american academy of arts & sciences Bulletin academy of arts & sciences vol. lxiii, no. 3 Page 15...

spring 2010 Bulletin

The Humanities: The Case for Data,

Book of Members, Page 6

From the Archives, Page 36

inside:

american academy of arts & sciences

vol. lxiii, no. 3

Page 15

Challenges to Business and Society in theTwenty-First Century: The Way ForwardRajat K. Gupta and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.

Daniel Yankelovich

Page 7

A New Literary History of AmericaWerner Sollors and Greil Marcus

David Brady and Pamela S. Karlan

Page 22

A Conversation on Evolving U.S. Policy toward RussiaRobert Legvold and Thomas Graham

Contents

Academy Projects

The Humanities: The Case for Data 1

Book of Members 6

Academy Meetings

A New Literary History of AmericaWerner Sollors and Greil Marcus 7

Challenges to Business and Society in theTwenty-First Century: The Way Forward

Rajat K. Gupta and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. 15

A Conversation on Evolving U.S. Policy toward Russia

Robert Legvold and Thomas Graham 22

Noteworthy 32

From the Archives 36

Friday, October 8, 2010Evening Reception and Program–Cambridge

Saturday, October 9, 20102010 Induction Ceremony–Cambridge

Calendar of Events

Fellows and Friends Again Contribute More than$1.5 million to the Annual FundIn the recently completed ½scal year, the Academy’s Annual Fund surpassed lastyear’s total and the $1.5 million mark for the fourth consecutive year–nearly 1,200donors helped to accomplish this goal.

Development Committee Chair Alan Dachs noted that “every Annual Fund giftwas important in achieving these results. Academy research projects and studiesare having more influence and impact than ever before on informed national policy.This important work and other Academy programs and activities across the countryrely on resources provided by a successful Annual Fund.”

The Academy is indebted to the Fellows, friends, foundations, and staff membersfor supporting its work. We are particularly grateful to a growing number of leader-ship donors. A complete list of contributors to the 2009–2010 Annual Fund willappear in the Academy’s Annual Report, which will be published in the fall.

The members of the Development and Public Relations Committee in fy 2010 wereLouis W. Cabot, Robert A. Alberty, and Alan M. Dachs, cochairs; David Alexander,Jesse H. Choper, Michael E. Gellert, Charles M. Haar, Stephen Stamas, Donald M.Stewart, and Nicholas T. Zervas.

Sunday,October 10, 2010Sunday Symposium–Cambridge

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

Save the Date:Induction Weekend

Bulletin of the American Academy, Spring 2010 1

Academy Projects

In her 2008 plenary address to the annualmeeting of the Association of American Col-leges and Universities, philosopher and legalscholar Martha Nussbaum spoke eloquentlyof how a liberal arts education conveys hu-manistic “abilities of citizenship” such ascritical thinking, cultural literacy, and nar-rative imagination. She emphasized thatthese abilities promote human developmentin the broadest terms and encourage respon-sible engagement in a pluralistic democracyand in the global economy.1 Nussbaum’scase for the liberal arts, and for the human-ities in particular, merits serious considera-tion, especially at a time when the conceptof a knowledge-based society is widely em-braced and policy-makers focus on econom-ic competitiveness and Americans’ scienti½cand technical competencies.

How do we determine whether our collegesand universities are adequately cultivating“abilities of citizenship” in our students?How do we assess the teaching of complexliteracy skills and critical thinking? Whatdo we know about student attainment inforeign languages and cultural understand-ing as graduates set out to pursue careers ina rapidly changing global economy? Whatdo we know about the humanities workforcewithin and beyond educational institutions?The search for answers to questions such asthese would bene½t from reliable, compre-hensive, and ongoing quantitative informa-tion about the state of the humanities in ourcountry. As Francis Oakley, Edward DorrProfessor of History and President Emeri-tus of Williams College, has suggested, “Forthe humanities, perhaps surprisingly, suchdata [have been] either altogether lacking,or were inconsistently assembled, hard to

access, poorly disseminated, unwittinglyignored, and routinely underutilized.”2

Scientists have long recognized the value ofhaving statistical data to measure the scopeand vitality of education, research, and work-force development in their ½elds. Such datasupport evidence-based policy discussionsin professional and governmental forums.Since 1982, the National Science Board hasbeen required by law to publish Science andEngineering Indicators (sei), a biennial reportproviding a range of quantitative informa-tion about U.S. science, engineering, and

technology in domestic and global contexts.With the sei data available as an authori-tative point of reference, stakeholders canengage in well-informed discussions andmake consequential decisions about invest-ments in science and technology, includingstem education and basic research in col-leges and universities.

Nothing similar exists for the humanitieseven though the 1985 reauthorization of theNational Endowment for the Humanitiescalled for a “national information and datacollection system on humanities scholars,educational and cultural groups, and audi-ences.”3 Such data are critical. Following

The Humanities: The Case for Data

For the ½rst time, we havein one place baseline statis-tics about many areas ofconcern to the humanitiescommunity.

1 Martha Nussbaum, “Education for Pro½t, Educationfor Freedom,” Liberal Education 95 (3) (Summer 2009):6–13.

2 Francis Oakley, “The Humanities Indicators Proj-ect,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences62 (2) (Winter 2009): 27.3 National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Code,Title 20, sec. 956, 1985.

the model of the sei, the American Academyof Arts and Sciences initiated the HumanitiesIndicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org),a demonstration project to enrich publicunderstanding of the humanities by increas-ing our empirical knowledge of the human-ities in action, both within schools andcolleges as well as in other social contexts.Supported by generous grants from theWilliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation andthe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, theIndicators are the culmination of severalyears of planning and collaboration withmany of the country’s leading humanitiesorganizations, including the National En-dowment for the Humanities and the Amer-ican Council of Learned Societies. Theproject was codirected by Academy FellowsSteven Marcus, the George Delacorte Pro-fessor in the Humanities Emeritus at Co-lumbia University; Patricia Meyer Spacks,the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of EnglishEmerita at the University of Virginia; andNorman M. Bradburn, the Tiffany andMargaret Blake Distinguished Service Pro-fessor Emeritus at the University of Chicagoand senior fellow at the National OpinionResearch Center (norc).

The Indicators provide a prototype for col-lecting data necessary to answer questionsabout the state of the humanities and howthey are faring. For the ½rst time, we havein one place baseline statistics about manyareas of concern to the humanities com-munity, including k–12 education in thehumanities, undergraduate and graduateeducation in the humanities, the humani-ties workforce, research and funding for thehumanities, and the humanities in Ameri-can life beyond the academy. The projectalso enables the coherent tracking of a vari-ety of trends in the humanities. Narrativesummaries of salient trends and relevantcontexts support more than seventy indica-

2 Bulletin of the American Academy, Spring 2010

tors and two hundred graphs. The oversightof Norman Bradburn and norc ensuresthat the Indicators conform to the higheststandards of accuracy and usefulness.

Since publicly launching its online databasein January 2009, the Academy has frequentlyupdated the ½ndings. More than one millionvisits to the Indicators website suggestwidespread interest in this portfolio ofstatistics. We hope to sustain and expandthe project as new data, methodologies, anddisciplinary questions emerge. Past effortsto collect humanities data have been epi-sodic, with the dissemination of ½ndingslimited to occasional publications. For datato be valuable to the widest constituency,their collection and use must be ongoing,and we look to governmental agencies andthe scholarly community to help sustain usin this effort.

The Indicators allow us to assess how wellwe are doing as a society in educating stu-dents in the competencies that the humani-ties foster. Existing and new data will helpacademic departments and cultural organi-zations understand trends, determine pri-orities, and measure progress in speci½careas. Given enhanced capacity to interprettrends and compare results, educationalleaders, policy-makers, scholars, teachers,and interested citizens can form a morecomplete picture of what is working andwhere interventions are needed.

For example, at the primary and secondaryschool levels, Indicators on pro½ciency inreading and writing at different ages, as wellas on knowledge of U.S. history and civics,show mixed results. On the whole, therehas been a slight national improvement inbasic literacy skills since 1971. But a consis-tent pattern of decreasing achievement as

students get older is also evident, suggestingthat students do not continue to developthe competencies introduced in primaryschool.

� More than half of the students graduat-ing from our high schools in 2006 failedto demonstrate basic knowledge of his-tory, and over a third of the studentslacked basic knowledge of civics.

� Humanities competency is concentratedin a relatively small number of students.Only a modest percentage of the nation’syoung people are leaving high school withat least pro½ciency–versus only the mostbasic skills–in history (13 percent) orcivics (27 percent). [Indicators i–3 and i–4; see Figures 1 and 2]

Indicators on k–12 teacher quali½cationstell us that the humanities face the same is-sues of teacher preparedness as math andscience. The lack of well-prepared teachersis especially severe in some core humanitiessubjects.

� In 2003–2004, the percentage of highschool students (26.5 percent) taught bya highly quali½ed history teacher waslower than for any other major subjectarea. (The de½nition of “highly quali½ed”is a teacher who has certi½cation and apostsecondary degree in the subject heor she teaches.) Similarly, the percentageof high school students (28.2 percent)taught history by someone lacking acerti½cation and a postsecondary de-gree in history was greater than for anyof the other measured subject areas.

� The percentage of least-prepared highschool history teachers was more thandouble the percentage for mathematics(12.1 percent) and ½ve times the percent-age for the natural sciences (5.2 percent)in the same year. [Indicator i–9a; seeFigure 3]

As we set priorities for the American educa-tional system, we should consider theseIndicators in the context of how teacherpreparedness relates to student perfor-mance, how our public commitment tok–12 humanities instruction influencesthe educational choices that students latermake, and how the curricula of our publicand private colleges prepare students to

become primary and secondary teachers inhumanities subjects.

Data on postsecondary education con½rma decline in bachelor’s and doctoral degreecompletions in humanities programs overthe last forty years, following peak levels inthe late 1960s and early 1970s. A modest re-covery starting in the early 1990s continuedthrough at least 2004. In the three largestdisciplines–English, history, and foreignlanguages–data indicate slight declines inabsolute numbers of doctoral degrees in the½rst half of the past decade. As measuredagainst the increasing number of studentsnow enrolled in postsecondary education,however, the proportion of humanities de-grees has declined dramatically.

� Between 1970 and 2004, completed bach-elor’s degrees in English compared to allother undergraduate degrees dropped byabout 50 percent. [Indicator ii–18]

� Comparable or even greater changes inmarket share can be seen in history andforeign languages and, at the doctorallevel, for the humanities generally. [In-dicators ii–19, ii–20, and ii–10]

These data show that, overall, the humani-ties have lost signi½cant market share tovocational degrees, primarily business, asthe number of students entering collegehas increased. The declines are relevant notjust to the pipeline for future teachers andscholars in the humanities, but also to thepreparation of a literate, flexible, creativeAmerican workforce and a well-informedcitizenry. As Jim Leach, Chair of the Nation-al Endowment for the Humanities, has said,“We live in perilous times, but nothing canbe more costly than shortchanging the hu-manities.”4

Academy Projects

The Indicators allow us toassess how well we are doingas a society in educating stu-dents in the competenciesthat the humanities foster.

Overall, the humanitieshave lost signi½cant marketshare to vocational degrees,primarily business.

4 John Pitcher, “Leach: ‘Civility Crisis,’” Omaha World-Herald, November 7, 2009, www.omaha.com/article/20091107/NEWS01/711079841.


Moreover, in a global economy, we need tobe sure that our educational system devel-ops strong competencies in reading andwriting, cultural literacy, and foreign lan-guages. Some evidence suggests that we arein fact falling behind. For instance, China isnot only increasing its efforts in science andmath as it rapidly develops its trained work-force, but is also strengthening education inthe liberal arts. As Mark Yudof, President of

the University of California system, pointsout, it is a “great irony” that as countries inSouth and East Asia are “attempting to em-ulate the American example of investing inworld-class public higher education [the]example to which they are looking is erod-ing in the very place it originated.”5

The Importance of the Humanities for an Educated Citizenry

At an Academy conference on “The PublicGood: The Humanities in a Civil Society,”U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice DavidSouter made an important distinction be-tween the transformative but occasional“epiphanies” celebrated in the humanities

and the life-changing and lifelong “habitsof mind” that the humanities foster. JusticeSouter reminded us that these empoweringhabits of mind, formed when we are young,require continual nourishment. He under-scored the importance of the humanities forgood citizenship: without a strong ground-ing in history we cannot understand andprotect our democratic institutions orcomprehend the rulings of our courts.6

The Indicators tell us that as a nation ourhumanistic habits of mind are not faringwell. Much attention is paid to the impor-tance of science and mathematics educa-tion as an engine for economic vitality. Ad-

Academy Projects

5 Mark G. Yudof, “Challenges to Public Universities,”Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 62(2) (Winter 2009): 40.

In a global economy, we needto be sure that our education-al system develops strongcompetencies in reading andwriting, cultural literacy, andforeign languages.

6 David Souter, “The Public Good: The Humanitiesin a Civil Society,” American Academy of Arts andSciences, March 9, 2009, www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-16159.


vanced literacy, critical thinking, and civicunderstanding are equally important to ournational well-being and our capacity to in-novate. But instrumental arguments aloneare not enough to convey the signi½canceof the humanities. Don Michael Randel,President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foun-dation, de½nes the domains of the humani-ties, along with the arts, as including “thestudy of the values that support the pro-duction of knowledge and its proper appli-


7 Don Michael Randel, “The Public Good: Knowl-edge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society,”Dædalus 138 (1) (Winter 2009): 11.

The humanities continue to play a core role in highereducation. Student interest is strong. But to meet thedemand, four-year colleges and universities are increas-ingly relying on a part-time, untenured workforce.

Those are among the ½ndings of the Humanities Depart-mental Survey, conducted by the American Academy ofArts and Sciences and a consortium of disciplinary associations. The survey, available at www.humanitiesindicators.org/resources/survey.aspx, includes datacollected from English, foreign language, history, his-tory of science, art history, linguistics, and religion departments at approximately 1,400 colleges and uni-versities. It is the ½rst comprehensive survey to providegeneral cross-disciplinary data on humanities depart-ments.

The survey covers a broad range of topics, includingnumbers of departments and faculty members, facultydistributions by discipline, courses taught, tenure activ-ity, undergraduate majors and minors, and graduatestudents. The data provide new information about eachof the disciplines; they also allow comparisons acrossdisciplines. These data are especially important becausethe U.S. Department of Education has inde½nitely sus-pended the only nationally representative survey provid-ing information about humanities faculty (the NationalStudy of Postsecondary Faculty).

According to the Humanities Departmental Survey:

� Across the humanities, but especially in English andcombined English/foreign language departments, theprofessoriate at four-year colleges and universities isevolving into a part-time workforce. During the 2006–2007 academic year, only 38 percent of faculty membersin these departments were tenured. English depart-ments had the greatest proportion of non-tenure-track faculty (49 percent).

� When minors are included, undergraduate partici-pation in humanities programs is about 82 percentgreater than counting majors alone would suggest.For the 2006–2007 academic year, 122,100 studentscompleted bachelor’s degrees and 100,310 completedminor degrees in the three largest humanities disci-plines: English, foreign languages, and history.

� Reflecting the demands of a global economy, studentinterest in foreign language is strong. During the2006–2007 academic year, foreign language depart-ments awarded 28,710 baccalaureate degrees and hadthe largest number of students completing minors(51,670). Yet investment in a stable professoriate toteach and study foreign languages and literatures appears to be declining, with a signi½cant reductionin recruitment of full-time faculty members (39 per-cent fewer recruitments for full-time positions in2008–2009 than hires for 2007–2008) and fewertotal graduate students than faculty members, theonly surveyed discipline for which this was the case.

continued on page 6

cation in society [and] the study of, contem-plation of, and exploration of what it meansto be a human being and why and how weshould want to organize our lives in relationto one another around the globe.”7 To sup-port these fundamental pursuits, we needto continue to assess the state of the human-ities as we prepare students both to become

active participants in a democratic societyand to compete most effectively in a globaleconomy. Until recently, our evidence forclaims about the state of the humanities hadbeen largely anecdotal. With the Humani-ties Indicators, we can argue with data andconviction.

A version of this essay was published in Liberal Education 96 (1) (Winter 2010).

© 2010 by Leslie Berlowitz

Humanities Departmental Survey

As the Academy marks its 230th an-niversary, we are pleased to announcethat an updated version of the Book ofMembers is now available on the Acad-emy’s website (at www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/bookofmembers.aspx). We are grateful toJohn Warnock (Adobe Systems, Inc.)– a Fellow of the Academy and specialadvisor to the Archives Committee–for his extraordinary work in realizingthis searchable list of all members elect-ed to the Academy.

In 2006, the Academy published a Book ofMembers to celebrate its 225th anniver-sary. The volume identi½ed the morethan eleven thousand men and womenwho had been elected to the Academysince its founding in 1780. Though thedirectory was available on the Acad-emy’s website, it was a static and print-based document. Modi½cations–such as changes in living members’ af½lia-tions, adding years of death for recentlydeceased members, and including newclasses of members elected after 2005–could not be made.

With John’s extraordinary and generous assistance, the Acad-emy’s archives and publications staff are now able to update theBook of Members on a regular basis and produce an online direc-tory that includes members elected from 1780 to the present.

We express our warmest gratitude to John for his help with thisproject. His support and guidance have been invaluable.


Humanities Departmental Surveycontinued from page 5

� Turnover rates among humanities faculty werelow (only 2.5 percent of humanities faculty left theprofession through departure, retirement, or deathduring the two academic years preceding the sur-vey). Combined with recently instituted hiringfreezes on many campuses, career opportunitiesfor the next generation of scholars (there wereapproximately 84,000 graduate students in the sur-veyed ½elds during the 2006–2007 academic year)are limited.

