TOP-NOTCH TALENT

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences inducted its 2004 class Saturday at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. Residents of the New York area were among distinguished scientists, intellectuals, businessmen, educators, composers, writers, and artists in attendance. Referring to its members as “thinkers and doers,” Academy president Patricia Meyer Spacks said the organization’s mission is to bring fine minds together to serve society. She referred to its members as “thinkers and doers.”

At this great gathering of gray matter, a curator of comparative ethnology could rub shoulders with one who developed theories of spatial co evolution and continental biogeography. A philosopher who champions the causal theory and reliabilism in epistemology might have met an experimental cosmologist or a pioneer in the study of insect thermoregulation. It was as though the Chronicle of Higher Education had sprung to life and assembled in a room.

Founded by John Adams and others in 1780, the Academy aims “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” In its long history, foreign honorary members have included figures such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Foreign members in this year’s class include artists Anselm Kiefer, Lucian Freud, and Gerhard Richter.

With its dark wood and soaring architecture, the Gothic Revival interior of Sanders Theatre resembles a cross between Westminster Abbey and an Adirondack lodge. Flanked by statues of patriot James Otis and Josiah Quincy, a former president of Harvard from 1829 to 1845, five new Academy members gave small talks on large subjects. The director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Steven V.W. Beckwith, said that America needs a more scientifically literate citizenry to avoid the danger of substituting superstition for understanding. A circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 7th circuit, Diane Wood, asked if there is any true international-level law and if there isn’t, “Is this a problem?”

Neurobiologist and Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman addressed the issue of brain privacy, and considered whether the rise of certain drugs may lead to classes of “chemical haves and have-nots” – and childrearing made into something of a competition. He said some describe athletes playing sports without performance enhancement drugs “playing naked.”

The president of Duke University, Richard Broadhead, spoke about his own adolescence – “a low water mark in the history of self esteem” – when others at school were cooler, more handsome, more popular or better at athletics. Though he had known poetry since nursery rhymes, the first time Mr. Broadhead “got it” was in his 14th year. Upon reading a Shakespearean sonnet, part of which reads:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone be weep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

He realized, “I know that person,” he said. And that “person is me,” Mr. Broadhead said to audience laughter.

Senator Sarbanes’s topic was corporate misbehavior. He said one must not only punish “bad apples” but consider the reasons behind their actions. To illustrate this point, he recalled an anecdote by Columbia University Law professor John Coffee Jr. that in 18thcentury London a penalty for pickpockets was hanging. Hundreds might gather in order to see the execution, and maneuvering through them would be numerous pickpockets.

Among the 177 new fellows were Fang-Hua Lin of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University; a physics professor at Columbia University, Alfred H. Mueller, who has led the study of high-energy quantum chromodynamics; a professor of genetics and microbiology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Marian Carlson; a senior vice president and curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, Michael John Novacek; George Yancopoulos of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown; a Columbia economics professor, Michael Woodford; a professor at Columbia Law School, George Fletcher; New York University’s Ned Block, who is known for his critical reactions to functionalism; Rutgers University philosopher Alvin Ira Goldman, and the director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Jean Strouse.

After the induction ceremony, Ms. Strouse was talking with Hermione Lee of Oxford University. Also among the new 2004 class were Columbia University humanities professor Gustavo Perez-Firmat; Columbia University Law school professor Thomas Wendell Merrill; New York visual artist Brice Marden; composers John Corigliano of the Juilliard School and Joan Tower of Bard College; Preston Robert Tisch of Loews Corporation; Anne Tatlock of Fiduciary Trust International; Robert Gregg Stone Jr. of Kirby Corporation; Gerald Rosenfeld of Rothschild North America; Henry H. Arnhold of Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder Holdings, who is a board member of the New School University; Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello; Frances Degen Horowitz, president of the Graduate School and University Center at City University of New York; Perseus vice chairman Richard Holbrooke, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, and poet Sharon Olds.

Sometimes the institutional affiliations were long enough – such as Max-Planck-Institut fur Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne, Germany, or Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung – that their affiliations and titles were still being formally announced by the time they arrived at mid-stage to shake hands with the president, vice-president, and deputy secretary of the Academy. Each inductee then walked to the far end of the stage, where upon a slanted wooden desk sat a book where each signed their name.

One truly marquee name inducted was Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization and the Shubert Foundation. His name will soon adorn a theater on West 45th Street.

Nietzsche once wrote that his readers must be “accustomed to living on mountaintops” to understand him. These scholars likewise constituted a kind of mountain range, each peaks in their respective fields.

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KNICK-KNACKS

Toni Goodale, Rona Jaffe, Edward Jay Epstein, Monica Crowley, as well as A.M. Rosenthal and Shirley Lord, were among those at the Broadhurst Theater in Midtown to hear a panel discussion celebrating the launch of Harold Evans’s book “They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine – Two Centuries of Innovators” (Little Brown).

Panelist Ted Turner entertained the crowd with quotable gems such as “Anytime of day, the Cartoon Network has three times the ratings of CNN. No wonder we have got such a screwed up country.”

Speaking about energy, the outspoken Mr. Turner said oil is going to get even more expensive because China is buying it now too for their cars. “You can’t blame them,” he said, “If you were riding around in a rickshaw, you’d want a car too.” When asked if he’d ever had a failure, he offered, “How about marriages?”