Calendar of Events 3

Academy Update 6

Nominating Committee Report

• Recommended Candidates for Academy Positions Open in 2003 11

Progress Reports on Academy ProjectsJohn Steinbruner, Francis Oakley, Robert C. Post, David Bloom, James Carroll 17

Stated Meeting Reports

• Education Reform: A Report CardMarshall S. SmithCommentator: Jerome Bruner 38

• Science as a Window into Wine HistoryCarole P. Meredith 54

BulletinWinter 2003

Vol. LVI, No. 2

THE BULLETIN OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OFARTS AND SCIENCES (ISSN 0002–712X) is published quar-terly. � 2003 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Periodicals rate postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts, and addi-tional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to theBULLETIN, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 136 IrvingStreet, Cambridge MA 02138.

Annual Fund Seeks to Top $1 Million Again

The Academy’s 2002–2003 Annual Fund is near-ing its closing date of March 31. DevelopmentCommittee Cochairs Robert Alberty and LouisCabot look forward, with the help of generousFellows and friends, to surpassing the $1 mil-lion mark again for another record-setting totalthis year.

If you have already made a gift to the AnnualFund, we are grateful; if not, we urge you to par-ticipate by March 31. The Annual Fund helps tosupport the planning stages of the Academy’sprojects and studies, its publications and web-site, and its meetings and other activities acrossthe country. Every gift counts toward reachingour ambitious goals. Please be as generous asyou can.

For assistance in making a gift to the Academy,please contact the Development Office (e-mail:dev@amacad.org; phone: 617–576–5057).

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

All members of the Academy are cordially invited to participatein any listed event, as space allows. Special notices are sent toFellows who reside in areas where specific meetings are held.This feature of the Bulletin informs all members of upcomingevents, not only in their own regions but also in locations theymay plan to visit. A list of forthcoming events appears on theback cover.

Wednesday, March 12, 20031868th Stated Meeting—Cambridge

“A Tribute to Herman Feshbach and Victor Weisskopf” by Carl Kaysen, MIT

Communication: “Nuclear Terror: Ambling Toward Apocalypse”

Speaker: Steven Weinberg, University of Texas, Austin

At the March Stated Meeting in Cambridge, theAcademy will honor two of its past presidents:Herman Feshbach (1982–86) and Victor Weisskopf(1976–79). The tribute will be presented by CarlKaysen, David W. Skinner Professor of PoliticalEconomy Emeritus at MIT.

Throughout their careers, both Herman and Vikiworked to control the spread of nuclear arms, tofoster East-West cooperation, and to champion sci-entific freedom around the world. They broughttheir deep concern with these issues to theAcademy’s studies on international security and toits efforts to advance productive nongovernmentalexchange with the Soviet Union and EasternEurope.

The speaker on this special occasion will be StevenWeinberg, professor of physics and astronomy at theUniversity of Texas, Austin. Weinberg is founderand director of the Theory Research Group atTexas, where he holds the Josey Regental Chair ofScience. His research has spanned a broad range oftopics in quantum field theory, elementary particlephysics, and cosmology.

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Weinberg has received numerous awards, includ-ing the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, the NationalMedal of Science, and the Cresson Medal of theFranklin Institute. In addition to his well-knowtreatise Gravitation and Cosmology, he has writtenseveral books for the general reader, including TheFirst Three Minutes (translated into twenty-twolanguages) and, most recently, Facing Up: Scienceand Its Cultural Adversaries, in which he considersthe culture, philosophy, history, and politics of sci-ence. He is also a contributor to the New YorkReview of Books. Weinberg has been a Fellow of theAcademy since 1968.

The evening will begin with a reception at 5:30p.m., followed by the program at 6:15.

For reservations, contact Sheri Bugbee (phone:617–576–5032; e-mail: sbugbee@amacad.org).

Thursday, April 10, 2003Joint Meeting of the Academy and the Boston Athenaeum

Location: Boston Athenaeum

Communication: “How to Read a Diary”

Speaker: Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia

On April 10 the President of the Academy, PatriciaMeyer Spacks, will address the second annual jointmeeting of the Academy and the BostonAthenaeum. The topic of her talk is “How to Reada Diary.”