� Approximately 87 percent of humanities depart-ments reported that their subject was part of thecore distribution requirements at their institution.

Several national disciplinary societies collaboratedwith the Academy to develop, ½eld, and interpret datagathered by the Humanities Departmental Survey: theAmerican Academy of Religion; American HistoricalAssociation; College Art Association; History of Sci-ence Society; Linguistic Society of America; and theModern Language Association. The American Coun-cil of Learned Societies and the American PoliticalScience Association also provided important assis-tance. The survey was administered by the StatisticalResearch Center of the American Institute of Physics,which also performed the basic data analysis.

Even though the humanities disciplines represent anessential core of the liberal arts curriculum, they havelong been data deprived. The empirical data now avail-able in the survey, along with the rich collection of in-formation already found in the Humanities Indicators,begin to ½ll that gap and to establish baselines thatwill allow stakeholders to track trends in the future.The Academy hopes that the Humanities DepartmentalSurvey can be expanded to include additional disciplinesand updated regularly, producing trend data that couldbe incorporated into the Humanities Indicators.

The Teagle Foundation provided support for the De-partmental Survey project and grants from the Williamand Flora Hewlett, Andrew W. Mellon, and RockefellerFoundations have advanced the Academy’s overallhumanities data initiative.

Academy Projects

Book of Members

John Warnock


Academy Meetings

A New Literary Historyof AmericaWerner Sollors and Greil Marcus

Introduction by Emilio Bizzi

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ess

Emilio Bizzi

Emilio Bizzi is Institute Professor and Investigatorat the McGovern Institute for Brain Research atthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He hasbeen a Fellow of the American Academy of Artsand Sciences since 1980. He served as the Acad-emy’s 44th President.

Introduction

Tonight, we have the pleasure of hearingfrom Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus, whowill discuss their new book, A New LiteraryHistory of America. They have done an in-credible job putting together in a single vol-ume a cultural history of the United Statesin the last four hundred years. They haveconsidered a number of topics, such as ½c-tion, drama, and poetry–but also a num-ber of unconventional genres, such as reli-gious sermons, children’s books, politicaladdresses, and other topics, in order to pro-vide a comprehensive view of the culturalcurrents in the United States. As Wernersays in the book, the goal of the project wasto produce not a comprehensive encyclo-pedia but a provocation.

Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M.Cabot Professor of English Literature andProfessor of African and African AmericanStudies at Harvard University. He has beencalled one of today’s foremost American-ists; his writings about ethnicity, literature,race, and history have broadened our un-derstanding of what it means to be Ameri-can. He was elected a Fellow of the Acade-my in 2001. His co-editor, Greil Marcus, isa writer, cultural critic, and acclaimed in-terpreter of the sound and soul of America.His 1975 book, Mystery Train, rede½ned pop-ular music criticism.

This presentation was given at the 1945th Stated Meeting held at the House of the Academy on September 24, 2009.


Werner Sollors

Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. CabotProfessor of English Literature and Professor ofAfrican and African American Studies at HarvardUniversity. He has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences since 2001.

In the course I am teaching now, we turnedthis week to Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.I came across the following passage in thebook: “The information the ancients didn’thave was very voluminous.” (This is apro-pos of passing the Rock of Gibraltar and re-alizing that they thought it was the end ofthe world.) Mark Twain continues: “Eventhe prophets wrote book after book and

epistle after epistle, yet never once hintedat the existence of a great continent on ourside of the water. Yet they must have knownit was there, I should think.” How can oneaddress this voluminous lack of informationin a literary history at this moment? JavierSolana, then Secretary General of the Coun-cil of the European Union, visited Harvardand said that what the European Unionneeds now is a narrative. “There is no nar-rative to guide us,” he lamented.

I think that also describes the task of liter-ary history today because there is a generalfatigue about grand narratives. There is theproblem, too, which David Perkins has il-

lustrated wonderfully, of limited plot linesin literary history. There always arises a gold-en age, or there comes a decline. There areavant-garde writers; there are epigonalwriters. The story is very quickly exhaust-ed, and it doesn’t amount to a very thrillingplot line. And then there are the readily ac-cessible electronic tools that make it mucheasier today for a student–or for anybody–to get to the bare facts, those facts that anineteenth-century literary historian wouldhave familiarized the reader with by em-ploying a narrative. What do we do in theage of Google with a literary history?

I also think of my own students’ experienceswith reading literary history. They tend tobrowse or look for particular informationon one author or one moment. Very fewstudents that I know read a literary historyfrom beginning to end.

Thinking of this state of affairs, I was veryhappy when Lindsay Waters, Executive Ed-itor for the Humanities at Harvard Univer-sity Press, asked me, almost four years agoto the day, to think of devising an Americanliterary history that would follow the mod-el of the histories that Harvard UniversityPress had published before: A New Historyof French Literature (1989) and A New Historyof German Literature (2004). They are organ-ized as assortments of essays held togetherby a chronological grid. Each essay is intro-duced with headlines and a particular date,but no attempt is made to create one periodnarrative or one continuous narrative frombeginning to end.

The dif½culty we encountered in talkingabout this project–in hundreds of emailmessages over the last four years–was thequestion of, what is the difference when wetry to approach American literary history?Obviously, it’s a much shorter span thandoing a history of German or French litera-ture. Also, with German and French litera-ture, one has a sense of a long-establishedliterary tradition that precedes the emer-gence of a nation-state. But in the UnitedStates, you ½nd so much emphasis on made-up things that are created under our noses:in print pamphlets, for example, we cantrace a line from the ½rst visions of whatthe American colonies could become tosuch documents as the Declaration of Inde-pendence.

Thus the idea emerged to focus on the pro-cess of making as something that could holdtogether a volume on America. When welook around the world today, we see thatthe whole world either loves or hates Amer-ica but knows American popular culturereally well–much better than after WorldWar II, when the early Americanists had tospread knowledge about writers like Mel-ville and Hawthorne through Americanstudies programs. Now, one can count onthe whole world knowing Superman orRambo or whatever else the popular cultureindustry has exported. So our idea was toinclude in the process of making aspects ofpopular culture, not just of high culture, andwe had to select them in a way that wouldmake sense for a volume in which literatureis still the central organizing device.

When Greil agreed to become co-editor ofthe book–which was the happiest momentfor me, to think of co-editing a book withMr. Lipstick Traces–we had to think aboutthe literary strand that could hold togethera great variety of topics and genres that in-cludes not only the literary genres Emilioalready talked about, but also political texts,the man-made environment, technologicalinventions, and so forth. We decided onthe aspect of literariness: of something thatis textual, that can be read, that has a delin-eation resembling the literary. For example,an entry on Chuck Berry mentions that hewrote an autobiography, so the textual an-gle is given there. We have a wonderful en-try on the Mergenthaler Linotype machine.(Mark Twain, of course, invested in themechanical typesetter that didn’t make it,

We tried to get contributingauthors who had not previ-ously published books ontopics they were assigned . . .Our slogan was always thatthey should surprise not onlythe readers but also them-selves with what they werewriting.

Academy Meetings

The idea emerged to focuson the process of making assomething that could hold to-gether a volume on America.


the Paige Compositor, and almost wentbankrupt as a result of it.) The Mergen-thaler typesetter teaches you interestingthings, such as why we say uppercase andlowercase (because that’s really how thetypesetting worked: with a case that washigher up and a case that was lower), that,again, relate directly to the textual.

With that in mind, we could include topicsthat would be, in a broad sense, literary–from the ½rst map in which the name Amer-ica appeared to Obama’s election, the latterof which was actually an afterthought.When Obama was elected in November2008, the volume’s last entry was an essayon Hurricane Katrina. It seemed importantto include the 2008 election, and we thoughtof asking an artist to comment. It wouldhave been too easy to have a political puffpiece of sorts, of inflated hopes, of the rhet-oric of the moment. We asked Kara Walkerto contribute, and she did a visual piece, aseries of her paper cuts with some writingin them. Again, the textual is there, but thewriting includes such phrases as wtf andomg that I think the text messagers amongyou can easily decode.

The amazement at things that have beencreated, that have been made, that havebeen made up is something that permeatesthe volume, including not only memorableprose but also unforgettable visuals: themoments at which drip paintings, populartunes, and technologies are created. As wethought of more and more topics, webounced ideas off each other, saying we really want this and that–even the electricchair was on the board at one point. We be-gan to realize, too, that it would be impos-sible to have a single volume, even a volumeof one thousand pages, that could claimsomething like complete coverage. Wefound a very good board of editors whohelped us, ½rst, to devise and settle on top-ics; the board also met with us twice inmeetings where we came up with almost

four hundred possible topics. We could ½ta few more than two hundred essays in thebook, so we had to radically reduce the num-ber of essays. We tried to negotiate how wewould give enough space to the high canon-ical authors like Hawthorne, Melville, T. S.Eliot, Faulkner, and O’Neill; to authors whoonce were canonical such as Longfellow(who gets a very good essay in the book);to middlebrow writers like James Jones,author of From Here to Eternity; to middle-brow institutions, as shown by an entry onthe Book-of-the-Month Club; and to writ-ers from minority groups who had no placein some histories of the past, including, forexample, Chief Simon Pokagon, one of the½rst American Indian ½ction writers.

The discussion of topics led to surprisingdouble entries where, in order to ½t differ-ent subjects into one entry, wonderfulmatches were made. Longfellow and Wil-liam Carlos Williams appear together astransnational poets. Dreiser and Whartonare together in one essay; T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence in another; Henry Ford andDiego Rivera, brought together by an invi-tation to lunch that Ford extended to Rivera,in still another. One of my favorites is thepairing of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone withthe Wind, both published in 1936 as South-ern epics but with quite different trajecto-ries. There’s John F. Kennedy’s inauguraladdress together with Joseph Heller’s Catch22, which gives you a sense of the surprisingdouble entries. We tried to get contributingauthors who had not previously publishedbooks on topics they were assigned; we didnot want rehashes of already publishedwriting, but writers who cared about thetopics and would try to write surprisingthings. Our slogan was always that theyshould surprise not only the readers but al-so themselves with what they were writing.

Among the contributors are also a greatnumber of contemporary writers who com-mented on authors of the past: among oth-ers, we have Walter Mosley writing on hard-boiled ½ction, Bharati Mukherjee on TheScarlet Letter, Ishmael Reed on HuckleberryFinn, John Edgar Wideman on Charles Ches-nutt, and Andrei Codrescu on the literatureof New Orleans.

Greil and I talked about the very protractedprocess of editing the essays down to theright size. They’re all between about 2,200and 2,500 words, some a little shorter, somea little longer. We also tried to “de-acade-mize” the book, so words like heteronormativ-ity were struck (although I noticed that itappears once in the book, prefaced by “whatgender theorists now call”). Greil is alsowonderful in getting rid of clichés and ½llerwords.

One of the things I am particularly happywith is the great number of minority writ-ers who are contributors but who don’twrite in the book about only the minoritygroup with which they are ordinarily asso-ciated; the essays on The Great Gatsby, on ABoy’s Own Story, on Melville, Wharton, andDreiser, on The Wizard of Oz, on Tarzan, andon Babbitt offer such examples.

The formal unit that emerges from thepredicament of writing cultural historytoday, or writing literary history, when thenarrative is exhausted is a book that allowsyou to create your own narrative by readingthe essays in a particular sequence. The bookhas a wonderful website (http://newliteraryhistory.com) with twelve essays that youcan look at as samplers. It’s set up as a deckof cards–“Pick a card, pick any card,” asGreil has said–to offer a clue on how toread the book. You can click on a card tohave an essay come up, and you can thenread it in different ways. You can read thebook in chronological sequences, whereyou read ½ve essays that are all set in 1925,or you can read it in any genre sequence inwhich you’re interested. It is, in its ownform, a response to the predicament thatwe’re in: trying not to devise grand narra-tives and yet still being able to providesomething like a historical overview.

The book allows you to create your own narrative by reading the essays in aparticular sequence.

The book is a response to thepredicament that we’re in:trying not to devise grandnarratives and yet still beingable to provide somethinglike a historical overview.

A New Literary History of America


Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is an author, rock critic, and col-umnist. His books include “Mystery Train: Im-ages of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music” (1975),“Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20thCentury” (1989), and “The Shape of Things toCome: Prophecy and the American Voice” (2006).

I would like to emphasize some other as-pects of this project, namely its fluidity. Wehad a wonderful board of ten people whotook part in two two-day, early-morning-until-late-evening marathons without theslightest hint of testiness, of turf defense,of “I know more about this than you do.”That sentiment was always absent. I thinkeverybody who took part in this project wasstunned by how much they didn’t knowabout what has happened in the last ½vehundred years in this expansive territory.People were always open.

Things were made up as we went along.We did have a heroic meeting where we cuteverything down to 220 essays, maybe 240.We thought we’d lose some essays by attri-tion–as if that was going to happen afterwe’d already argued, discussed, and real-ized a particular essay was crucial for thebook. Then came the point when GeraldEarly–essayist, American culture critic, and

professor at Washington University in St.Louis–said, “What about Linda Lovelace?”Everybody turned to him, and he wasn’tkidding. We said, “What do you mean?”and he said, “This was a cultural turningpoint. Everything changed after this, andour culture was never the same.” The basicargument was this: Here’s someone whohas written four autobiographies with dif-ferent “as told tos” and co-writers. Four au-tobiographies! Two were all about “I was alibertine. I did everything.” And two were,“I was a slave. I was forced to do everything.”She wrote–she did not invent–but shemined the confessional genre in a way thatnobody else had. She both exposed every-thing she had to expose and hid within thatgenre, as writers always do. This has beenthe dominant form of literature in this coun-try over the last thirty or forty years. Whobetter to represent this genre than LindaLovelace?

He convinced us. We thought about whocould write the piece: Ann Marlowe is aNew York writer who wrote a book aboutheroin and a book about a love affair. Shenow covers Afghanistan for The Weekly Stan-dard and The Wall Street Journal. She’s a veryconservative writer politically and a veryunconservative writer in every other way.But it turned out to be like my effort to ½ndsomeone to do the Absalom, Absalom!/Gonewith the Wind entry. For that essay, I contact-ed Lee Smith, who is a great Southern nov-elist born in Virginia and who now lives inChapel Hill. She has written, I think, ninenovels, my favorite of which is The Devil’sDream. This is a woman in her 60s–a whitewoman in her 60s who is a deep Southern-er. She said, “I’ve never read Gone with theWind; I’ve seen the movie.” I didn’t believeit, but she promised she had never read thenovel. You can’t really say, “I’d like you totake this on; it’s only a thousand pages.” So I called Bobbie Ann Mason, another South-ern writer from Kentucky and about thesame age. Again: “I’ve never read Gone withthe Wind; I’ve seen the movie.” I just didn’tbelieve it.

In the same way, when I called Marlowe andsaid, “Ann, how would you like to writeabout Linda Lovelace?” she said, “I’ve nev-er seen Deep Throat.” Here was this culturalilliteracy among people who we thought

would be perfect for these contributions.So Ann got a copy of the movie online. Itseemed to be a tenth-generation dub, andshe said it was very bad, hard to watch even.But Ann dove into those four autobiogra-phies by Linda Lovelace. She excavatedthose four books. She lived in those fourbooks.

There did come a point during our brain-storming meeting when, as Werner said, wewere saying, “Oh, the electric chair!” and“What about the Pez Dispenser?” (I don’tthink that last one really came up, but it washeading in that direction.) That’s whenDavid Thomson, one of the few editorialboard members who is not an academicbut is a great ½lm critic and ½lm historian,novelist, and social historian, just aboutpounded the table and said, “This book hasgot to get a lot more conventional beforeit gets crazy.” We turned around, and weturned back to Emerson, back to Heming-way, back to Jefferson. We began to see thatthere needed to be anchors before we cutthe anchor. We ended up with two entrieson Emerson, on “The American Scholar”and “The Divinity School Address,” andthe easiest thing in the world would havebeen to ½nd experts on Emerson and havethem give us a cool, plain, simple accountof how these addresses are touchstones inAmerican culture. But that’s exactly whatwe didn’t want and exactly what we didn’tget. We got someone who read these ad-dresses as if for the ½rst time and askedquestions like, What’s going on here?What’s happening? Why is this being saidnow? What does it sound like today? I re-member reading those entries and feelingas if I had never before encountered thesubjects of those essays. That sense of reve-

Academy Meetings

Every one of these essays issomebody confronting thelanguage of his or her sub-ject and trying to ½nd thelanguage that will open it up.

In every case, this is a mat-ter of people attempting totalk to their subject matterand make their subject mat-ter talk to them. It is literaryin the best, most live, andleast pretentious sense.


lation happened again and again, and it’swhy the book is something you can read forpleasure, something that engages the read-er through the engagement of the writersthemselves.

The most frightening piece for me wasRobert O’Meally’s on Billie Holiday. Thepieces were supposed to be 2,500 words atmost, and O’Meally’s was clearly over 6,000words. There is only one way to cut a 6,000-word essay down to 2,500 words: with ameat cleaver. I got it down to about 2,100words, and it was a very shapely essay then.

Part of what was cut from that essay, though,was a passionate cry about Gayl Jones, anAfrican American novelist who, in the mid-1970s, wrote two books, Corregidora and Eva’sMan, which got some attention. After thatshe pretty much disappeared, although shewrote a couple of other novels years later.Her personal life blew up, and she withdrew.People thought she was dead. So O’Meallyreshaped his material on Jones, and thatbecame a new entry, on its own terms. Somepeople have already said, “Gayl Jones? Whoknows about Gayl Jones? Who cares aboutGayl Jones? What about John Updike?What about Don DeLillo?” Well, whatabout them? Jones is somebody we put ourmoney on; we put our bet on her. We’ll seewhat happens.

