The annual announcement of newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (as well as the National Academy of Sciences, to which only three philosophers have been elected in recent decades: the late W.V.O. Quine; Patrick Suppes, who is emeritus at Stanford; and Brian Skyrms at the University of California at Irvine) is a pleasant rite of Spring in American universities, one of those rare occasions in American life when serious intellectual and scholarly accomplishment (usually spanning several decades) is recognized and celebrated.

The process of selection of new members is not, however, an entirely “pure” one, though this typically produces errors of omission, rather than inclusion. (See my earlier comments on this in connection with Philosophy.) Existing members of the Academy nominate new candidates for membership; the existing membership eventually votes on some of these nominees; and then a membership committee makes the final selection and, in philosophy at least, is not bound by the membership vote. What this means, of course, is that the selection procedure has a distinct “the rich get richer” element built in to it: the more members of the Academy a unit or university already has, the easier it typically is to get more members. And the composition of the final selection committee can, of course, be hugely important to the outcomes.

Notwithstanding the not ideal methodology, the Academy does recognize—at least in the fields I can judge—meritorious scholarly achievement; the sins of omission, as noted, are the real cause for skepticism, though the occasional “friend of a friend” makes it in who doesn’t compare favorably to other elected members in his or her field.

With those caveats in mind, here is a listing of universities based on the number of new members this year. Note that any school with a medical school will fare better, because there are 5 biology sections to which members are elected (including one explicitly for medicine), and in several of these those elected are frequently on medical school faculties. That fact is important, e.g., for schools like Duke, Washington/Seattle and Wash U/St. Louis which have outstanding medical schools, of longstanding—and makes the strong performance of universities without medical schools (e.g., MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, UC Irvine, Texas/Austin) all the more striking. Note that the University of California at San Francisco is a medical school campus only (though with wide-ranging research in the biological sciences). (Having a law school doesn’t confer quite as great an advantage, because there is only one law section to which members are elected–but it’s worth keeping in mind that schools like MIT and Princeton and Irvine don’t have law schools either!)

Give or take 1 or 2 new members, most of the top 25 perform pretty comparably year in and year out; the really odd one out this year is Northwestern, with an astonishing 10 new members. Since by no other measure is Northwestern comparable to, e.g., MIT or Harvard or Stanford (its research peer class is usually thought to be Duke, Illinois, Texas, NYU, Penn, Wisconsin, etc.) my suspicion is that some of the impurities of the procedure may explain this anomalous result. (Other slightly surprising results this year: 3 from Maryland and Ohio State marks a notably strong, and just, showing for these [underappreciated] state universities; 0 from Johns Hopkins [esp. given Hopkins’s strength in medicine] is a surprise; only 1 from Cornell is a bit off their usual 2-4; also 0 from Brown, Cal Tech, and Wisconsin seems odd, especially the latter two.)

Anyway, here they are by number of new members elected in 2004:

1. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (11)
2. Harvard University (10)
2. Northwestern University (10)
4. Yale University (8)
5. Stanford University (7)
5. University of California, Berkeley (7)
7. Columbia University (5)
7. Princeton University (5)
9. Duke University (4)
9. New York University (4)
9. University of California, Los Angeles (4)
9. University of California, San Francisco (4)
9. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4)
9. University of Washington, Seattle (4)
9. Washington University, St. Louis (4)
16. Ohio State University (3)
16. University of California, Irvine (3)
16. University of California, San Diego (3)
16. University of Chicago (3)
16. University of Maryland, College Park (3)
16. University of Texas, Austin (3)
22. Pennsylvania State University (2)
22. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2)
22. University of Pennsylvania (2)
22. University of Virginia (2)

All of the following schools had 1 faculty member elected this year: University of California, Santa Barbara; College of William & Mary; Smith College; Clemson University; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Rutgers University, New Brunswick; Cornell University; University of Florida, Gainesville; University of Iowa; University of Vermont; City University of New York Graduate Center; Carnegie-Mellon University; Emory University; Wheaton College; Amherst College; University of Missouri, Columbia; Indiana University, Bloomington; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Georgia; University of Pittsburgh; Northeastern University; Bard College; Florida State University.