As Spacks explains, “It’s not hard to understandwhy people enjoy reading diaries of the famous: inorder to get an inside glimpse of exceptional lives.Nor is it difficult to know why Boswell’s LondonJournal was a best-seller: good stories, bawdy bits.Pepys provides similar appeal; Virginia Woolf ’sdiaries supply mini-essays on the literary life; onecan multiply examples. But what is the attractionof diaries that offer only records of uneventful andundistinguished lives? Two such diaries, kept overlong spans of time by eighteenth-century writersunknown except for their daily accounts, provide

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test cases for assessing the interest of what might becalled ‘hidden narratives.’ The writers, an AmericanQuaker woman living in Philadelphia and anEnglish country clergyman, both lived through theyears of the American War for Independence,although neither makes that war a primary subjectfor reflection. Investigation of these diaries revealstechniques for analyzing and appreciating thesuperficially unappealing and demonstrates therewards of analysis.”

The Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at theUniversity of Virginia, Spacks is an authority oneighteenth-century English literature. She has writ-ten on the poets and novelists of the time in suchbooks as The Poetry of Vision and Desire and Truth.She has also authored books and essays on culturalas well as literary subjects, including adolescence,boredom, gossip, and women writers from theeighteenth century to the present. Her new book,Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self, willbe published this spring by the University ofChicago Press. Spacks is chair of the board of direc-tors of the American Council of Learned Societiesand a trustee of the National Humanities Center.

The program will begin at 6 p.m. at the BostonAthenaeum, 101⁄2 Beacon Street, Boston. Seating islimited.

For reservations, contact Sheri Bugbee (phone:617–576–5032; e-mail: sbugbee@amacad.org).

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ACADEMY UPDATE

Occasional Paper on the Costs of War in Iraq

A new Occasional Paper—War with Iraq: Costs,Consequences, and Alternatives—has been pub-lished under the auspices of the Academy’s Com-mittee on International Security Studies (CISS).An Associated Press story on the paper was carriedby over fifty media outlets, including the threemajor US television networks, as well as newspa-pers in the United States, England, India, andRussia. War with Iraq has been downloaded over100,000 times from the Academy’s website.

William D. Nordhaus (Yale University) estimatesthe costs of war with Iraq in scenarios that are bothfavorable and unfavorable to the United States. Heprojects that the war could cost $99 billion over thenext decade in the best case, or in excess of $1.9trillion during the same period in less favorablecircumstances. The latter figure is nearly ten timesthe comparable worst-case estimate offered by theBush administration.

Analyzing the few publicly available studies of thecost of a potential war with Iraq, Nordhaus findsthat they have largely ignored a number of postwarfactors, including:

• Prolonged occupation and peacekeeping, whichcould cost between $75 and $500 billion;

• Iraq’s reconstruction, potentially requiringabout $105 billion in funds;

• Humanitarian assistance, with a price tag of$10 billion at minimum; and

• A macroeconomic impact over the next decadethat could result in a gain of $17 billion in the bestcase, or a loss of nearly $400 billion if the war causesa disruption of oil markets and a resulting recession(as have previous Middle East wars).

“The economic ripples of a war with Iraq are likelyto spread beyond the direct budgetary costs, withthe prospect of raising the cost of imported petro-

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leum, slowing productivity growth, and possiblytriggering a recession,” writes Nordhaus. “The dan-gers of tipping into recession are real,” he contends,“particularly given that the US economy was grow-ing very slowly in the fall of 2002.”

Steven E. Miller (Harvard University) challengesclaims that war with Iraq will be cheap, beneficial,and hard to avoid. He examines these assertions inlight of a number of potentially disastrous out-comes of a war with Iraq, all of which could realis-tically occur but have received scant public atten-tion. Miller considers how Iraq’s use of weapons ofmass destruction, its disruption of the flow of oil,its drawing the United States into urban combat inBaghdad, or its attacking Israel (among other out-comes) would affect the American war effort.

Miller also examines the impact that a conflict withIraq might exert on the administration’s war on ter-ror, as well as its longer-term effect on the UnitedStates’s position as a global superpower. He con-cludes that although the administration’s case forwar against Iraq is attractive, it is also a gamble withenormous stakes and a significant risk of adverseconsequences.