Kara Walker, who contributed the ½nal pieceon the 2008 presidential election, said at onepoint, “I’m too busy. I can’t possibly dothis.” She did say she wanted to make itclear that Harvard would not own the origi-nals of the artwork that she supplied. Shesaid something like, “I’d feel really bad ifHarvard owned the originals and then theyturned around and sold them for a quarterof a million dollars.” I said, “Oh, really.That’s interesting.” She didn’t mentionwhat she was being paid, which was reallykind of that amount reduced by a certainnumber of zeros. In the end, her attitudewas, “I can’t possibly say no to this. You’reasking me to have the last word in the his-tory of the country? Who could say no tothat?” And that’s pretty much how peoplereacted, one after the other. People who weinvited to contribute to this book trustedthe project more than we did.

We have had a lot of dif½culty explainingwhy this is called A New Literary History ofAmerica. What does that mean? We’ve comeup with a lot of really good or not-so-goodexplanations. But the best came in one ofthe early reviews of the book. It said, “Thisis a literary history,” stressing the literary.Every one of these essays is somebody con-fronting the language of his or her subjectand trying to ½nd the language that willopen it up. In every case, this is a matter ofpeople attempting to talk to their subjectmatter and make their subject matter talkto them. It is literary in the best, most live,and least pretentious sense–if we’ve suc-ceeded. If we haven’t, we won’t have to ex-plain what it’s about.

Question

How did you think about the audience forthis book, both your ideal audience and whatyou really think the audience will be nowthat it’s done?

Werner Sollors

We talked during the editing process aboutremoving the overly academic language, sowe had, ½rst, a general reader in mind, areader who would not already be an experton the subject and who would not say, “Oh,but you forgot this and that secondary es-say.” Rather, we aimed for somebody whowould be opening to a subject as if for the

½rst time. We also agreed to reduce, perhapscompletely remove, references that wouldimply the book was written only for anAmerican audience. So phrases like “in ourtradition” or “in this country,” which arehard to translate into Chinese without de-parting from the original, we tried to avoid.We imagined an intelligent, curious readeranywhere, one who is not a specialist. (I thinknobody in the world can be a specialist onall these topics.) That was the ideal thatwe were going for. I don’t know who thereal reader is, but that was certainly theideal we had in mind.

Greil Marcus

It’s a book to be read for pleasure as opposedto enlightenment. It’s not a book that’s sup-posed to be good for you in that sense. Myideal reader has always been someone whois walking down the street and trips over abook lying on the sidewalk. After he kicksthe book for having tripped him, he picks itup, opens it, and says, “This looks interest-ing.” Every essay here had to have enoughinformation in it so that someone who knewnothing whatsoever about the subject notonly could follow what was being said butalso could be drawn in and engaged. Thatwas every writer’s job. People were notwriting for their academic peers or theirnonacademic peers. For me, it was the rev-elation of my own ignorance that was sothrilling. Again and again, I read essays onsubjects I know nothing about, and thewriter had to be able to suck me in, had toleave me at the end saying, “I want to knowmore about this.” The audience is anybodywho thinks this is a really great cover andwonders what’s inside.

Question

I was struck by the impression that you wereinnovating a kind of emergent process thathadn’t existed before–that your processwas almost as important as your very cre-ative and innovative product. The hundredsof email messages back and forth, the brain-storming meeting, the ½guring out the jux-tapositions, and the marathon winnowingmeeting: all of that was essential in the cre-ation of this vision of a new kind of literaryhistory. Could you comment more on thatand how self-conscious you were of it?

Werner Sollors

The self-consciousness went to the extentthat, in one meeting, somebody proposedthat the last entry should be about the pub-lication of the literary history itself, whichwe fortunately got rid of. But I think theself-consciousness inherent in creating atext such as we were–trying to be textualand literary in approaching American cul-ture more broadly–was certainly there,and it created its own excitement. A num-ber of the members of the editorial board,


The majority of entries was always literary.


the contributors, and Greil and I felt wewere all in the process together. It was, in asense, the most exciting project I’ve been apart of in my whole academic life. You hadthis invigorating feeling of something hap-pening at the moment of deciding this orchanging that. Removing, for example, allbirth and death dates of authors was a realrelief. We said we’d put them in the index,but by the time we got to the index, we for-got about them. You can go to Wikipediaand look them up; we don’t need birth anddeath dates. These were freeing momentsin the process that I found very exciting.

Greil Marcus

Bill Clinton once said something I reallyliked. I don’t know how true it is, but I likedit. He referred to the old democratic princi-ple that most people can do most jobs. (Ithink he was talking about putting togetherhis cabinet.) That was pretty much the prin-ciple we went on: that most intelligent,questioning people can write about damnnear anything. We did go to people who

had an interest and who knew something,except sometimes people would say, “Idon’t know anything about this, but I’llgive it my best.” Farah Grif½n acceptedthe notion of writing about Edith Wharton’sThe House of Mirth and Theodore Dreiser’sSister Carrie in one essay because these nov-els seem to tell the same story in very dif-ferent ways at pretty much the same time.The story is about a rupture in the idea ofwhat the country was and what it could be.Farah said she wanted to do this, and I said,“Great, Farah, this is terri½c.” Afterward,she said to me, “You know, I hate Dreiser,and I’m not going to write about him.” Ithought, “Okay, that was sort of the point,but what the hell.” I don’t know if she waspulling my leg, but she wrote an essay de-

scribing exactly how and where Carrie Mee-ber and Lily Bart would have met, if theyhad. And you think, “I didn’t realize theymet. Oh, wait a minute, they aren’t real.”

When we reached the end of the book, werealized we had a serious problem. The bookwas ½nished. Everything was in; everythingwas edited. Werner and I were patting eachother on the back, and we realized that therewere two things we didn’t have: an essay onThe Sound and the Fury and an essay on Moby-Dick. I won’t go into why that happened, butthat’s where we were. So we flipped a coin:he did Faulkner; I did Melville. By then,though, we knew what the book was. Weknew how people had risen to an occasionwe hadn’t even fully de½ned. We knew whatwe were up against, how high the bar was.People will judge whether we came up to it.

Question

Did Elvis Presley come into the mix at anypoint, and if so, is there a good story abouthow you dealt with him or chose not to dealwith him?

Greil Marcus

That’s very tricky. Of course Elvis came up.I felt uncomfortable about it and stayed outof the discussion because I’ve written a lotabout Elvis–two-and-a-half books, actually.The argument was made for Chuck Berry,and as Werner said, this is a literary history.Chuck Berry wrote an autobiography. As apiece of writing, it’s extraordinary, just asBob Dylan’s Chronicles is. Both of these booksare clearly written, and they weren’t writtenwith somebody. You can read and you cansee the choices between words that the au-thor has made. This wasn’t read into a taperecorder. We thought, this is someone whohas shaped his story. He has made an effortto affect how people will understand whohe was and what he did. I think there wassomething in The New York Times aboutChuck Berry being chosen over Elvis be-cause he wrote his own songs, and I thought,“Is that why? I don’t remember that.” That’snot a standard I believe in. It was becausehe wrote an extraordinary book. That’s why –and Elvis has gotten a lot of press.

Werner Sollors

I think that was a full account of the discus-sion. I can only go back to the point at whichwe said we are not aspiring to full coverage.Representing something by a suggestive es-say that’s in the vicinity should be suf½cient.

Question

Can you say more about how you wentabout keeping those pillars, and whetheryou consciously crafted the book as a re-sponse to more traditional histories ofAmerican literature? Did you have theNorton Anthology in front of you to say,this is what we’re not doing?

Greil Marcus

That’s a really good question because theNorton Anthology did come up. It might havebeen placed on the table at some point, andI think the reaction was, “No, we don’t wantto look at this. We really have to hash thisout.” In terms of what you’re calling ourpillars, there was never a question of Jeffer-son not being there. There was a questionabout John Adams and which of his workswe were going to write about, but Adamshad already broken his way into the room.This meant we had to think in a differentmode for the next two hours. Who are thepeople or what are the works this book ab-solutely has to have? For the ½rst couple ofhours we focused on the “how cool wouldit be if” standard, and the book was gettingaway from us. We went back to the question,who does this book absolutely have to have?That was easy, because once you have JohnWinthrop, Thomas Jefferson, Hemingway,and Frederick Douglass, it becomes easierto drop other people. People begin to looksmall. That made our work easier.

Werner Sollors

In the four-hundred-title grid, there was al-ways a preponderance of traditional authors,and one of the things we wanted to do wasnot take just the modernist canon, but takesome of the writers who had been takenaway: some of the genteel writing, some ofthe middlebrow, any of the victims of mod-ernism. The majority of entries, even in the

Academy Meetings

The question that runsthrough this book is this notion that America ismade-up, that it is inventedand continually remade and reinvented.


larger version, was always literary and hada large substance that was that skeleton.The amazing thing was that we didn’t ½ndauthors to write about Moby-Dick and TheSound and the Fury. We had the fantasy ofincluding many contemporary writers, so Ican tell you the list of contemporary authorsI asked to write on The Sound and the Furywho either didn’t grace the request with ananswer at all or simply said no. Melville andFaulkner were always supposed to be in thereand, indeed, are in there: Faulkner with that

half-entry together with Gone with the Windand Melville with his later writings. But werealized we couldn’t do without Moby-Dickand The Sound and the Fury. That’s how weended up writing these entries ourselves. Itwasn’t that we were becoming conservativeat a crucial moment, just that our attemptsto get contemporary writers to write aboutthese books had failed, This surprised me,as it seemed to be easier to get contempo-rary writers to write on a whole variety ofother works. I still think it would be a greatproject to put together a collection of con-temporary authors writing a literary histo-ry of the past, including personal essays onthe writers who meant most or least to them.

Question

Was the decision to include Norbert Wien-er’s Cybernetics an easy one? How did you½nd its place in the pantheon you werecreating?

Werner Sollors

I’m very happy that David Mindell, whowrote the entry, is sitting there in the back.We wanted to have one of the tracks in theliterary history be about histories of inven-tions, technology, and science in the Unit-ed States. Wiener’s book was a perfect ex-ample of a text that created a word that cre-ated a whole ½eld; it is clearly related to thehistory of technology. The entry is a fasci-nating one and dates the book wonderfully.It ½ts into this post–World War II moment.We were happy with the choice and withthe essay that came from it. With the histo-ry of technology, we could have very easilyhad 150 essays about just that, but, again,the inclusion of a text that had enormousconsequences made the difference in ourselection.

Question

How are you left feeling or thinking aboutAmerica?

Greil Marcus

It was Werner’s idea that the book shouldend with a piece that we would write to-gether on Hurricane Katrina. I didn’t reallyknow why he made that suggestion, but itwas a challenge–and not just because wehad to work together and write somethingin 2,500 words that wouldn’t be redundantupon redundant, given the enormousamount that had already been writtenabout that event. As we thought about it, it raised the question that runs throughthis book, this notion that America is made-up, that it is invented and continually re-made and reinvented. Sometimes thoseinventions fail. Sometimes they blow upin people’s faces. Sometimes they producethe worst consequences with only the best

intentions. Sometimes the intentions aren’tso great. Hurricane Katrina and the re-sponse, both from the federal governmentand, to some degree, the rest of the countryitself, raised the question of whether thecountry really exists at all as anything morethan a marketplace. And that question, wefound, came up again and again. If you canmake something, if you can invent some-thing as enormous, both as an idea and asthe reality of a nation that is also a conti-nent, it can be unmade. If you can make itup, somebody can attack the premises onwhich you created this thing. Knock all thefloorboards out, and that question is alivethroughout the book. I’m not going to an-swer for Werner, but this book left me witha deeper sense than I ever had before ofhow contingent, delicate, at-risk, in jeop-ardy this enormous adventure has alwaysbeen and remains.

Werner Sollors

I may be the more Pollyannaish and opti-mistic ½gure there, but I think the contin-gency of creativity is certainly something I took from reading so many essays aboutareas where I had no expertise whatsoever.I’ll give you an example. I asked a famouswriter to contribute an essay on HenryRoth’s Call It Sleep. The writer said, “I can-not do this,” and I said, “Why not? You likethe book.” The writer said, “This is a manwho had writer’s block; he didn’t writeanything for sixty years. If I write about hisbook, I may catch it. I may not be able towrite.” This was a joke, but the fear that asyou face an empty page, as you start to cre-ate something from scratch that the cre-ation can stop, is also very real and serious;it can lead to depression, to an implosion ofwhatever beautiful creativity you thoughtyou had. The sense of contingency in theamazing variety and beauty of things thathave been created, be they legal texts or po-ems or visual objects, and that have de½nedculture is very present. To see this happen-ing in the various activities is both thrillingand intimidating because you realize thecontingency is all based on man-made ma-terials. There’s this feeling that it can stop,that the creativity can end.


The dif½culty of setting½ction that followed Euro-pean norms on Americansoil–What could an Ameri-can Gothic novel be like?Should it have Indian atroc-ities in it to say somethinglocal?–these are the earlymoments in the book.


Question

When did American literary history begin?You mentioned John Winthrop, but whoare some of the early ½gures you deal with?

Werner Sollors

We start with a map that Martin Waldsee-müller drew and with Matthias Ringmann,who coined the new continent America af-ter Amerigo Vespucci (adding that since allthe other continents had been named afterwomen, he was happy to name the new oneafter a man). We did not want to open withColumbus because it was highly predictable,although I think the ½rst name in the book,nonetheless, is Columbus, even under theWaldseemüller entry. We have Spanish set-tlers and then move to the Puritans andearly Southern texts fairly quickly. Thenit’s a more traditional assortment of writ-ers–Charles Brockman Brown, James Feni-more Cooper, Irving, and Hawthorne–so weget a rich array of the early Republic writ-ers. Intermingled are visual texts: there’sthe Declaration of Independence and Win-throp’s Arbella speech. There’s also a won-derful essay on the Great Awakening thatasks whether there really was such a thing,or whether it was something historians cre-ated. The book deals with many familiartopics but also some unusual ones: for ex-ample, Charles Willson Peale’s exhibitionof a mastodon at his museum in Philadel-phia and John James Audubon’s responseto Alexander Wilson’s drawing of the baldeagle. The dif½culty of setting ½ction thatfollowed European norms on American soil –What could an American Gothic novelbe like? Should it have Indian atrocities init to say something local?–these are theearly moments in the book.

Greil Marcus

There’s another way of looking at it, too: ifthis book is successful, the different entriesargue with each other over that very ques-tion. There’s no single essay in which some-body says, this is where American literaryhistory begins; but in some ways, the es-says that go up to 1800 are all staking claims.Traditionally, the earliest American literarygenre is the Puritan sermon. That’s wherepeople began to work out the languageneeded to describe this place and what ithas to become. How to put this into newwords was a tremendous struggle. In some

ways, that de½nes the whole Puritan exper-iment. On the other hand, there is a shock-ingly original entry early on by Adam Good-hart about John Smith as a writer. Suddenlyyou realize that, no, it’s not the sermon.The ½rst American literary genre is peoplegoing back with strange tales of wonder or,in the case of Smith, strange tales of per½dy,envy, and every one of the deadly sins; talesof what the colonists were like and of howthe place was hell on earth. Reading thisbook, I know exactly where American liter-ary history begins; it begins with the Dec-laration of Independence, the struggle to½nd the words to de½ne this place. Some-body said, “Okay, we’ll just make it up,”and that’s what happened. When I look atthis book a year from now, I’ll have a com-pletely different answer.

© 2010 by Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus,respectively

There’s no single essay inwhich somebody says, this is where American literaryhistory begins.

Academy Meetings


Academy Meetings

“Recovery and Reform”

Presentation

The history of how business interacts withsociety moves in cycles.1 There are periods inwhich the interaction intensi½es and periodsin which it ebbs. The post−World War II erawas the last major cycle of engagement inwhich the modern corporation formed anew social compact with citizens and thestate, influencing a wide range of social ac-tivity, policy, and behavior.

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Rajat K. Gupta

Rajat K. Gupta is Senior Partner Emeritus andformer Managing Director of McKinsey & Com-pany, Inc. He was elected a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Roughly a decade ago, prodded by risingconsumer expectations and often by spe-ci½c reputational threats, businesses beganto launch corporate social-responsibilityprograms and engage with governments,ngos, and other stakeholders on issuessuch as climate change and child labor.Today, a few vanguard companies havetaken that engagement to the next level.By understanding the needs of all stake-holders–shareholders, employees, custom-ers, communities, governments, and thelarger society–they have been able to iden-tify sustainable sources of value, avoid

Challenges to Business and Society in the Twenty-First Century: The Way ForwardRajat K. Gupta and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.

These presentations were given at the 1950th Stated Meeting, held in collaboration with the New York University Pollack Center forLaw & Business, on November 30, 2009, at New York University School of Law. The meeting was part of the Academy’s conference on“Challenges to Business and Society in the Twenty-First Century: The Way Forward,” chaired by William T. Allen (New York Univer-sity School of Law), Rakesh Khurana (Harvard University), Jay Lorsch (Harvard University), and Gerald Rosenfeld (Rothschild NorthAmerica and New York University).

1 I wish to acknowledge the valuable assistance ofMcKinsey & Company experts who provided re-search and guidance in preparing this article: SheilaBonini, Lenny Mendonca, Eric Jensen, and AndrewSellgren. I also thank Kiran Rao and Geoffrey Lewisfor their editorial support.


costly conflicts, reduce risks, and shaperegulation in ways that bene½t both societyand their industries.

These front-runners offer a new and power-ful template for private enterprise to engagewith society. For these companies, engage-ment is not simply about philanthropy orreputation-building or governance; it is en-lightened self-interest, based on the recog-nition that the success of their businessesdepends on the health of the society in whichthey operate. When a global candy makercommits to using sustainable cocoa, for ex-ample, it is not just a huge win for the ngosthat are trying to protect rainforest environ-ments or for subsistence farmers, it is also astrategic victory for the company, whichneeds a reliable supply of a vital ingredient.

