton Univer-sity). Blessed are the Organized:Grassroots Democracy in America.Princeton University Press, De-cember 2010

John A. Swets (bbn Technolo-gies). Tulips to Thresholds: Coun-terpart Careers of the Author andSignal Detection Theory. PeninsulaPublishing, June 2010

Helen Vendler (Harvard Univer-sity). Dickinson: Selected Poems andCommentaries. Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, Sep-tember 2010

Garry Wills (Northwestern Uni-versity). Outside Looking In: Ad-ventures of an Observer. Viking,October 2010

Theodore Ziolkowski (PrincetonUniversity). Die Welt im Gedicht:Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus II.4. Koen-igshausen & Neumann, July 2010

Noteworthy

We invite all Fellows and For eign Honorary Members to send notices about their recent and forthcoming pub -lications, scienti½c ½ndings,exhibitions and performances,and honors and prizes to bulletin@ama cad.org.


Thomas Julian Ahrens–November 24, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1995

John David Alexander–July 25, 2010; electedto the Academy in 2006

Neal Russell Amundson–February 16, 2011;elected to the Academy in 1992

Milton Byron Babbitt–January 29, 2011;elected to the Academy in 1974

Kurt Baier–October 24, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 1975

Ralph Belknap Baldwin–October 23, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1980

Paul Frank Barbara–October 31, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1999

Daniel Bell–January 25, 2011; elected to theAcademy in 1964

Jacob Bigeleisen–August 7, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1968

Adriaan Blaauw–December 1, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1973

Reinhold Brinkmann–October 10, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2002

Nicola Cabibbo–August 16, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1981

Britton Chance–November 16, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1955

William K. Coblentz–September 13, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2002

Robyn M. Dawes–December 14, 2010; elected to the Academy in 2002

Jacqueline de Romilly–December 18, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1988

William von Eggers Doering–January 3,2011; elected to the Academy in 1954

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt–September 2, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1968

Charles J. Epstein–February 15, 2011; electedto the Academy in 2004

John Bennett Fenn–December 10, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2000

Alfred Paul Fishman–October 6, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1996

Joseph Harold Flom–February 23, 2011;elected to the Academy in 2006

Philippa Ruth Foot–October 3, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1983

Philip P. Frickey–July 11, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 2002

Albert Ghiorso–December 26, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1972

Remembrance It is with sadness that the Academy notes the passing of the following members.*

*Notice received from July 23, 2010, to February 24, 2011

William H. Goetzmann–September 7, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2000

Eugene Goldwasser–December 17, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1991

Morris Goodman–November 4, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1996

Oleg Grabar–January 8, 2011; elected to theAcademy in 1973

Louis Henkin–October 14, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1974

Walter Rollo Hibbard, Jr.–February 24, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1963

Richard C. Holbrooke–December 13, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2004

Bernard Leonard Horecker–October 10,2010; elected to the Academy in 1962

John Peter Huchra–October 8, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1991

David Lee Hull–August 11, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1992

Robert Stephen Ingersoll–August 22, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1988

Alex Inkeles–July 9, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1962

Walter Isard–November 6, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1975

Chalmers Ashby Johnson–November 20,2010; elected to the Academy in 1976

Tony Robert Judt–August 6, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1996

Alfred Edward Kahn–December 27, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1978

Benjamin Kaplan–August 18, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1958

Friedrich Katz–October 16, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 2003

James Collyer Keck–August 9, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1973

John Frank Kermode–August 17, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1976

Richard Darwin Keynes–June 12, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1978

John Werner Kluge–September 7, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2002

Leon Knopoff–January 20, 2011; elected to the Academy in 1965

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox–July 22,2010; elected to the Academy in 1977

Mabel Louise Lang–July 21, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1981

Henry Lardy–August 4, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 1965

Jack Levine–November 8, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1949

Romulus Linney–January 15, 2011; elected tothe Academy in 1998

Guido Majno–May 27, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 1977

Benoit B. Mandelbrot–October 14, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1982

Jerrold E. Marsden–September 21, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1997

John Emery Murdoch–September 16, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1973

Nathan J. Oliveira–November 13, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1994

Kenneth Harry Olsen–February 6, 2011;elected to the Academy in 1976

Martin Ostwald–April 10, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1991

Oscar Sala–January 2, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 1988

Daniel Schorr–July 23, 2010; elected to theAcademy in 2002

Eli Shapiro–December 4, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1955

Alfred William Brian Simpson–January 10,2011; elected to the Academy in 1993

Melvin Ernest Stern–February 2, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1975

Robert Edward Lee Strider–November 28,2010; elected to the Academy in 1962

James Mourilyan Tanner–August 11, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1993

Michael Tinkham–November 4, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1967

Robert Charles Tucker–July 29, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1975

Frederick Theodore Wall–March 31, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1966

David J. Weber–August 20, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 2007

Sidney J. Weinberg, Jr.–October 4, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2005

George Christopher Williams–September 8,2010; elected to the Academy in 1990

Bernhard Witkop–November 22, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1978

Arnold Zellner–August 11, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1979


Condoleezza Rice Visits the Academy

On December 1, 2010, President Leslie C.Berlowitz welcomed and formally inductedinto the Academy former Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice. Patricia Meyer Spacks,President of the Academy from 2001–2006,also of½ciated at the induction ceremony.