Carl Kaysen (Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology), John D. Steinbruner (University of Mary-land), and Martin B. Malin (Academy) examinethe broader national security strategy behind themove toward a preventive war against Iraq. Theyfind that the new strategy differs sharply from along tradition in American foreign policy, particu-larly in its neglect of the utility of international lawand institutions for achieving the United States’sprincipal aims. They suggest that the strategy’sreliance on US military force, maintained at a stan-dard that aspires to be “beyond challenge,” isimpractical—and likely to stimulate precisely the“asymmetric responses” to America’s global domi-nance that the strategy is designed to prevent.

To order War with Iraq, call 617–576–5024. ThisOccasional Paper is also available on the Academy web-site at www.amacad.org/publications/occasional.htm.

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Kirk Varnedoe Speaks at Academy Stated Meeting in New York

On December 5, 2002, the Academy held its sec-ond meeting of the fall in New York City. PresidentPatricia Meyer Spacks, Vice President LouisCabot, and Executive Officer Leslie C. Berlowitzgreeted more than 150 Fellows and guests fromacademia, business, foundations, and the media.Thomas Sakmar, acting president of RockefellerUniversity, cohosted the Academy event at Rock-efeller’s Caspary Auditorium.

Dr. Harold Varmus, president of the MemorialSloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, intro-duced the speaker, Kirk Varnedoe, as a “culturalphenomenon” whose work as a curator and arthistorian is “a happy reminder of how scientificthought can shape cultural understanding.” As Var-mus noted, Varnedoe argues in his book A FineDisregard that conventional accounts of transitionsin art should be replaced by “a Darwinian notionof evolutionary origins and growth” and that mod-ern art demonstrates “the creative force of contin-gency—the interaction of multiple mutations withspecial environments . . . and has yielded an amaz-ing, diverse world of thriving new forms of life.”Varnedoe served as chief curator of the Departmentof Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of ModernArt (MoMA) for thirteen years. He is currently

Left to right: Kirk Varnedoe (Institute for Advanced Study) and HaroldVarmus (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center)

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professor of the history of art at the Institute forAdvanced Study in Princeton.

In his talk, “Matisse, Picasso, and the Idea ofInfluence,” Varnedoe suggested that the concept ofinfluence is too crude an indicator of the relationbetween and among artists. Using Picasso andMatisse as examples, he presented slides demon-strating that the two artists carried on a lifelong dia-logue in paint, marked by both competition andemulation. Underlying their very different styles,Varnedoe detects some common vocabularies and ashared interest in reinterpreting earlier masters suchas Ingres, Delacroix, and Cézanne. In a seeminglyparadoxical way, he observed, both Picasso andMatisse found that the challenges of each other’swork often helped them to see new possibilitieswithin their own art and to produce some of theirmost potently original works. After Matisse’s death,Picasso told friends that he felt he was, in some ofhis art, carrying on Matisse’s work; for instance, hesaw a “legacy” of Matisse in his own figures of odal-isques painted after 1954. Varnedoe’s new exhibiton Matisse and Picasso opens at MoMA’s Queenslocation on February 13, 2003.

The New York meeting was another important stepin advancing the Academy’s presence in the tristatearea and in expanding opportunities for Academymembers to meet in locations beyond the Cambridgeheadquarters and the regional centers.

Humanities Indicators Workshop

As part of its broader Initiative for the Humanitiesand Culture, the Academy is developing a new set ofeducational databases for the humanities. The cre-ation of humanities indicators will involve a system-atic attempt to build a statistical profile of thehumanities disciplines that will examine teachingand curricular trends and monitor labor andemployment issues for the humanities profession.To achieve this goal, the Academy has organized anadvisory committee led by Academy Fellows FrancisOakley (former president of Williams College andcurrently acting president of the American Council

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of Learned Societies) and Stephen Raudenbush(professor of education and statistics at the Uni-versity of Michigan School of Education and seniorresearch scientist at the Institute for Social Research).