Increasingly, ceos of major corporationsgrasp the value of this type of social engage-ment: McKinsey surveys show that 55 per-cent of ceos say that balancing the obliga-tion to contribute to the broader publicgood with generating shareholder value is“the right thing to do.” Twenty-nine percentsay that they pursue these twin goals becauseit provides competitive advantage throughimproved customer loyalty, the ability toattract and retain talented employees, andpositive media coverage. Twice as many ex-ecutives say that contributing to the publicgood increases shareholder value as thosewho say it detracts.

The current economic crisis provides animportant test for this new vision for busi-ness in society. The downturn is widelyviewed as the result of corporate greed andmalfeasance, and public trust in business hasfallen to new lows. Meanwhile, surveyedbusiness leaders acknowledge that the cri-sis has increased the public’s expectationsfor the role of business in society.

Yet productive public-private engagement ismissing where it is most needed–in tacklingthe most critical problems facing businessand society. For example, in health care andclimate change, many stakeholders are push-ing narrow, self-serving agendas, delayingaction, and guaranteeing suboptimal solu-tions. In the case of regulatory reform in½nancial services, the private sector’s cred-ibility with large segments of the public andpolitical leadership is so low that it riskslosing a seat at the table. Another challeng-ing global issue is the rapid urbanizationof emerging economies such as China andIndia, where governments are struggling todevelop effective models to encourage theurgently needed participation of multina-tional and domestic businesses in urbandevelopment.

I believe we can do better. I believe we canharness enlightened self-interest to solveintractable problems that neither the pub-lic sector nor the private sector can tacklealone. Only this higher form of engagementcan achieve the breakthroughs we need.

Before we turn to the role of enlightenedself-interest in the solution to those extraor-dinary problems, it is important to under-stand why this novel form of engagement isso promising. We know that this approachworks; it has proven its value in mining,plastics, and other industries, where it hassolved dif½cult problems, removed threats,and unlocked new sources of value.

Consider the story of the plastics industry.In the late 1980s, the image of truckloadsof plastic bottles being tipped into land½llsbecame the popular symbol of environmen-tal disaster in the United States. Regulatorsconsidered outright bans on plastic bever-age containers, which would have beendevastating for the plastics industry. Indus-try leaders organized a response and, work-ing with environmental groups and local

governments, devised a solution. They re-formulated their products to be recyclableand collaborated with municipalities todesign the logistics of bottle recycling. In astroke, the plastics industry saved one ofits largest markets, improved its image, andhelped municipalities by reducing solidwaste.

Another example is mining. Leading com-panies have rede½ned their relationshipswith host countries, communities, and en-vironmental ngos, reducing the risk ofbeing denied access to resources and ward-ing off labor and community problems. Bybringing a relevant “social offer” to thetable, such as improving schools, partner-ing with health ngos, and building waterinfrastructure, some mining companiesensure government and community sup-port and prevent costly work interruptions.Moreover, because the new relationshipshelp bring projects on-stream more rapidly,they have contributed to top-line growthand near-term earnings.

Similar opportunities to apply these lessonsmay be found in some of the biggest chal-lenges straddling business and society:health care, climate change, urbanization,and ½nancial-sector reform. Although allare vastly different, these issues share im-portant traits. They must be solved to en-sure that business and society can thrive;they involve entrenched public and privatestakeholders; and in each case, long-stand-ing approaches have not yet delivered satis-factory solutions.

On health care, the strengths of the U.S.health care system include innovation andrapid access to new treatments and tech-nologies; world-class academic medicalcenters; higher cancer survival rates; andoverall convenience. On the flip side, the

Productive public-privateengagement is missing whereit is most needed–in tack-ling the most critical prob-lems facing business andsociety.

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Roughly a decade ago, prod-ded by rising consumer expec-tations and often by speci½creputational threats, business-es began to launch corporatesocial-responsibility programsand engage with governments,NGOs, and other stakehold-ers on issues such as climatechange and child labor.


U.S. system has the highest expenditure ofany developed country. According to thefederal government, the United States spentmore than $2.4 trillion on health care in2008, or twice the amount Americans spendon food and more than the total expendi-ture for goods and services for all Chineseconsumers. Two decades of efforts to curbhealth care inflation have had little effect.Despite the expense, the United States isnot statistically ahead on most measures ofhealth outcomes, and in measures such asinfant mortality, it lags behind other mem-ber countries of the Organisation for Eco-nomic Co-operation and Development(oecd). Also, the number of uninsuredAmericans has risen to 16 percent of thepopulation. While two-thirds of these un-insured choose not to participate, a thirdsimply do not have access to affordable in-surance.

Identifying the underlying problem is notdif½cult. Incentives in the system are mis-aligned. Supply is not value-driven, nor isconsumption value-conscious. Costs tendto ripple through the supply chain, passingfrom makers of medicine and equipmentto physicians and hospitals, to payers, andultimately to employers and patients. Eachstakeholder absorbs a share of the cost in-crease and attempts–if possible–to passon even greater cost to the next player in thechain. Consumers (employers and patients)have little interest in constraining costs andeven less leverage because they lack any ob-jective metric of value received for the cost.Meanwhile, the prevalence of costly life-style-induced chronic conditions such asobesity and diabetes continues to rise, plac-ing additional burdens on the system.

The threat that unchecked health care infla-tion poses to U.S. economic vitality and com-petitiveness becomes more visible every

year. According to an analysis by the Mc-Kinsey Global Institute, in 2006, Americansspent $650 billion more than one wouldexpect on a normalized basis, even control-ling for U.S. health and demographics com-pared with other wealthy nations. This ex-penditure equates to a 30 percent premium.

No single stakeholder seems willing or ableto reverse the pattern. The solutions to con-trolling costs and changing incentives–suchas outcomes-based medicine and reimburse-ment, value-conscious consumption, andimprovements in administrative ef½ciency –can only be applied through a concertedeffort by all stakeholders: health care busi-nesses, policy-makers, employers, and thepublic. However, a mechanism to bring allthese stakeholders together is sorely lack-ing. Congress is considering legislation thatwill likely expand care to more people, whichis important, but it may not substantiallyaddress excessive spending. Passage of thebill would put the United States on a trajec-tory to spend an extra $1 trillion by 2015.

On the issue of climate change, althoughthere is virtual consensus on the science,there is nothing close to agreement on so-lutions. According to the Intergovernmen-tal Panel on Climate Change, reducinggreenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by2030 (compared with 1990 levels) wouldgive us a good chance of holding globalwarming below a critical threshold (2 de-grees Celsius above preindustrial levels).

The debate about how to achieve this goal –or whether it should be pursued–contin-ues. McKinsey research ½nds that this re-duction target can be met while sustainingeconomic growth. The measures to reducegreenhouse gases are well known, and three-quarters of them–mostly those involvingconservation–could be deployed today. Tomove forward on conservation initiatives,we need new policies, regulatory frame-works, and market-based incentives for en-ergy ef½ciency as well as research on carboncapture and storage and more ef½cient bio-fuels.

If executed at scale, energy ef½ciency im-provements would yield gross savings worthmore than $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy,a handsome return on the $520 billion need-

ed through 2020 to fund ef½ciency mea-sures; this savings equates to the discoveryof a vast, low-cost energy resource.

Successful solutions will involve a portfolioof approaches to unlock the full potentialof energy ef½ciency. Those strategies in-clude: developing new energy sources thateliminate or vastly reduce carbon use, iden-tifying up-front funding, and aligning in-centives between utilities, regulators, andconsumers to implement solutions likesmart-grid technology and to manage de-mand. The obstacle is the lack of an ade-quate engagement model that would bringstakeholders together to agree on how toproceed.

Urbanization in China, India, and other fast-growing economies presents such an enor-mous challenge that it is almost impossibleto imagine. In China, migration to urbanareas will create ½fteen super-cities, withaverage populations of twenty-½ve millionby 2025. In India, a doubling of urban pop-ulations (by as many as seven hundred mil-lion people in the next twenty-½ve years) willrequire a tripling of the water infrastructure,twenty-seven million affordable housingunits, new roads, sewers, and rail lines.India’s cities will need to increase capitalinvestments by a factor of ten to ½fteentimes present levels; the total cost, McKin-sey estimates, will be $2.5 trillion over twen-ty years. To put this estimated cost into per-spective, India’s gdp is about $1.1 trilliontoday.

Bringing private-sector talent and resourcesto bear on these challenges will make a hugedifference. There is a tremendous opportu-nity for investment. McKinsey estimatesthat proper infrastructure investments tosupport rapid urbanization could generateadditional gdp growth of 1 to 1.5 percent-age points annually.

I believe we can harness enlightened self-interest tosolve intractable problemsthat neither the public sectornor the private sector cantackle alone.

In the United States, ½nan-cial reform represents perhapsthe greatest challenge for de-ploying effective engagementby the private sector.

Challenges to Business and Society


Without doubt, the scope of the effort willrequire the capital, capacity, and capabili-ties of the private sector. Yet those factorsare largely absent. The solution is strongercollaborative leadership on the public side.Indian of½cials must set up conditionsunder which private enterprises that havethe knowledge and innovations to helpIndia’s cities leapfrog into the twenty-½rstcentury can participate.

In the United States, ½nancial reform rep-resents perhaps the greatest challenge fordeploying effective engagement by the pri-vate sector. What little mutual respect ex-isted between the ½nancial sector and itsregulators has all but evaporated in the wakeof the recent crisis, leaving little room for

collaboration. The Senate bill introducedby Senator Christopher Dodd, which wouldrework large parts of the regulatory land-scape, was written with little direct inputfrom the sector. This is a missed opportu-nity–not because of the bill itself, but be-cause the process does not include all stake-holders. As with health care, there is nomechanism to mediate diverse interests,which raises the odds of producing ineffec-tive legislation, suboptimal results for soci-ety, and new risks.

We must do better. We all understand theextraordinary pressures that business lead-ers face today. However, the long-term suc-cess of businesses and that of society atlarge depends on the active engagement ofbusiness leaders and their problem-solvingexpertise. We need business statesmen to

put their companies on a productive pathof engagement and to participate in delib-erations to solve these thorny issues. Wealso need a political climate in which suchengagement is encouraged and sought bypolitical leaders.

What are we asking business leaders to do?What should public leaders do?

1) Find your enlightened self-interest.ceos should start by thinking about wherethe interests of the enterprise and societyconverge. The resulting engagement canbe close to home, such as helping improveschools in the communities from whichthe company recruits employees. It can be a global initiative. For example, Novo Nor-disk, the world’s leading supplier of dia-betes drugs, has funded efforts to preventdiabetes in developing nations, a programthat builds its pro½le in new markets, evenif it reduces the number of potential con-sumers.

2) Mobilize other business leaders andengage regulators. I have shared examplesof companies partnering to attack socialor environmental problems. Think aboutwhether your industry associations are really pursuing the long-term interests oftheir members, or if they exist simply toblock regulation. The process of rule-mak-ing in an industry should be about compa-nies and government working toward com-mon goals–rather than seeking a zero-sumvictory. This principle applies equally tothose sitting on the government side of thetable. Regulators and politicians wouldbene½t from a more nuanced view of busi-ness stakeholders. Understand what cre-ates long-term success for business, andbusiness will continue to generate the eco-nomic growth that society needs, too.

3) Stand up and be counted. Consider whatJohn Browne, the former ceo of BritishPetroleum, accomplished when he stood upin 1997 and said something his colleaguesregarded as treason: that climate change isreal, it is caused by greenhouse gases asso-ciated with hydrocarbons, and it is in the

interest of the global energy industry to helpsolve the problem–and, in the process,create a role for itself in a lower-carbon fu-ture. Today, other major oil companies arefollowing Browne’s lead.

These are important steps but they are notimpossible. Take them and we will get theenergy and talent we need to help solve ourcrises. By working in partnership acrosssectors, we can begin to create the reformsthat our society truly deserves.

© 2010 by Rajat K. Gupta

Academy Meetings

The long-term success of businesses and that of society at large depends onthe active engagement ofbusiness leaders and theirproblem-solving expertise.


Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., is President and ChiefExecutive Of½cer of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement EquitiesFund (TIAA-CREF). He was elected a Fellow ofthe American Academy of Arts and Sciences in2010.

“Long-Term Financial Security”

Presentation

The title of our meeting is Challenges toBusiness and Society in the Twenty-FirstCentury: The Way Forward. In order todetermine the way forward, we must ½rstknow where we stand. Today, the relation-ship between businesses and individuals–consumers, borrowers, investors, and em-ployees–is strained. In the wake of theglobal economic crisis, the American pub-lic holds a cynical view of business andWall Street.

As a nation, we are contemplating regula-tory reform because our existing oversightsystem has not evolved with the ½nancialservices industry. We are rethinking healthcare; in Congress and across the nation,

people are grappling with what could bethe most signi½cant overhaul of the healthcare system in forty years.

These are fundamental issues with the po-tential to shift our society. As New York Timescolumnist David Brooks wrote in a recentop-ed, we are in the midst of “a debate aboutwhat kind of country we want America tobe.”1 What role will business play as societytries to right itself? How can we as Ameri-cans achieve a more balanced state to en-sure long-term ½nancial security for oursociety?

In proposing answers to these questions, Iwill focus on:

· Our opportunity to revisit the socialcontract;

· Measures we can implement to helpbusinesses adopt a more prudent, long-term view; and

· Steps we can take to help individualsenjoy sound ½nancial health over thelong run.

The Social Contract

Over the past few decades, employees haveassumed greater responsibility for their ca-reers, professional development, advance-ment, and retirement. The workforce hasbecome more mobile as it has adapted tothe global economy.2 In an age of “employ-ment at will,” corporate loyalty has waned.3

We know that lifetime employment is nolonger an option. But lifetime income shouldbe our objective as we rethink and renew thesocial contract.

New research from McKinsey & Company½nds that the average American family willface a savings gap of $250,000 at the time ofretirement.4 Even with payments from So-


cial Security and pensions, as well as frompersonal savings in 401(k) and other retire-ment plans, the average family will haveonly about two-thirds of the income it willneed. Moreover, according to the McKin-sey study, for every ½ve years we wait to ad-dress the issue of retirement security, wewill see a 10 percent decline in the typicalretiree’s standard of living.

That is one reason why tiaa-cref andothers are calling for a holistic system thatensures Americans will have the retirementincome they will need. A holistic systemwould:

· First, ensure full participation and suf-½cient funding by enrolling employeesautomatically on their ½rst day of workand offering incentives for employersand employees that encourage totalcontributions between 10 percent and14 percent of pay–roughly double theaverage contribution today. Automaticiras, which President Obama has pro-posed, could provide a tax-favored sav-ing opportunity to those without aworkplace retirement plan–currently,about half the American workforce.

· Second, help employees manage riskby offering a menu of ½fteen to twentyinvestment options. This menu wouldprovide suf½cient diversi½cation with-out presenting an overwhelming num-ber of choices.

· Third, give workers ½nancial educationand objective, noncommissioned adviceto help them build a portfolio that re-flects their goals and risk tolerances.

· Fourth, provide opportunities and in-centives for employees to save for re-tirement medical expenses.

· Fifth, provide lifetime income throughan affordable ½xed annuity option.

I believe we have an obligation to help ourcolleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizensmove safely to and through retirement.

1 David Brooks, “The Values Question,” The NewYork Times, November 23, 2009.2 John C. Edwards and Steven J. Karau, “Psycholog-ical Contract or Social Contract? Development ofthe Employment Contracts Scale,” Journal of Lead-ership and Organizational Studies 13 (3) (2007).3 Roger Eugene Karnes, “A Change in BusinessEthics: The Impact on Employer-Employee Rela-tions,” Journal of Business Ethics 87 (2009): 189–197.4 “Restoring Americans’ Financial Security: AShared Responsibility” (McKinsey & Company,October 19, 2009).

As we look to recover fromthe worst recession in seventyyears, we must be mindfulof the far-reaching structur-al changes that have alteredthe macroeconomy.

Regulatory reform can helpto reemphasize long-termthinking.


short-term outlook and focus instead onsustainability.

A group of ½nancial and academic leadersconvened by the Aspen Institute has posit-ed that “a healthy society requires healthyand responsible companies that effectivelypursue long-term goals.”7 Citing the insidi-ous nature of the problem, the group notedthat “many college savings, 401(k), and re-lated retirement funds engage in behaviorthat is inconsistent with their investors’goals, as they trade securities, pay their man-agers, and engage in (or support) activismin pursuit of short-term ½nancial objectivesat the expense of long-term performanceand careful analysis of fundamental risk.”

Regulatory reform can help to reemphasizelong-term thinking. Indeed, Congress is con-sidering comprehensive ½nancial regulatoryreform. Led by the House Financial ServicesCommittee and the Senate Banking Com-mittee, both congressional chambers havebeen working actively on this issue.

Well-conceived reforms can ensure that ½-nancial services ½rms are able to innovate,develop new businesses, and take reason-able risks within an appropriate supervisoryframework that promotes overall long-termstability and protects market participants.In fact, at a New York University (nyu) con-ference on regulatory reform in September2009, I participated in a panel discussionwith Eric Dinallo, former New York super-intendent of industry and visiting professorat nyu’s Stern School of Business, in whichwe discussed the creation of an OptionalFederal Charter (ofc) for the insuranceindustry. This measure, which tiaa-cref

supports, would provide life insurers withthe choice to be regulated by a single federalentity or to continue to operate under thecurrent state-by-state regulatory structure.An ofc could increase the ef½ciency of thelife insurance industry, maintain productsafety and soundness, and make U.S. lifeinsurers more competitive on a global scale.

