American Academy elects Vassar College President Frances Fergusson

Vassar College President Frances Fergusson will join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodrow Wilson, and Vassar's own Maria Mitchell, the college's first professor of astronomy, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation's preeminent learned society and a research institution.

"I am deeply honored, delighted, and greatly surprised by this honor. Vassar's own Maria Mitchell was the first woman to be elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and I find it quite humbling to be in her company," Fergusson says. "I gather one of the excitements of the induction in October will be that I will sign the book of induction, the first signature of which is George Washington's."

The academy will welcome this year's new fellows and foreign honorary members at the annual induction ceremony at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 5.

The 2002 class of 177 fellows and 30 foreign honorary members includes a United States senator and representative, four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, three MacArthur Fellows and six Guggenheim Fellows. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, former Senator Warren Rudman, violinist Itzhak Perlman, Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston, author and physician Oliver Sacks, National Medal of Science for Research on Mental Illness recipient Nancy C. Andreasen, and Nobel Prize-winning chemist George Olah are among this year's new fellows.

This year's class also includes novelist Milan Kundera; Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe; Lord Anthony P. Lester, president of the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights; and Fritz W. Scharpf, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. The class also includes David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration and dean of the School of Medicine at Yale; writers Larry McMurtry and Grace Paley; economist and former National Economic Adviser to President Clinton Laura D'Andrea Tyson; Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of the department of computer science at Stanford University; New York Times Editorial Board member Tina Rosenberg; Lawrence Sullivan, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School; Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian David Levering Lewis; Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; and businessman Leonard Lauder. A full list of new members is available on the academy website at http://www.amacad.org/members/new2002list.htm.

The selection of foreign honorary members continues the tradition of honoring distinguished experts and intellectuals from outside the United States whose work complements the values of the American Academy. Niels Bohr, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Albert Camus were among past elected foreign fonorary fembers.

"The Academy is pleased to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation's most illustrious learned society. Election to the American Academy is the result of a highly competitive process that recognizes those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. Leslie C. Berlowitz, the academy's executive officer, added, "The American Academy is unique among America's academies

for its breadth and scope. Throughout its history, the academy has gathered individuals with diverse perspectives to participate in studies and projects focusing on advancing intellectual thought and constructive action in American society."

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." The academy has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of its membership, the American Academy conducts thoughtful, innovative, non-partisan studies on international security, social policy, education, and the humanities.

For additional information, contact the Office of College Relations at (845) 437-7400. Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

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Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Tuesday, May 28th, 2002.