Dr. Rice, who was elected to the Academyin 1997 while serving as Provost of StanfordUniversity, spoke about her perspectives onthe importance of public service to a groupof Fellows and members of mit, Harvard,Boston University, and the W.E.B. Du BoisInstitute for African and African AmericanResearch.

“It is not always the easiest transition, togo from the academy into the world of gov-ernment, but it is one of the really greathonors that one can have,” said Rice. Shenoted that although cynicism toward pub-lic service may make it an unattractive op-tion for some, she is encouraged by thepassion and idealism exhibited by manyyoung people on college campuses. “Agreat democracy cannot function withoutthose who are devoted to trying to make it a better democracy.”

Condoleezza Rice

Former Secretary of State Reflects on the Importance of Public Service

During a wide-ranging conversation, Ricereflected on her career as a Soviet and EastEuropean affairs specialist, an academicadministrator, White House National Se-curity Advisor, and the nation’s sixty-sixthSecretary of State. She also spoke aboutmore recent events in North Korea andChina, the role of science and technologyin diplomacy, and arms control and theNew start Treaty with Russia.

Asked about the tenor of contemporarypolitics, Rice remarked that “our politicshas just gotten too fast and the volume istoo loud. . . the questioning of the motivesof our politicians, of our public servants,has reached a fever pitch.” She stressed theneed for a less partisan, more constructivepublic discourse about such critical issuesas immigration reform and national eco-nomic policy.

american academy

of arts & sciences

Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, ma 02138telephone 617-576-5000, facsimile 617-576-5050,

email [email protected], website www.amacad.org

academy officers

Louis W. Cabot, Chair of the Board and Trust

Leslie Berlowitz, President and William T. Golden Chair

John S. Reed, Treasurer

Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary

Gerald L. Early, Cochair of the Council

Neal Lane, Cochair of the Council

John Katzenellenbogen, Vice Chair, Midwest

Jesse H. Choper, Vice Chair, West

publications advisory board

Jerome Kagan, Chair; Jesse H. Choper, Denis Donoghue, Gerald Early, Linda Greenhouse, Steven Marcus, Jerrold Meinwald

editorial staff

Phyllis S. Bendell, Director of Publications

Micah J. Buis, Associate Editor

Erica Dorpalen, Editorial Assistant

Scott Eaton Wilder, Design & Layout

Initial design by Joseph Moore of Moore + Associates

Bulletin Winter 2011Issued as Volume lxiv, Number 2© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (issn 0002–712x)is published quarterly by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.Periodi cals rate postage paid at Boston, ma, and at additional mailingof½ces. Post master: Send address changes to Bulletin, American Acad-emy of Arts & Sciences, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, ma 02138.

The views expressed in the Bulletin are those held by each contribu-tor and are not necessarily those of the Of½cers and Fellows of theAmerican Acad emy of Arts & Sciences.

photo credits

Steve Rosenthal inside front cover

Martha Stewart pages 1, 5–9, 12–13, 15–17, 22–24, 26, 32–34, 47, 49–50, 53–56, 59–62, 65, 76

Elisabeth Fall page 10

Rod Searcey page 43, top

Jim Block pages 43, bottom; 52

Don Liebig/ucla Photography page 44

Eric Craig page 45

Wendy Barrows page 46, top

Ed Zilberman page 46, bottom

Leslie Berlowitz has beennamed the 45th President ofthe American Academy of Artsand Sciences. She has led theAcademy as Chief ExecutiveOf½cer since 1996 and waselected a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy in 2004.

Louis W. Cabot, Chair of theBoard, noted that Berlowitz haspresided over an unprecedent-ed period of accomplishment.

“Leslie has raised the visibilityand impact of the organization.She has expanded the scope andsize of the research programs;enhanced our publications;increased the engagement ofmembers around the country;created innovative new fellow-ship programs for early-careerscholars; established an archivesto improve access to the Acad-emy’s records; and overseenthe most successful fundrais-ing effort in our history,” Cabotsaid. “This new title reflects thevalue that the Board places inLeslie’s leadership and our con-½dence in her ability to bringthe Academy to new levels ofdistinction.”

Berlowitz has helped to advancemajor Academy initiatives onenergy policy, federal fundingof science, the independenceof the judiciary, and new normsfor business practices. A nation-

Leslie Cohen Berlowitz named President of the Academy

al leader on humanities policy,she led the creation of the Acad-emy’s Humanities Initiativeand its widely cited HumanitiesIndicators.

Berlowitz is currently directingthe Academy’s response to acongressional call to assess thestate of the humanities and so-cial sciences and their impacton the country’s education sys-tem, economic competitive-ness, and cultural diplomacy.

“It is a great privilege to servethe members of the Academy,”Berlowitz said. “This is an his-toric organization with a vitalcontemporary mission. I amgrateful to the of½cers and mem-bers for the faith they haveplaced in me and look forwardto collaborating with the Boardand the fellowship in the com-ing years as we work to servethe public good.”

Documents

Bulletin - American Academy of Arts & Sciences · Paul Sagan, Robert Darnton, David S. Ferriero, and Marjorie M. Scardino Cybersecurity and the Cloud Tom Leighton, Vinton G. Cerf,