With the holistic system I have outlined,we can help all Americans enjoy greater½nancial security. But in order to accom-plish that goal, we need to encourage busi-nesses and individuals to adopt a more bal-anced, long-term, risk-managed approach.

Promoting Financial Security in Business

As we look to recover from the worst reces-sion in seventy years, we must be mindful ofthe far-reaching structural changes that havealtered the macroeconomy, including theglobalization of capital, labor, and produc-tion and the evolving role of national gov-ernments in driving growth and expandingregulatory oversight. These forces may havea moderating effect on inflation, particularlygiven the rise of unemployment and thestrongest productivity growth rate we haveseen over a six-month period since 1961.5

But these structural changes may also cre-ate favorable conditions for asset bubblesby encouraging sudden price increases indiscrete sectors of the market. Commercialreal estate in the late 1980s, the dot-comequity market of the late 1990s, and thehousing market in the present decade are afew examples of ½nancial bubbles that ulti-mately burst.6 In such an environment, busi-nesses must resist the temptations of a

Proper reform will take time. But there aresteps businesses can take immediately tooperate more prudently, such as strength-ening their risk management programs andensuring–through good corporate gover-nance–that their strategies and compensa-tion are aligned with the long-term interestsof shareholders. These long-term-planningstrategies can drive corporate performanceand help strengthen the market overall.

Furthermore, shareholders in the UnitedStates should be given greater rights, in-cluding access to the proxy to nominatedirectors, majority voting in director elec-tions, and a shareholder vote on executivecompensation. Shareholders and compa-nies have a common goal of long-termwealth creation and must work toward thatgoal together.

Encouraging businesses to adopt a morerational, long-term approach will enhancethe health and ½nancial security of thecountry’s economic system. Individualsneed similar help and guidance to achievepersonal ½nancial security.

Helping Individuals Achieve FinancialSecurity

Since the mid-1980s, the ratio of householddebt to disposable income has more thandoubled, increasing from 65 percent to anunsustainable, all-time high of 133 percentin 2007.8 Americans have been living beyondtheir means. Two-thirds of the U.S. gdp

was driven by consumer spending, and easycredit helped fuel its growth.

That scenario is changing out of necessity.The personal savings rate, which was around

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5 Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 5, 2009.6 Brett Hammond and Martha Peyton, “Economicand Market Scenarios: Sea Changes, Inflation andBubble Bias” (tiaa-cref Internal Research, Sep-tember 4, 2009).

Well-conceived reforms canensure that ½nancial services½rms are able to innovate, de-velop new businesses, and takereasonable risks within an ap-propriate supervisory frame-work that promotes overalllong-term stability and pro-tects market participants.

7 “Overcoming Short-termism: A Call for a MoreResponsible Approach to Investment and BusinessManagement” (The Aspen Institute, September 9,2009).

8 Reuven Glick and Kevin J. Lansing, “U.S. House-hold Deleveraging and Future ConsumptionGrowth,” frbsf Economic Letter no. 2009-16,May 25, 2009.

Proper reform will take time.But there are steps businessescan take immediately to operate more prudently.


Only half of the respondents were able tocorrectly answer the ½rst two questions;only one-third of the respondents wereable to correctly answer all three. These areAmericans over age ½fty–individuals whoare either close to retirement or in retire-ment. As it turns out, the ability to solve afew basic math problems can signi½cantlyinfluence an individual’s ½nancial security.

Researchers have established a correlationbetween ½nancial literacy and retirementplanning, which in turn is a powerful pre-dictor of wealth accumulation. People whoplan for retirement have more than doublethe wealth of people who do not plan. Con-versely, individuals with a lower degree of½nancial literacy tend to borrow more mon-ey, accumulate less wealth, and select mu-tual funds with higher fees; they are lesslikely to invest in stocks, more likely to ex-perience dif½culty with debt, and less likelyto know the terms of their mortgages andother loans.

If we are to strengthen the long-term ½nan-cial security of our society, we must do moreto improve ½nancial literacy; ½nancial ser-vices ½rms can (and should) lead the way.

To promote long-term ½nancial security, weneed to strengthen the relationship betweenbusinesses and individuals. We must alignthe interests of employers and employees,sellers and consumers, issuers and investors.We need to wean ourselves off of uncheckedconsumerism and focus on exports and in-vestments to drive growth. We need to savemore and consume less. We need to thinkabout what kind of country we want Amer-ica to be.

A new social contract should include a ho-listic system to help ensure that all Ameri-cans can enjoy a more secure retirement;eschew short-termism in favor of long-termperformance, sustainable value creation,and prudent risk management; and advocate

10 percent of income in the 1970s and fell tozero in 2005, has risen to roughly 5 percent.Households are focused on paying downtheir debts. This deleveraging will have adampening effect on consumer spending inthe short term, but it bodes well for long-term economic stability in the United Statesand globally. Moreover, encouraging indi-viduals to save more money will help re-store their personal balance sheets. Oneway to assist individuals to achieve this endis with ½nancial education.

In a recent study, Americans over the age of½fty were asked three questions involvinginterest rates, the effects of inflation, andthe concept of risk diversi½cation9:

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings ac-count and the interest rate was 2 per-cent per year. After ½ve years, howmuch do you think you would have inthe account if you left the money togrow: more than $102, exactly $102,less than $102?

2. Imagine that the interest rate on yoursavings account was 1 percent per yearand inflation was 2 percent per year.After one year, would you be able tobuy more than, exactly the same as, orless than today with the money in thisaccount?

3. Do you think that the following state-ment is true or false? “Buying a singlecompany stock usually provides a saferreturn than a stock mutual fund.”


Encouraging businesses toadopt a more rational, long-term approach will enhancethe health and ½nancial security of the country’seconomic system.

9 Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, “Financial Literacy: Evidence and Implications for Financial Education” (tiaa-cref Institute,May 2009).

a balanced approach to saving and investingby raising the level of ½nancial literacy. Byseizing these opportunities, we will strength-en our economy and create a more vibrant,½nancially sound society.10

© 2010 by Teachers Insurance and AnnuityAssociation-College Retirement EquitiesFund, New York, NY 10017

10 The views described above may change in re-sponse to changing economic and market condi-tions. Past performance is not indicative of futureresults. The material is for informational purposesonly and should not be regarded as a recommen-dation or an offer to buy or sell any product orservice to which this information may relate.

To promote long-term ½nan-cial security, we need tostrengthen the relationshipbetween businesses and in-dividuals. We must alignthe interests of employersand employees, sellers andconsumers, issuers and investors.


Academy Meetings

Leslie Berlowitz

Leslie Berlowitz is Chief Executive Of½cer andWilliam T. Golden Chair at the American Acad-emy of Arts and Sciences. She has been a Fellowof the American Academy since 2004.

Welcome

In 1971, in a talk at the Academy, Fellow andstatesman William Averell Harriman spokeabout the long arc of U.S.-Russia relations,in which he played a pivotal role. Reflectingthen on his years of experience with Russianleaders, he told his audience, “Competitivecoexistence with the Soviet Union is likelyto continue for some time. However, bilat-erally, we can reconcile our differences on anumber of speci½c issues, and each agree-ment we reach will make the next one eas-ier.” Much has changed in the almost fortyyears since Ambassador Harriman’s obser-vation, but one thing has not changed: thevital importance of the complex relationshipbetween our two countries. Our speakerstonight well understand the importance ofcontinuing those conversations so that thatarc will continue to be achieved.

During the past year, the new administra-tions in Washington and Moscow as wellas Carnegie Corporation of New York en-couraged the Academy to reexamine U.S.-Russia relations. Under the leadership ofRobert Legvold, a member of the Commit-tee on International Security Studies (ciss),the committee members prepared a strate-gic assessment of the bilateral relationshipand created a blueprint for conceptualizinga twenty-½rst-century policy toward Russia.In recent months, the committee has sharedits perspectives with policy-makers in theU.S. administration and in Congress, aswell as with the media and other interestedgroups. The report that they have put to-gether is available on the Academy’s websiteat http: //www.amacad.org/russiapolicy.aspx.

A Conversation on Evolving U.S. Policy toward RussiaRobert Legvold and Thomas Graham

Welcome by Leslie Berlowitz

This presentation was given at the 1952nd Stated Meeting held at the House of the Academy on January 28, 2010.

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I want to express the Academy’s thanks toboth Professor Legvold for leading thisproject and Carnegie Corporation of NewYork for its support of the Russia project.

Tonight’s speakers are Robert Legvold andThomas Graham. Robert Legvold is a lead-ing expert on Russia and former Sovietstates. He is the Marshall D. Shulman Pro-fessor Emeritus in the Department of Polit-ical Science at Columbia University andserved as Director of the Harriman Insti-tute from 1986 to 1992. Before joining theColumbia faculty, he held positions at theCouncil on Foreign Relations in New Yorkand at Tufts University. He has authored oredited numerous books, most recently acollaborative volume, Russian Foreign Policyin the Twenty-½rst Century and the Shadow ofthe Past (2007). A foreign member of theRussian Academy of Social Sciences, he waselected a Fellow of the American Academyin 2005 and has been an important guidingspirit for our work in security issues.

Thomas Graham is a Senior Director atKissinger Associates. Before joining the½rm in 2007, he served as Special Assistantto the President and Senior Director forRussia on the National Security Councilstaff. In these roles, he was a key WhiteHouse interlocutor with the Putin govern-ment. His government service includes as-signments as the Associate Director of thePolicy Planning Staff of the State Depart-ment and, earlier in his career, a ForeignService Of½cer, with postings in Moscowand in Washington. He was a Senior Asso-ciate in the Russia and Eurasia Program atthe Carnegie Endowment for InternationalPeace, which published two of his books:Russia’s Decline and Uncertain Recovery (2002)and U.S.-Russian Relations at the Turn of theCentury (2000).

I want to thank both of our speakers; wecouldn’t have two more knowledgeablepeople with us this evening to speak on U.S.policy toward Russia.

Robert Legvold

Robert Legvold is Marshall D. Shulman ProfessorEmeritus in the Department of Political Science atColumbia University. He has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005.

Presentation

Tom and I are going to talk about the U.S.-Russia relationship one year into the Oba-ma administration. The relationship today,in my view, is in a very different place fromwhere it was a year ago. The residual tracesof what had been a seriously deterioratingrelationship during the ½ve or six years be-fore January 2009 are still there, and theyare capable of reemerging. When we start-ed the U.S. Policy toward Russia project inApril 2008, we had been through a six-yearperiod (from late 2002) of rocky and steadi-ly deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations, butit was still six months before the free fall inthe U.S.-Russia relationship, in the contextof the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008.Many in Moscow, including senior peoplein the leadership, thought of that war as the½rst proxy war against the United States inthe post–Cold War period. We know nowthat leadership in both countries contem-plated the possibility of the war escalatinginto a direct confrontation between thetwo countries.

For a number of us at the time–some ingovernment but a number of people on theoutside, especially those in the Russian ½eld–this was not only a regrettable and danger-ous state of affairs, it was also in some im-portant respects an unnatural and even il-logical circumstance given where we thought

relations were headed at the end of the ColdWar. I say unnatural and even illogical be-cause there was no deep, ideologically driv-en animus to sustain or support enmity be-tween the two countries. There was no vastgap in the core international security issuesthat both countries faced (at least, not intheory) and there was no comparability inpower between the two countries that wouldsustain a wide-ranging strategic rivalry. Yetthere we were in January 2009, after every-thing that had happened, especially theevents of 2008.

I think we are now at a different place; it isambiguous in many respects, it is uncertainin other respects, but it’s a different posi-tion. The difference is for two basic reasons.First is the impact of the ½nancial/econom-ic crisis, and second, the election of BarackObama. I believe it’s the second–that is,the new directions in U.S. foreign policy,particularly toward Russia–that is the moreimportant of the two. For those of us in-volved in the project and a lot of other peo-ple in the United States and in Europe whofollow the U.S.-Russia relationship, it wasclear that if the trend line from Fall 2002through 2008 was going to be broken, ifthat inertia was to be transformed, it wouldhave to be because of U.S. leadership. Itwasn’t going to occur on the Russian side.There was too much skepticism, too muchparalysis, and too great an unwillingness totry even to think about what would be nec-essary in order to change relations.

So it did require initiative on the part of theObama administration. The question, then,is why the Obama administration priori-tized U.S. relations with Russia given theother problems that it faced in foreign pol-icy coming into of½ce. In my view two rea-sons explain the changes undertaken by the

The question, then, is whythe Obama administrationprioritized U.S. relationswith Russia given the otherproblems that it faced in for-eign policy coming into of½ce.

U.S. Policy toward Russia


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Obama administration. The ½rst may besubconscious; it was never articulated bythe president or his team before or after theelection. But, if you think about U.S. rela-tions with major powers, the relationshipthat was in greatest disrepair was with Rus-sia. If the administration was going to beginturning around the dynamic of U.S. relationswith all the great powers, particularly fol-lowing the deterioration after 2003, Russiawould be the hard case and, thus, the toughtest case.

The core reason, however, which was quiteconscious and which was articulated, wasmanaging a nuclear world. For those of youwho followed the positions Obama adoptedduring his campaign, he was quite clear thatthe single most important issue he wouldface as president was managing a nuclearworld. He did not articulate a Russia policyduring the campaign, though a workinggroup was developing one. Each time hetalked about the need to address the nuclearquestion, both in terms of potential prolif-eration and managing weapons among thosethat already have them, he underscored Rus-sia’s important role in making progress onthose issues.

What, then, did the Obama administrationdo once in of½ce? I think several things.First, the president made Russia a prior-ity–and in a way that surprised virtuallyeveryone, including those on his Russiateam. (I know this from direct contact withthem at the time.) He gave as much time toRussia in those ½rst months as he did to theproblems of Iraq or Afghanistan. The ½rststrategic reviews prepared by the adminis-tration were of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, andRussia.

Second, the administration stressed theimportance of Russia in U.S. foreign pol-icy–something no prior administration haddone. That has been one of the key weak-nesses of U.S. policy since 1991: the failureof national leadership to articulate howrami½ed and substantial the stakes are inthe U.S. relationship with Russia. In April,when William Burns, the Under Secretaryfor Political Affairs, spoke in Washington,he said there is no country in the world thathas a capacity to affect the success of U.S.foreign policy in more areas than Russia.He didn’t say that makes Russia the most

important country for the United States,but he was arguing that no other countrytouched as many issues of concern to theUnited States.

Third, the Obama administration startedby changing the tone of the relationship.That’s what the speech Vice President Bidenmade at the Munich Security Conferencewas all about, the famous metaphor: the“reset.”

Fourth, the administration decided to fo-cus on a number of core problems, whichhave been at the very center of U.S. foreignpolicy since. The ½rst was to move quicklyon a follow-on agreement for start i,which was scheduled to expire in December2009. The other immediate issues were thewar in Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear is-sue, and the need to strengthen the nuclearnonproliferation regime heading to the 2010npt Review Conference. Those issues thenbecame part of an extensive agenda thatthe U.S. administration had outlined andnegotiated with Russia in Obama’s ½rstmeeting with President Medvedev in Lon-don in April 2009. The two presidentssigned on to a very ambitious agenda intheir joint statement, one that addressednot just start, nonproliferation, and nu-clear terrorism, but everything from Euro-pean security architecture to progress onthe Middle East, from transnational secu-rity threats such as drug traf½cking, organ-ized crime, and corruption, to stability inSouth Asia, including Afghanistan, to in-creased economic ties. By July and the Mos-

cow summit, genuine progress had beenmade on a number of these issues, enoughto justify moving forward with the newpolicy. Indeed, a framework agreement fornegotiating the follow-on agreement forstart i was in place. There continue tobe delays in concluding the agreement, butthe understanding of what the agreementwas going to look like had been achievedby July 2009.

In Moscow, the two sides also established aBinational Presidential Commission. I be-lieve this is the only presidential-level com-mission the United States has with any ofthe major powers. The commission ischaired by the U.S. Secretary of State andRussia’s Foreign Minister. It has sixteenworking groups, as well as subcommitteeswhose agendas include counterterrorism,business development, energy, nuclear en-ergy and nuclear security, public health,management of emergencies, and othercivil society issues. In fact, a civil societyworking group is led by one of the hardlin-ers on the Russian side, Vladislav Surkov,and by Michael McFaul, Special Assistant tothe President and Senior Director for Russiaand Eurasian Affairs at the National SecurityCouncil.

There is a ½nal element of the Obama ad-ministration’s policy that has not been fea-tured much in the press, or even noticedwithin the expert community. That is, fromthe moment they took of½ce, the presidentand his team have worked to engage Russiaon a multilevel basis, not just governmentto government, but also in terms of civilsociety and the business community. Thisapproach is based on the notion that untilwe begin to engage business communitiesin both countries and create stakeholdersin the relationship, it will be very dif½cultto build a foundation that has durabilityand stability during moments of dif½culty.In July 2009 there were actually three sum-mits: the government to government sum-mit; the business summit, with more thantwo hundred representatives from the U.S.side; and the civil society summit. Sincethen, there has been a continued effort tofollow up on these initiatives.

So, what’s happened in U.S.-Russia rela-tions? What are the shadows and potentialpitfalls? Developing the relationship is a

Each time President Obamatalked about the need to ad-dress the nuclear question,both in terms of potentialproliferation and managingweapons among those thatalready have them, he under-scored Russia’s importantrole in making progress onthose issues.


dif½cult and impacted process, and in manyrespects a disappointing process to bothsides. But genuine, if very slow, progresshas been facilitated by several factors. First,the effects of the economic crisis, whichhave been bracing for the Russian leader-ship, have shifted discourse in Moscow to-ward patience, sacri½ce, and modesty; nolonger is there boasting about Russia be-coming the world’s ½fth most productiveeconomy and one of the world’s new ½nan-cial centers. There is also reserve in Russia’srecent external behavior, particularly in theway Moscow has reengaged with Europe.

Second, the U.S. administration’s decisionto alter the Bush administration’s approachto ballistic missile defense (bmd) in Europehas facilitated change. That said, the plansthe administration have substituted are clear-ly not only or even primarily to please the Rus-sians or grease the tracks of the relationship.They have their own basis. Third, Ukraine’sand Georgia’s nato membership bids weresimply taken off the table after the events of2008–2009, not least because major nato

allies wanted them off the table.

The focus throughout this period has beenon the immediate issues outlined earlier:the follow-on agreement for start i, Af-ghanistan, Iran, and nonproliferation. Thestart i agreement, as I understand it, isalmost complete. National Security Advi-sor James Jones and Chairman of the JointChiefs of Staff Michael Mullen were bothrecently in Moscow and are satis½ed withthe progress made on a couple of the re-

maining, very dif½cult issues. For example,there is an issue around telemetry and atechnical set of issues surrounding veri½-cation of missile defense and active defenseas well as the question of how the bmd

issue is to be handed off to future negotia-tions. On Afghanistan, the issue has beenthe transit route, both for lethal and non-lethal supplies, in the air and on the ground.While the press has reported the effort astroubled because Russia had supposedlydragged its heels, in fact, the transit routeis now up and running, and the administra-tion is satis½ed that this agreement is goingto be important and productive in the nearterm.

On Iran, William Burns has recently de-clared the U.S.-Russia relationship to beworking well, particularly the degree towhich the United States and Russia werekey in developing the International AtomicEnergy Agency (iaea) program offered toIran for the export of low-enriched urani-um in return for the eventual supply of fuelrods. The iaea initiative, however, has notbeen successful to this point, and the issuebecomes the imposition of sanctions. TheRussians blow hot and cold on sanctions,but since Fall 2009, Medvedev has put Rus-sia on record as saying that in circumstanceswhere there appear to be no alternatives,Russia would support sanctions on Iran.The Obama administration is preparing topresent a set of sanctions at the un Securi-ty Council.

Therefore, in three of the four areas of U.S.-Russia relations, there has been slow prog-ress, but real progress nonetheless. Theadministration also hopes to see results onthe fourth issue, nuclear nonproliferation,at the Nuclear Security Conference that willbe held in April 2010 under President Oba-ma’s auspices. Thus far, Russia has beencooperative and supportive of this initiative,according to White House reports. At thenpt Review Conference in May 2010, we’llsee what the two sides are able to accom-plish in the area of nonproliferation.

The Presidential Commission mentionedabove has been very slow to start, but theadministration has not used this part of itsagenda as the primary measuring stick forjudging whether the process is working.

The administration’s focus is primarily onstart i, Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear pro-gram, and nonproliferation as the test forwhether U.S.-Russia relations can advance.The working group on business develop-ment in Russia, for example, which is criti-cal to the multilevel approach I discussed,had its ½rst meeting this week at mit underthe chair of U.S. Secretary of CommerceGary Locke and Elvira Nabiullina, RussianMinister of Economic Development andTrade. Also, a major conference led by Dep-uty Prime Minister of Russia Igor Shuvalovand a set of U.S. counterparts was recentlyheld to explore how, in the United States,collaboration among universities, entre-preneurs, companies, and ½nanciers helpsbring technology (nanotechnology in partic-ular, an area that Russia is especially inter-ested in) from the laboratory to the market.

Also important for building relationships isthe degree of authority given to those at theUnder Secretary level by those at the verytop. There must be suf½cient authority forthem to pull together various bureaucra-cies, or, if the administration wishes to bemore ambitious, to advance a real strategicdialogue. U.S. Under Secretary Burns, whois splendid in this role, and the very ableRussian Deputy Foreign Minister SergeiRyabkov have just met to try to push thecommission’s development forward.

The more serious obstacle for the UnitedStates, in my view, is the failure to deliveron a number of high-priority items the ad-ministration had said would be addressedearly in its term, including the repeal of theJackson-Vanik Amendment and moving

In April, when WilliamBurns, the Under Secretaryfor Political Affairs, spoke in Washington, he saidthere is no country in theworld that has a capacity to affect the success of U.S.foreign policy in more areasthan Russia.

Until we begin to engagebusiness communities inboth countries and createstakeholders in the relation-ship, it will be very dif½cultto build a foundation thathas durability and stabilityduring moments of dif½culty.



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forward on the Comprehensive Test BanTreaty (ctbt) and the 123 civil nuclear co-operation agreement. From the Russianside, progress has been complicated by itsvacillation over joining the World TradeOrganization as well as its uncompromis-ing attitude on conventional arms controlin Europe following the suspension of itsparticipation in the Conventional ForcesTreaty in Europe and, with it, its refusal tobe part of the data exchange or monitoringarrangements set up under that agreement,among other issues.

Finally, where are the shadows and poten-tial pitfalls of U.S. policy toward Russia? I think ½rst and most imminent will be thefamiliar story of politics in both countries.Attitudes in various circles, particularlywithin Congress and parts of the media, re-main skeptical. Even when the start i

agreement is brought before the Senate, re-actions to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Reviewand issues of nuclear modernization, in-cluding the Reliable Replacement Warheadprogram, will complicate the rati½cationprocess. The decision to proceed with thectbt or the 123 agreement will be caughtup in this complicated process and thetrade-offs different politicians will try to en-gineer. We have seen a variety of criticismof the administration’s new Russia policy.

It is present at least implicitly in SenatorsMcCain and Kyl’s censure of France’s ten-tative decision to sell the Mistral helicoptercarrier to Russia. It would appear a partialmotivation in the proposal of the usuallymoderate Senator Richard Lugar to providedefense equipment to strengthen Georgia’scapacity to deal with a future Russian as-sault. In some quarters of the U.S. govern-

ment, support for a neo-containment pol-icy toward Russia is still very much alive.For Russia’s part, the process has been im-peded by strong resistance and mistrustwithin security circles, including parts ofthe military, and by either the inability orthe unwillingness of Russia’s national lead-ership to crack bureaucratic heads.

Second, for the moment the concrete issuesin the U.S.-Russia relationship (the follow-on to start i, Afghanistan, Iran, and non-proliferation) are not embedded in a largerstrategic vision that will give broader guid-ance to the relationship. It is important forthe U.S. administration to develop a strate-gic plan if they really do mean to put the re-lationship on a different footing. However,because the administration did not set outto do this at the outset, given the pressuresand the normal rhythms of Washington,the prospect of moving in this directionnow is probably not very good.

Third, deep, underlying sources of tensionremain unattended in the relationship, inparticular, the interaction between theUnited States and Russia within the post-Soviet space. This is the great unaddressedproblem–the large elephant in the room–and until the United States and Russia di-rectly and frankly begin working out a mo-dus vivendi for their respective roles in thisregion, progress on all other aspects of therelationship will be impeded. This inatten-tion, in turn, also delays efforts to addressthe improvements that need to be made tothe European security architecture.

Fourth, what I would call Russia’s strategicambivalence, or uncertainty about where itstands in relation to the outside world, hasincreased. On one day, Russia recognizesthe importance of Europe and Russia’s eco-nomic stake in the relationship with Europe.The next day, Russia talks about Europe’sdiminished importance in internationalpolitics and the need to dismiss Europe andthe eu and move on to other things. Rus-sians wrestle with the question of how theythink about their relationships with thenew rising powers, particularly with Brazil,Russia, India, and China (bric).

An emerging subcategory within Russia’srapport with bric is the Russia-China re-lationship. Russia is not treating this as a

fundamental strategic choice–not toyingwith the idea of aligning with China as analternative to alignment with the West or theUnited States. Rather, more important is theextent to which a signi½cant part of the Rus-sian political establishment grows increas-ingly attracted to the Chinese political mod-el. We have seen over the last year an increas-ing interest even on the part of Russia’s dom-inant political party and others in and aroundPutin’s circles in the way China organizes it-self politically, including the role of its dom-inant political party. This obviously bears onthe degree to which one can expect Russia tomove its domestic policy in directions thatwill support a Western option and closer re-lations with the United States.

Russia’s domestic orientation recalls a fa-vorite cocktail conversation: who’s up andwho’s down in the Medvedev-Putin diarchy.Here, the struggle between a greater orien-tation toward the West or toward Asia playsout. I don’t want to oversimplify by arguingthat Putin represents the Asian option, Med-vedev the Western. But the more that pow-er hierarchy tilts toward Medvedev, the lesslikely it will be for Russia to explore the Chi-nese political model; the more it tilts or re-turns entirely to Putin, the more that optionwill begin to open up.

A series of very signi½cant factors will con-tinue to constrain how far and fast the U.S.-Russia relationship will move, but we oughtto be thankful that it has moved as far as ithas, and that the two countries have reversedthe sharply negative and unhappy state ofaffairs as they stood a year ago.

The U.S. administration’sfocus is primarily on START I,Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclearprogram, and nonprolifera-tion as the test for whetherU.S.-Russia relations canadvance.

A series of very signi½cantfactors will continue to con-strain how far and fast theU.S.-Russia relationshipwill move.


Thomas Graham

Thomas Graham is Senior Director at KissingerAssociates and former Special Assistant to thePresident and Senior Director for Russia on theNational Security Council staff.

Presentation

I agree with Bob that the current adminis-tration has begun to turn the relationshiparound. The tone is different, and we are en-gaging Russia with an intensity we haven’tseen since the ½rst year of the Bush admin-istration. However, I also think that the re-lationship has not progressed as far as theObama administration had anticipated thatit would when they took of½ce a year ago.The start negotiations have dragged onsomewhat longer than the administrationhad hoped; establishing a deal to open theAfghan air corridor has been problematic(although the situation is not nearly as se-vere as the press would have us believe);and although the architecture of the Presi-dential Commission has promise, it has aways to go before it can be a productive partof managing this very complicated relation-ship. At this point, the challenge is movingbeyond the rhetoric of 2009 to solidify therelationship going forward.

I want to pick up on one point that Bob men-tioned: the question of strategic vision.While the current administration internal-ly has thought through how to approachU.S.-Russia relations, neither they nor theRussian administration has provided a clear,public articulation of the strategic frame-work in which the two parties are conduct-ing their relationship. This failure to articu-

late an agenda will be increasingly problem-atic as we try to put real flesh onto the struc-ture of a “reset” relationship.

Neither country has publicly articulatedwhy the other country is important to itsown national interest in a positive way.Russia knows what it doesn’t want, whichcan be summed up in a series of “no”s: noto nato expansion; no to missile defensein Eastern Europe; no to increasing U.S. in-fluence in the former Soviet space; no toAmerican interference in Russian domesticaffairs. From the American standpoint,there is a much broader idea of what thepositive relationship could look like, but forvarious reasons, including the president’sown agenda, the focus is very narrow. Sen-ior of½cials in Moscow (as opposed to thosewho are intimately involved in managingday-to-day relations with the United States)say that the United States is not really in-terested in engaging Russia on most of theissues that aren’t important to the UnitedStates but are important to Russia.

The way we talk about common interestsand shared threats can provide a founda-tion for a relationship going forward, butnot until we clarify each country’s priori-ties. That shared interest is not currentlypart of a common agenda and does not un-derscore the extent to which the countrieswill need to work together in the real world.Iran is a prime example of this lack of clar-ity in national priorities. For the past eightyears, even when I was working in the Bushadministration, the line on Iran has been,

“Russia and the United States share a stra-tegic goal in preventing Iran from obtaininga nuclear weapon.” We just haven’t beenable to agree on the tactics of getting thatdone in the real world.

Part of the reason we haven’t been able toagree on a strategy is that we look at thisproblem in different ways. For the UnitedStates, you could argue that preventing Iranfrom obtaining a nuclear weapon is the topforeign policy priority, one that is linked inour minds to the role that Iran has played insupporting terrorist organizations, particu-larly in the Middle East, and also to whatwe see as a fairly hostile regime inside Iran.This is not a top priority for Russia. Russia’sinterest in preventing Iran from obtaininga nuclear weapon is countered by the posi-tive role that Iran has played in not challeng-ing Russian interests in the Caucasus andCentral Asia. It’s also balanced by the lucra-tive contracts that a segment of the Russianpolitical elite have had in selling arms toIran; by nuclear cooperation with Iran; andby Russia’s interest in tensions between theUnited States and Iran, because the result-ing sanctions would preclude the shipmentof Iranian gas into the European markets,where Russia sends almost all of its gas andwhere it derives a considerable part of itsfederal revenue.

This is not to say that we can’t agree on apolicy toward Iran; but it underscores thatworking collaboratively will be much morecomplicated than simply talking aboutshared threats and common interests. TheUnited States has to consider a range ofRussian interests in Iran and provide incen-tives for Russia to prioritize the part of therelationship that is most important to us.

I think the United States and Russia havestruggled to develop a strategic vision fortheir relationship for several reasons. First,both sides realize that we have entered a

While the current adminis-tration has thought throughhow to approach U.S.-Rus-sia relations, neither they northe Russian administrationhas provided a clear, publicarticulation of the strategicframework in which the twoparties are conducting theirrelationship.

Neither country has publiclyarticulated why the othercountry is important to itsown national interest in apositive way.



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period of tremendous upheaval, of uncer-tain duration, in international affairs. Wetalk about the shift in global dynamics fromEurope to Asia; the historic struggle in theMiddle East between forces of modernityand tradition; and the positive and nega-tive impacts of globalization that have be-come more prominent over the past severalyears. Neither country really knows wherethe global system is headed and what role itwill play in that system, let alone what therelationship between the United States andRussia will be.

Second, the U.S.-Russia relationship is in-creasingly part of a multilateral system.We’re well beyond the era when U.S.-Sovietrelations de½ned the international system.During the Cold War, we had con½dencethat if the United States and the SovietUnion could agree, we could get certainthings done in the world. In a multilateralcontext, it’s much more dif½cult for eachside to calculate what the other will con-tribute to current international challenges.For example, although it helps the UnitedStates to have Russia on board in managingthe global ½nancial crisis, more of the U.S.administration’s attention is focused onEurope, China, and India. Another questionis where Russia ½ts into the conversationon climate change. And although Russiamay be the critical “other” in U.S. nonpro-liferation efforts (given its nuclear arsenal,experience in nuclear weapons, and thehistory the United States and Russia sharein managing this relationship), that factdoesn’t provide the basis for a broader stra-tegic vision of how the two countries shouldwork together in the future.

Third, domestic policy is the top priorityfor both countries. In his ½rst State of theUnion Address, President Obama talkedabout jobs, the economy, and the ½nancialsector. In November 2009, President Med-vedev talked about infrastructure renewal,demographic decline, diversi½cation of theeconomy, and a modernization programthat he said was critical to Russia’s survivalas a major power in the twenty-½rst centu-ry. You also have two presidents who cameto of½ce (one elected, one selected) to dealwith domestic reconstruction in their coun-tries. Thus, building strategic relationshipsin a global context is secondary.

My ½nal point (something that I ½nd in-creasingly curious as you talk to Russiansabout this relationship) is that each coun-try thinks the other is in decline. For theUnited States, the question of whether Rus-sia really matters has been implicit sincethe breakup of the Soviet Union. While this

sentiment may not be true of the presidentand his chief advisors, if you get down intothe bowels of bureaucracy and the peoplewho are supposed to implement policy, theconviction that Russia genuinely matters toU.S. national security is absent; people arenot inclined to devote a lot of time to thisrelationship. In Russia, the view that theUnited States is in decline originated much

more recently. It’s a consequence of whatRussia regards as the failed policies of theBush administration; the economic crisisand the failure of what they see as the Amer-ican capitalist system; and doubts aboutthe current U.S. administration’s ef½cacy.However popular and even strategically ap-propriate the decisions on Afghanistan andIraq might be from our standpoint now andin the future, the Russians see troop with-drawals in Iraq and the desire to draw downtroops in Afghanistan next year as an aban-donment of international responsibilities,a retreat in the face of a failed policy con-ducted by the previous administration. Thequestion for Russia becomes: To what ex-tent are we prepared to risk our relationshipwith Iran if the United States plans to removeitself from both Iraq and Afghanistan? Towhat extent do we want to be involved withthe United States in dealing with the prob-lem in Afghanistan if the United States isleaving in a year-and-a-half? These are realquestions about the United States’ commit-ment to the hard issues in international af-fairs that Russia believes de½ne the globalsecurity environment.

I believe we can deal with these challenges,but it’s important to recognize the existingbarriers. The argument for better U.S.-Rus-sia relations is future-oriented. It’s aboutwhere we think the world is heading overthe next ten or ½fteen years, what the chal-lenges will be for the United States, and howand under what circumstances Russia canhelp us over the long term in dealing withthose challenges.

Question

Can you give us an update on Russia’s rela-tionship with the former Soviet republics,the Commonwealth of Independent States(cis)? Are there any relationships there thatshould concern the United States?

Robert Legvold

I think Russia’s interaction with its neighborsis the key issue that has not been frankly ordirectly faced by any U.S. administration inpolicy toward Russia. There has been anynumber of positions taken in response tospeci½c Russian actions, whether it’s in the

The argument for betterU.S.-Russia relations is future-oriented. It’s aboutwhere we think the world isheading over the next ten or½fteen years, what the chal-lenges will be for the UnitedStates, and how and underwhat circumstances Russiacan help us over the longterm in dealing with thosechallenges.

The way we talk aboutcommon interests andshared threats can provide a foundation for a relation-ship going forward, but notuntil we clarify each coun-try’s priorities.


context of color revolutions, a Georgian war,dueling pipelines, or a host of other things.But we haven’t really addressed the under-lying question of what kind of modus vi-vendi the United States and Russia need toimplement as Russia deals with its neigh-bors and the outside world, whether it’snato, the eu, the United States, or Turkey.This is a kaleidoscopic relationship that hasmany different pieces, continually changes,and varies enormously depending on theways in which Russia relates to its neighbors.

There are several categories of relationshipsbetween Russia and the states around it.First, there is the quasi-partnership, themarriage of convenience or failure of alter-natives, such as aspects of the Russian-Armenian relationship because of Arme-nia’s generally secure environment; theCentral Asians, beginning with the Ka-zakhs, which have chosen a close workingrelationship with the Russians without do-ing Russia’s bidding; or Belarus, which formuch of the time casts its lot with Russiaby rejecting any Western options.

Other states, including Ukraine, Azerbai-jan, and, at times, Uzbekistan, have beenvery uncomfortable in the face of the So-viet legacy and the ongoing Russian effortto maintain a dominant influence and adroit de regard over the states’ actions. Thatpicture, however, is continually changing.In the upcoming Ukrainian election, Russiahas not been an issue because either of thecandidates who wins will attempt to build aconstructive and working relationship withRussia that will deemphasize Western rela-tions in terms of nato membership andthe eu.

At the same time, some of the countries thathave been very close to Russia have grownrestless and resistant and have refused tocooperate with Russia on new initiatives.Russia and Belarus are in the middle of atug-of-war over oil. Moreover, the Russian-Belarus relationship was key in Russia’splans for a “Collective Security Treaty Or-ganization” that included a cooperativemilitary enterprise among several of thepost-Soviet states. As of last summer, theBelarusians have boycotted one importantpiece of that alliance.

There is a tendency in the outside world tooversimplify Russia’s relationship with itsneighbors by assuming that Russia’s funda-mental motivation is a neo-imperialist ob-jective to reestablish its sway within theregion, using energy or arms if necessary(as the Georgian war proved, according tothis line of thinking). That’s the way weshould analyze Russia’s relationship withthis region: to what extent it is succeedingor failing in this neo-imperialist agenda.This is not to say that the Russians don’tbelieve they ought to be the most dominantpower within the region, but the questionis the extent to which they exclude the out-side world in their agenda and, conversely,the extent to which they are willing to workwith other countries that are engaged inthe region.

Question

What kind of broader agenda do you thinkmight actually lead the Russians to be morecooperative on dealing with Iran?

Thomas Graham

Part of the challenge is to establish a modusvivendi with Russia in the former Sovietspace, particularly in the Caucasus andCentral Asia, an area where the Russiansbelieve Iran has played a more or less posi-tive role, and where the United States, overthe past eight to ten years, has played alargely negative role. Demonstrating thatwe can ½nd a way to manage the relation-ship productively in that part of the worldlessens Iran’s advantage.

We also need to move forward much morerapidly on civil nuclear cooperation. The123 agreement that was negotiated towardthe end of the Bush administration, sub-mitted to Congress, then withdrawn in thewake of Russia’s war with Georgia needs tobe resubmitted. It provides a framework thatallows the United States to facilitate work-ing together on civil nuclear energy, bothbilaterally and also, presumably, in devel-oping countries. If we were able to put to-gether a joint venture between Rosatom onthe Russian side, and Westinghouse or Gen-eral Electric on the U.S. side to build nuclearreactors as part of the nuclear renaissance indeveloping countries, this initiative wouldalso give Russia an alternative to broaden-ing its nuclear relationship with Iran.

Also, we cannot continue to present thegreat dependence Europe has on Russiangas as a major threat to Europe’s securityand the transatlantic relationship. We needto understand that Russian gas will be an im-portant part of Europe’s energy equationin the future, and we need to assure Russiathat if the relationship with Iran does im-prove, Russia will play a role in the develop-ment of Iranian resources and the export ofthose resources to European markets.

Finally, the extent to which the current U.S.administration can engage Tehran directlyraises concern in Moscow about whereIran’s interests are headed, which I think ishelpful in encouraging Russia to think morecreatively about how it works with us. Incrude terms, if we normalize our relation-ship with Iran, Iran is more likely to look tothe West and the United States for nuclearcooperation and arms (as the Shah did thir-ty or forty years ago) than they are to Mos-cow. Together, these considerations changethe matrix that Moscow calculates fromand begin to increase the chance that Rus-sia will work with us on dealing with Iran’ssupposed nuclear weapons program.

I think Russia’s interactionwith its neighbors is the key issue that has not beenfrankly or directly faced byany U.S. administration in policy toward Russia.

We need to understand thatRussian gas will be an impor-tant part of Europe’s energyequation in the future.



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Question

Given the backsliding on democracy-build-ing and human rights in the Russian Feder-ation and throughout the former Sovietspace today, is there anything the UnitedStates can do to nudge Russia toward a morereasonable path?

Thomas Graham

The Obama administration’s efforts to setup a working group on civil society as part ofthe bilateral presidential structure bringsour civil societies together to discuss issuesthat are of common concern to us and toreach out to a broader segment of the Rus-sian population and Russian political elitesin a way that is not seen as lecturing, but asan exchange of experience that helps eachcountry deal with current crises.

I would like to see this working group iden-tify a set of issues for American ngos andRussian ngos to work on together. I wouldlike to see them think about immigration,the role of the press, and corruption, all ofwhich, we can argue, are problems in bothsocieties that need to be addressed by ex-perts so that each country can provide for amore productive and open society. I thinkthe U.S. administration is off on the rightfoot on this effort.

Question

What is the impact of the rise of China as amajor power on the relationship betweenRussia and the United States, and how hasit affected Russian foreign policy?

Robert Legvold

China’s emergence as an economic poweris critical to Russian foreign policy. Russia’srelationship with China, though semi-inde-pendent, is, in an important respect, a func-tion of the relationship with the West. Atthe outset of an independent Russia, you hada Yeltsin/Kozyrev orientation toward theAtlantic community called the “pro-Atlan-ticist” position. During that period of time,Kozyrev was prepared to go to China in thecontext of this pro-Western policy and lec-ture China on how it should change domes-tically. In 1993, greater cooperation withChina began to occur at the same time that

undulating curves appeared in Russia’s re-lationship with the West during the Clin-ton administration: up and down from thebeginning through nato enlargement, tosome improvement, before Fall 1998, and soon. At each of the low points, the Russia-China relationship moved to the next stage,from friendship, to strategic partnership,to, ultimately, the treaty the two countriessigned. Improvements in the relationshipwere accompanied by media reports that de-picted Russia as turning toward China andpotentially creating an alignment againstthe United States. I don’t think the Russiansever believed that it would be wise, let alonefeasible, for them to draw the Chinese intoan alternative strategic alignment againstthe West.

But what did happen over that period oftime was the emergence of what I wouldcall parallel foreign policies. There is nocountry with which Russia has more com-mon positions in international politics thanChina. And frankly, among the major pow-ers, there is no country with which Chinahas more common interests, whether it’sdealing with rogue states, attitudes towardnato, security ties between the UnitedStates and Japan, or parallel issues in thecases of Russia/Chechnya and China/Tibet,or even Taiwan. But convergence of foreignpolicy and economic interest stops short ofstrategic alignment.

The new factor is the degree to which, with-in an important part of Russia’s politicalestablishment, there is an af½nity for theway China conducts its affairs, particularlymanaging its system at home.

Even with Russia’s ambivalence aboutwhether the United States is a fading powerand whether Europe can be dismissed, theWest is still the dominant force in interna-

A relationship with the Westis critical to Russia’s interestsin Europe, the United States,and Japan, and it also affectsRussia’s options with respectto China.

tional politics. A relationship with the Westis critical to Russia’s interests in Europe,the United States, and Japan, and it also af-fects Russia’s options with respect to Chi-na. China is now part of a three-way game.

Thomas Graham

China’s ability to invest in the Russianeconomy has changed rather dramaticallyover the past couple of years. Ten years agowe made the argument that if Russia want-ed to modernize, it needed the investment,expertise, and know-how it could ½nd onlyin the West. That’s no longer true: Chinainvests in the development of resources inSiberia and far eastern Russia, and you can½nd Chinese businessmen in Moscow.Changes in the economic relationshipcould have long-term implications for howRussia deals with China and how Chinadecides to deal with Russia as part of itsbroader foreign policy stance.

Question

Does Russia have a policy toward North Ko-rea as a participant in the six-party talks?

Thomas Graham

The Russian position on North Korea is“talk to the Chinese.”

Robert Legvold

In the last years of the Soviet Union, Gorba-chev literally wrote off the North Koreans;he didn’t renew the bilateral security treatyand he made an arrangement with SouthKorea at North Korea’s expense. It was quiteclear, given the direction of Gorbachev’sWestpolitik, that the Soviet Union hadchosen South Korea over North Korea.But in the late-Yeltsin and particularly theearly-Putin years, there was an effort torestore the relationship with North Korea,though North Korea remains suspicious ofRussia. There’s no question that the domi-nant player among the six parties is China.Russia’s response to the nuclear issue inNorth Korea parallels China’s; China hasthe lead and Russia is its partner in dealingwith North Korea on the nuclear issue, in-cluding in the context of the six-party talksand in the un Security Council.


Question

This question is on behalf of the youngestmembers in the audience. When did youbecome interested in studying the SovietUnion and Russia, and how would you ad-vise our students?

Thomas Graham

I came of age in the late 1950s and early1960s, so the Cold War and Sputnik are thethings I remember from my childhood thatinitially sparked my interest in the SovietUnion and Russia. The ½rst exchange pro-grams set up under the Eisenhower admin-istration with Khrushchev let us reach outto the Soviet Union and Russian citizens ina way we hadn’t previously. In addition, Iwas fortunate to go to one of the few highschools in the United States in the early1960s (in Princeton, New Jersey) that of-fered Russian as a foreign language.

I think it is extremely important to focuson the language, culture, and history–thisis where the real richness of Russia is, inany event, and this provides a foundationfor understanding how Russians think.When they understand that you appreciatetheir culture and history, that appreciationis reciprocated. In graduate school in the1970s, a lot of people my age made the mis-take of becoming Soviet experts, and in1991, they had an entire library of booksthat were basically useless. I studied politi-cal science at Harvard University and wrotemy dissertation on a Russian existentialphilosopher (which I managed to justify as a political science dissertation); and thatproject led me into Russian thought and

the much broader understanding of thehistory and culture that became importantafter the breakup of the Soviet Union.

My advice would be to study the language,literature, and culture. If you have the op-portunity to travel, take advantage of it. It’sa fascinating society, and it’s going to be animportant country for the United Statesgoing forward.

Robert Legvold

I was much less prescient or thoughtful as ahigh school student than Tom was. My in-terest began to emerge when I was in col-lege, in a rather conventional and not veryimaginative way, because the Soviet Unionwas at the center of U.S. foreign policy andinternational relations. (Were I a sopho-more in college right now, I would almostcertainly have chosen to study China.) Myinitial aspiration was to go into the ForeignService; I changed my mind once I foundout there was a way to be a permanent stu-dent. Even those of you who have not madeRussia or the U.S.-Russia relationship animportant part of your career have mostlikely been exposed to it, and have eitherstudied the Russian language, literature, orculture, or have traveled there. Travel inparticular gets it in your blood. There issomething enormously engaging aboutRussian culture and society, and maybealso because U.S. relations with that coun-try have long been as complex–and attimes tension-½lled–as they have beenimportant. But I have never for a day re-gretted the career choice that I made.

© 2010 by Robert Legvold and ThomasGraham, respectively

We need to assure Russia thatif the relationship with Irandoes improve, Russia willplay a role in the develop-ment of Iranian resourcesand the export of those re-sources to European markets.



Noteworthy

As of press time, several Fel-lows of the Academy, listedbelow, have been nominatedto serve in senior roles inPresident Barack Obama’sadministration.

Lawrence S. Bacow (Tufts Uni-versity): Member, President’sBoard of Advisors on HistoricallyBlack Colleges and Universities

Stephen L. Hauser (University ofCalifornia, San Francisco): Mem-ber, Presidential Commission forthe Study of Bioethical Issues

Richard H. Jenrette (Donaldson,Lufkin & Jenrette): Member,Committee for the Preservationof the White House

James McNerney, Jr. (BoeingCompany): Chair, President’sExport Council

Donald M. Stewart (Universityof Chicago): Member, Commis-sion on Presidential Scholars

Carl Wieman (University of Brit-ish Columbia; University of Col-orado): Associate Director forScience, Of½ce of Science andTechnology Policy

In addition, President BarackObama has nominated threeFellows for posts listed below:

Peter Diamond (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology): Mem-ber, Board of Governors, FederalReserve

Elena Kagan (United States De-partment of Justice): AssociateJustice, Supreme Court of theUnited States

Janet Yellen (Federal ReserveBank of San Francisco): ViceChairwoman, Federal Reserve

Select Prizes and Awards

National Medal of Arts, 2009

Maya Lin (Maya Lin Studio)

Jessye Norman (New York, NY)

Michael Tilson Thomas (San Francisco Symphony)

John Williams (Los Angeles, CA)

National Humanities Medal,2009

Robert A. Caro (New York, NY)

David Levering Lewis (New YorkUniversity)

William H. McNeill(Colebrook, CT)

Philippe de Montebello (Metro-politan Museum of Art)

Elie Wiesel (Boston University)

Other Awards

David Botstein (Princeton Univer-sity) is the recipient of the AlbanyMedical Center Prize in Medicineand Biomedical Research. Heshares the prize with co-recipi-ents Francis S. Collins (NationalInstitutes of Health) and EricLander (Broad Institute, Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology).

Thomas Cline (University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley) is the recipientof the Edward Novitski Prizefrom the Genetics Society ofAmerica.

William K. Coblentz (Coblentz,Patch, Duffy & Bass, llp) receivedUniversity of California, Berke-ley’s Institute of GovernmentalStudies Distinguished ServiceAward.

Francis S. Collins (National Insti-tutes of Health) is the recipientof the Albany Medical CenterPrize in Medicine and BiomedicalResearch. He shares the prize withco-recipients Eric Lander (BroadInstitute, Massachusetts Instituteof Technology) and David Botstein(Princeton University).

Rita Colwell (Canon U.S. Life Sci-ences, Inc.; University of Mary-land; Johns Hopkins University)was awarded the 2010 StockholmWater Prize.

Natalie Zemon Davis (Universityof Toronto) was awarded the 2010Holberg International MemorialPrize.

Titia de Lange (Rockefeller Uni-versity) is the recipient of the50th annual American Associa-tion for Cancer Research G.H.A.Clowes Memorial Award.

Christopher F. Edley, Jr. (uc

Berkeley School of Law) is therecipient of the DistinguishedAlumni Award by the New Ro-chelle Fund for Educational Ex-cellence.

Susan Fiske (Princeton Univer-sity) is the co-recipient of theDistinguished Scienti½c Contri-bution Award, given by the Amer-ican Psychological Association.

Howard Gardner (Harvard Uni-versity) is among the recipientsof the 2010 Common Sense MediaAward.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (HarvardUniversity) received the 41stnaacp Image Award in the cat-egory of Outstanding LiteraryWork for In Search of Our Roots:How 19 Extraordinary AfricanAmericans Reclaimed Their Past.

William H. Gates III (MicrosoftCorporation) is the recipient ofthe 2010 Bower Award for Busi-ness Leadership.

Sha½ Goldwasser (Massachu-setts Institute of Technology)was awarded the 2010 BenjaminFranklin Medal in Computer andCognitive Science.

Paul E. Gray (Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology) was awardedthe 2010 ieee Founders Medal.

Paul Greengard (RockefellerUniversity) is the recipient of a Dart/nyu BiotechnologyAchievement Award.

Lily Jan (University of California,San Francisco) and Yuh Nung Jan(University of California, SanFrancisco) are the joint winnersof the 2010 Edward M. ScolnickPrize in Neuroscience, awardedby the McGovern Institute at theMassachusetts Institute of Tech-nology.

Leonard Kleinrock (Universityof California, Los Angeles) wasnamed a 2010 Dan David Prizelaureate. He shares the prize withMichael O. Rabin (Harvard Uni-versity) and Gordon E. Moore(Intel Corporation).

János Kornai (Collegium Buda-pest) was awarded the LeontiefMedal. He was also presented withthe Grand Cross Order of Meritof the Republic of Hungary.

Eric Lander (Broad Institute,Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology) is the recipient of theAlbany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Re-search. He shares the prize withco-recipients Francis S. Collins(National Institutes of Health)and David Botstein (PrincetonUniversity).

Edward Lazowska (University ofWashington) received the 2010acm Distinguished ServiceAward.

George Lucas (Lucas½lm Ltd.) isamong the recipients of the 2010Common Sense Media Award.


Robert Mahley (The J. DavidGladstone Institutes) is the recip-ient of the Research!America’s2010 Builders of Science Award.

Andreu Mas-Colell (UniversitatPompeu Fabra) is the recipientof the bbva Foundation Fron-tiers of Knowledge Award inEconomics, Finance and Man-agement. He shares the prizewith Hugo Sonnenschein (Uni-versity of Chicago).

Robert C. Merton (Harvard Bus-iness School) received the Kol-mogorov Medal from the Uni-versity of London.

Gordon E. Moore (Intel Corpo-ration) was named a 2010 DanDavid Prize laureate. He sharesthe prize with Michael O. Rabin(Harvard University) and Leon-ard Kleinrock (University of Cal-ifornia, Los Angeles).

Bethany Moreton (University ofGeorgia; Academy Visiting Schol-ar, 2006–2007) won the Freder-ick Jackson Turner Award, givenby the Organization of AmericanHistorians, for her book To ServeGod and Wal-Mart: The Making ofChristian Free Enterprise.

John Murdoch (Harvard Univer-sity) was awarded the SartonMedal from the History of Sci-ence Society.

Eiichi Nakamura (University ofTokyo) is the recipient of the2010 Arthur C. Cope Award ofthe American Chemical Society.

Peter C. Nowell (University ofPennsylvania School of Medi-cine) was awarded the 2010 Ben-jamin Franklin Medal in LifeScience.

Stuart L. Pimm (Duke Univer-sity) was awarded the 2010 TylerPrize for Environmental Achieve-ment.

Steven Pinker (Harvard Univer-sity) was awarded the George A.Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuro-science.

Alejandro Portes (Princeton Uni-versity) is the recipient of theW.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distin-guished Scholarship Award fromthe American Sociological Asso-ciation.

Adam Przeworski (New YorkUniversity) was awarded theJohan Skytte Prize in PoliticalScience.

Michael C. J. Putnam (BrownUniversity) was awarded a Cen-tennial Medal by the AmericanAcademy in Rome.

Michael O. Rabin (Harvard Uni-versity) was named a 2010 DanDavid Prize laureate. He sharesthe prize with Leonard Kleinrock(University of California, LosAngeles) and Gordon E. Moore(Intel Corporation).

Martin Raff (University CollegeLondon) is the recipient of a Dart/nyu Biotechnology AchievementAward.

Phillip A. Sharp (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) is therecipient of the fourth annualAmerican Association for CancerResearch Margaret Foti Awardfor Leadership and ExtraordinaryAchievements in Cancer Research.

Hugo Sonnenschein (Universityof Chicago) is the recipient of thebbva Foundation Frontiers ofKnowledge Award in Economics,Finance and Management. Heshares the prize with Andreu Mas-Colell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

Jack Strominger (Harvard Uni-versity) received the aai Excel-lence in Mentoring Award by theAmerican Association of Immu-nologists.

JoAnne Stubbe (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology) is therecipient of the 2010 BenjaminFranklin Medal in Chemistry.

Dennis Sullivan (Stony BrookUniversity; cuny GraduateCenter) was awarded the 2010Wolf Foundation Prize in Math-ematics. He shares the prizewith Shing-Tung Yau (HarvardUniversity).

Axel Ullrich (Max-Planck-Insti-tut für Biochemie) was awardedthe 2010 Wolf Foundation Prizein Medicine.

Peter K. Vogt (The Scripps Re-search Institute) is the recipientof the 5th Annual Szent-GyorgyiPrize for Progress in Cancer Re-search.

E. O. Wilson (Harvard University)was awarded the Thomas Jeffer-son Foundation Medal in Archi-tecture by the University of Vir-ginia.

James Wright (Dartmouth Col-lege) received the New EnglandBoard of Higher Education’sEleanor M. McMahon Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Xiaoliang Sunney Xie (HarvardUniversity) is among the recipi-ents of the 2009 E. O. LawrenceAward.

Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard Uni-versity) was awarded the 2010Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Heshares the prize with Dennis Sul-livan (Stony Brook University;cuny Graduate Center).

New Appointments

Fellows Appointed to the Advisory Board of ProjectReason

Jerry Coyne (University ofChicago)

Daniel C. Dennett (Tufts Univer-sity)

Rebecca Goldstein (Harvard Uni-versity)

Ian McEwan (London, UnitedKingdom)

Steven Pinker (Harvard Univer-sity)

J. Craig Venter (J. Craig VenterInstitute)

Steven Weinberg (University ofTexas at Austin)

Other New Appointments

Arden L. Bement, Jr. (NationalScience Foundation) has beennamed to lead the Global PolicyResearch Institute at Purdue Uni-versity.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn (Univer-sity of California, San Francisco)was named President of the Amer-ican Association for Cancer Re-search.

Jeffrey A. Bluestone (Universityof California, San Francisco) hasbeen appointed ucsf ExecutiveVice Chancellor and Provost.

Paul G. Falkowski (Rutgers Uni-versity) was elected to the gov-erning council of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

David S. Ferriero (U.S. NationalArchives and Records Adminis-tration) was con½rmed as the 10thArchivist of the United States.

Gerald D. Fischbach (SimonsFoundation) was appointed tothe Interagency Autism Coordi-nating Committee.

Zvi Galil (Tel Aviv University)was named Dean of the Collegeof Computing at Georgia Tech.

Arthur Levinson (Genetech, Inc.)has been appointed to the Boardof Directors of Amyris Biotech-nologies, Inc.

John S. Reed (Citigroup) hasbeen elected Chair of the mit

Corporation.

Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis Uni-versity) was named President ofthe Mandel Foundation.

Noteworthy


Select Publications

Poetry

Anne Carson (McGill Univer-sity). Nox. New Directions, April2010

Charles Simic (University ofNew Hampshire), ed. and trans.The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthol-ogy of Serbian Poetry. Graywolf,May 2010

Fiction

Ann Beattie (University of Vir-ginia). Walks with Men. Scribner,June 2010

Robert Coover (Brown Univer-sity). Noir. Overlook, April 2010

Gish Jen (Brandeis University).World and Town. Knopf, October2010

Jim Lehrer (NewsHour with JimLehrer). Super. Random House,April 2010

Jane Smiley (New York, NY).Private Life. Knopf, May 2010

E. O. Wilson (Harvard Univer-sity). Anthill. W. W. Norton,April 2010

Non½ction

Robert Alter (University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley). Pen of Iron: Amer-ican Prose and the King James Bible.Princeton University Press, April2010

Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia Uni-versity). Uninhibited, Robust, andWide-Open: A Free Press for a NewCentury. Oxford University Press,December 2009

Paul Brest (William and FloraHewlett Foundation) and LindaHamilton Krieger (uc BerkeleySchool of Law). Problem Solving,Decision Making, and ProfessionalJudgment: A Guide for Lawyers andPolicymakers. Oxford UniversityPress, May 2010

Alan Brinkley (Columbia Univer-sity). The Publisher: Henry Luceand His American Century. Knopf,April 2010

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh(Denver Museum of Nature andScience; Academy Visiting Schol-ar, 2005–2006). Inheriting the Past:The Making of Arthur C. Parker andIndigenous Archaeology. Universityof Arizona Press, October 2009

Karen S. Cook (Stanford Universi-ty), Margaret Levi (University ofWashington), and Russell Hardin(New York University), eds. WhomCan We Trust? How Groups, Net-works, and Institutions Make TrustPossible. Russell Sage FoundationPublications, November 2009

Michael Dummett (University ofOxford). The Nature and Future ofPhilosophy. Columbia UniversityPress, April 2010

Paul Farmer (Harvard MedicalSchool; Brigham and Women’sHospital, Boston; Partners InHealth). Partner to the Poor: APaul Farmer Reader. Universityof California Press, April 2010

Margot E. Fassler (Yale Universi-ty). The Virgin of Chartres: MakingHistory through Liturgy and the Arts.Yale University Press, April 2010

Crystal N. Feimster (Universityof North Carolina, Chapel Hill;Academy Visiting Scholar, 2003–2004). Southern Horrors: Womenand the Politics of Rape and Lynch-ing. Harvard University Press,November 2009

Daniel Foster (Duke University;Academy Visiting Scholar, 2008–2009). Wagner’s Ring Cycle andthe Greeks. Cambridge UniversityPress, March 2010

Renée C. Fox (University of Penn-sylvania). In the Field: A Sociologist’sJourney. Transaction Publishers,July 2010

Hsuan L. Hsu (University of Cal-ifornia, Davis; Academy VisitingScholar, 2004–2005). Geographyand the Production of Space in Nine-teenth-Century American Literature.Cambridge University Press, June2010

Michael Kammen (Cornell Uni-versity). Digging Up the Dead: AHistory of Notable American Re-burials. University of ChicagoPress, May 2010

Jürgen Kocka (Wissenschaft-szentrum Berlin für Sozialfor-schung). Civil Society and Dictator-ship in Modern German History.Brandeis University Press, July2010

Bernard Lewis (Princeton Uni-versity). Faith and Power: Religionand Politics in the Middle East. Ox-ford University Press, May 2010

Gerhard Loewenberg (Univer-sity of Iowa), ed. Parliaments inPerspective. Transaction Publish-ers, April 2010

Charles S. Maier (Harvard Uni-versity), Erez Manela (HarvardUniversity; Academy VisitingScholar, 2008–2009), Niall Fer-guson (Harvard University), andDaniel J. Sargent (University ofCalifornia, Berkeley), eds. TheShock of the Global: The 1970s inPerspective. Belknap Press of Har-vard University Press, March 2010

Maxine L. Margolis (Universityof Florida). An Invisible Minority:Brazilian Immigrants in New YorkCity. University Press of Florida,March 2009

Douglas S. Massey (PrincetonUniversity) and Magaly SánchezR. (Princeton University). BrokeredBoundaries: Creating ImmigrantIdentity in Anti-Immigrant Times.Russell Sage Foundation Publica-tions, June 2010

Ajay K. Mehrotra (Indiana Uni-versity; Academy Visiting Schol-ar, 2006–2007), Isaac WilliamMartin (University of California,San Diego), and Monica Prasad(Northwestern University), eds.The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxationin Comparative and Historical Per-spective. Cambridge UniversityPress, July 2009

Steven E. Miller (Harvard Ken-nedy School), Michael E. Brown(George Washington University),Owen R. Coté Jr. (MassachusettsInstitute of Technology), andSean M. Lynn-Jones (HarvardKennedy School), eds. Contendingwith Terrorism: Roots, Strategies, andResponses. mit Press, July 2010

Robert Mnookin (Harvard LawSchool). Bargaining with the Devil:When to Negotiate, When to Fight.Simon & Schuster, February 2010

Bethany Moreton (University ofGeorgia; Academy Visiting Schol-ar, 2006–2007). To Serve God andWal-Mart: The Making of ChristianFree Enterprise. Harvard UniversityPress, May 2009

Gary B. Nash (University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles). The LibertyBell. Yale University Press, May2010

Nicholas Penny (National Gallery,London). A Closer Look: Frames.National Gallery Company, June2010

Robert B. Pippin (University ofChicago). Hollywood Westerns andAmerican Myth: The Importance ofHoward Hawks and John Ford forPolitical Philosophy. Yale Univer-sity Press, May 2010

Michael C. J. Putnam (BrownUniversity), trans. Jacopo San-nazaro: Latin Poetry. The I TattiRenaissance Library. HarvardUniversity Press, 2009

Diane Ravitch (New York Uni-versity). The Death and Life of theGreat American School System: HowTesting and Choice Undermine Edu-cation. Basic Books, March 2010

Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis Uni-versity) and Yaacov Shavit (TelAviv University). Glorious, Ac-cursed Europe: A Modern JewishExperience. Brandeis UniversityPress, July 2010

David Remnick (The New Yorker).The Bridge: The Life and Rise ofBarack Obama. Knopf, April 2010

Frances Rosenbluth (Yale Uni-versity) and Torben Iversen(Harvard University). Women,Work, and Politics: The PoliticalEconomy of Gender Inequality.Yale University Press, June 2010

Robert Scholes (Brown Univer-sity) and Clifford Wulfman(Princeton University). Modern-ism in the Magazines: An Introduc-tion. Yale University Press, June2010


Asif A. Siddiqi (Fordham Uni-versity; Academy Visiting Schol-ar, 2004–2005). The Red Rockets’Glare: Spaceflight and the SovietImagination, 1857–1957. CambridgeUniversity Press, February 2010

Thomas A. Stapleford (Univer-sity of Notre Dame; AcademyVisiting Scholar, 2008–2009).The Cost of Living in America: APolitical History of Economic Sta-tistics, 1880–2000. CambridgeUniversity Press, September 2009

David A. Strauss (University ofChicago Law School). The LivingConstitution. Oxford UniversityPress, May 2010

Mark Tushnet (Harvard LawSchool). Why the ConstitutionMatters. Yale University Press,May 2010

Alice Waters (Chez PanisseFoundation; Chez Panisse). Inthe Green Kitchen: Techniques toLearn by Heart. Clarkson Potter,April 2010

Hans-Ulrich Wehler (UniversitätBielefeld). Land ohne Unterschich-ten? Neue Essays zur deutschenGeschichte. Verlag C. H. Beck,February 2010

C. K. Williams (Princeton Uni-versity). On Whitman. PrincetonUniversity Press, May 2010

Robert Wuthnow (Princeton Uni-versity). Be Very Afraid: The Cul-tural Response to Terror, Pandemics,Environmental Devastation, NuclearAnnihilation, and Other Threats.Oxford University Press, April2010

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.

David Ernest Apter–May 4, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1966

Robert Harza Burris–May 11, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1975

Barton Childs–February 18, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1974

Lucille Clifton–February 13, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1999

Saul G. Cohen–April 24, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1956

Kenneth James Dover–March 7, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1979

Samuel James Eldersveld–March 5,2010; elected to the Academy in 1977

Herbert Federer–April 21, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1962

William Edwin Gordon–February 16,2010; elected to the Academy in 1986

Norman Arthur Graebner–May 10,2010; elected to the Academy in 1990

RemembranceIt is with sadness that the Academy notes the passing of the following members.*

* Notice received from February 1, 2010, to May 13, 2010

John L. Harper–March 22, 2009;elected to the Academy in 1992

Harvey Akio Itano–May 8, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1998

Carl Kaysen–February 8, 2010; electedto the Academy in 1954

Nathan Key½tz–April 6, 2010; elected tothe Academy in 1971

Ian R. Macneil–February 16, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2001

Angus Maddison–April 24, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1996

Walter Francis Murphy–April 20, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1977

Charles Muscatine–March 12, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1974

Douglas Llewellyn Oliver–October 30,2009; elected to the Academy in 1953

Edmund P. Pillsbury–March 25, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1997

Robert Vivian Pound–April 12, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1952

Helen Margaret Ranney–April 5, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1975

Albert Joseph Rosenthal–March 17,2010; elected to the Academy in 1983

Charles Andrew Ryskamp–March 29,2010; elected to the Academy in 1990

Manfred Robert Schroeder–December28, 2009; elected to the Academy in 1986

Joanne Simpson–March 4, 2010;elected to the Academy in 2006

Horton Guyford Stever–April 9, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1953

Boris Peter Stoicheff–April 15, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1989

William Willard Wirtz–April 24, 2010;elected to the Academy in 1964

Markley Gordon Wolman–February24, 2010; elected to the Academy in 1981


On August 1–2, 1958, the Academy convened a “Colloquium on Religious Faiths and World Ethics”at its House in Brookline, Massachusetts, to “provide the opportunity for a limited group of sometwo or three dozen representatives of religious thinking in the Eastern United States to explorewith the help of some of these visitors how the religions of the world might cooperate to providea more effective moral base for world order and peace.”

Colloquium on Religious Faiths and World Ethics, 1958

cêçã=íÜÉ^êÅÜáîÉë

Organizing Committee of the Colloquium on Religious Faiths and World Ethics. Left to right: Dr. S. van derWoude, University of Amsterdam; Dr. Joseph P. Bishop, Church of the Covenant, Boston; Rt. Rev. Msgr. EdwardMurray, Sacred Heart Rectory, Roslindale, Massachusetts; Dr. Kirtley F. Mather, President of the AmericanAcademy; Mr. Ralph W. Burhoe, Executive Officer of the American Academy; Rev. Swami Akhilananda, VedantaCenter, Boston; Dr. Dana McLean Greeley, American Unitarian Association, Boston; Rabbi Beryl D. Cohon,Temple Sinai, Boston; Rev. Charles A. Engvall, Council of Churches, First Parish, Medford, Massachusetts;Dr. James Luther Adams, Harvard Divinity School.

A new web-based feature, From the Academy Archives, has been launched to mark the 230th anniver-sary of the Academy’s founding on May 4, 1780. It features notable studies and events drawn from thenewly created Academy archives. It is available on the Academy’s website at http://www.amacad.org.

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, Chairman of the Board Pro Tem

Leslie Berlowitz, Chief Executive Of½cer and William T. Golden Chair

John S. Reed, Treasurer

Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary

Steven Marcus, Editor

Neal Lane, Cochair of the Council Pro Tem

Gerald Early, Cochair of the Council Pro Tem

publications advisory board

Jerome Kagan, Chair; Jesse H. Choper, Denis Donoghue, Gerald Early, Linda Greenhouse, Steven Marcus, Jerrold Meinwald, Patricia Meyer Spacks

editorial staff

Phyllis S. Bendell, Director of Publications

Micah J. Buis, Associate Editor

Erica Dorpalen, Editorial Assistant

Scott Eaton Wilder, Layout & Design

Initial design by Joe Moore of Moore + Associates

Bulletin Spring 2010Issued as Volume lxiii, Number 3© 2010 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 6–8, 10, 22–23, 27

Wendy Barrows pages 15, 19

Notice to Fellows� Call for Nominations

The Nominating Committee, chaired by Emilio Bizzi,is seeking recommendations for anticipated openpositions on governing bodies and committees in-cluding Board, Council, Trust, Midwest and West-ern Regional Committees, and Audit and BudgetCommittees. All candidates must be Fellows of theAmerican Academy and interested in being activelyengaged in Academy work. Please submit recom-mendations via email to [email protected] orin writing (postmarked by July 1, 2010) to the Nomi-nating Committee, c/o Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary,American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 136 IrvingStreet, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138.

� Academy DuesThe Executive Committee in consultation with theAcademy Council approved a $300 dues assessmentfor all Fellows this year. Dues account for only asmall portion of the Academy’s budget, but they arecritical in helping to cover the rising costs of meet-ings and symposia throughout the country; mem-bership activities, including the election process;the development of new research projects and pub-lications; and ongoing efforts to inform membersabout the Academy’s work.

american academy of arts & sciences Bulletin academy of arts & sciences vol. lxiii, no. 3 Page 15...

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