Although there have been independent efforts tocompile humanities data in the past, a study com-missioned by the committee—Making the Hu-manities Count: The Importance of Data—estab-lished the need for a more systematic approach thatwill address the serious gaps and inconsistencies inthe information currently available. The advisorycommittee organized a workshop at the House ofthe Academy in early January, bringing together adistinguished group of educational researchers, pol-icymakers, and leaders of learned societies con-cerned with the state of the humanities. The meet-ing opened with a consideration of the most impor-tant educational policy issues today and their rela-tion to the humanities. Following a review of theinformation provided in current humanities data-bases, participants considered ways to overcome thelimitations of available information by building onresearch that is under way or in development andby undertaking new studies.

The recommendations from the meeting will be dis-cussed with the Academy’s Humanities IndicatorsConsortium, an informal leadership group compris-ing representatives of organizations and public agen-cies interested in improving data collection in thehumanities. Reports on the meeting will appear infuture issues of the Bulletin and on the Academy’swebsite at www.amacad.org. The Academy Occa-sional Paper Making the Humanities Count is avail-able on the website and in print; to obtain a freecopy, contact the Office of Publications (phone:617–576–5085; fax: 617–576–5088; e-mail: publi-cations@amacad.org).

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PROGRESS REPORTS ON ACADEMY PROJECTS

Prior to the National Induction Ceremonyon October 5, 2002, the Academy heldan orientation session for newly electedmembers at its House in Cambridge.President Patricia Meyer Spacks (Universityof Virginia), Vice President Louis W. Cabot(Cabot-Wellington, LLC), Secretary EmilioBizzi (MIT), and Executive Officer Leslie C.Berlowitz welcomed the inductees and

provided an overview of the Academy’s history and mission. Fiveproject representatives gave progress reports on Academy stud-ies: John Steinbruner (University of Maryland), Francis Oakley(Williams College), Robert C. Post (Boalt Hall School of Law, UCBerkeley), David Bloom (Harvard School of Public Health), and his-torian James Carroll. Their remarks are published here, in theorder presented.

Reconsidering the Rules of Space

John Steinbruner

The Committee on International Security Studiesis embarking on a study of space policy—an areawe think is likely to be an emerging and major con-cern in this country and abroad. Let me begin witha fact that is probably familiar to all of you: overthe past two decades, with sustained investment inmilitary capability, the United States has acquireda degree of military superiority that is arguablyunprecedented in history. The buildup was origi-nally articulated as a balanced response to externalthreats and was not explicitly intended to provideglobal superiority. Nonetheless, the American polit-ical system as a whole has endorsed a program ofmilitary investment that will sustain our militarysuperiority over at least the next twenty years. Thisraises important questions about how, in whatmanner, and for what purpose this military capacityis to be used.

Implicit in these questions is the degree to which theUnited States addresses itself to issues of interna-tional security, as distinct from national security,

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and the degree of influence we allow other coun-tries to have over the way we develop and use ourmilitary establishment. These issues are now promi-nently in question in Iraq—but they are not solely,or even primarily, about Iraq. Very significant andunresolved security issues are being played out inrelationships that are more enduring than the cur-rent situation with Iraq. In the background, andmeaningfully affected by our actions toward Iraq,are our relationships with Russia and China.

These latter two countries represent, in some sense,the broader world—certainly, the broader worldnot formerly involved in US alliances. The Moscowtreaty on nuclear weapons, concluded in May,announced, in effect, the end of an era of armscontrol. The whole process of arms control, fromthe end of World War II until very recently, hasbeen an attempt to balance the capabilities ofopposing military establishments—to make themequitable enough to provide stability. The MoscowTreaty abandons the objective of balancing capa-bility and sets conditions that increasingly legit-imize significant US military superiority. Russia,unable to avoid the fundamental fact of US mili-tary superiority, has signed on to that inevitability.

Under the circumstances, the prominent questionfor the Russians, and for the Chinese and others, iswhether the United States will use its increasing

John Steinbruner (University of Maryland)

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capability to intimidate or to reassure. Obviously,countries outside the United States—in particular,those outside our alliance system—strongly needus to, and hope we will, use it to reassure.

The answer to the question of how we will use ourcapability will depend heavily on rules of activity inspace. Space capacity is critical to the particularforms of superiority that the US military establish-ment has acquired and continues to develop. Spacecapacity is also exceedingly vulnerable, and there-fore, although it is an area of common interest andaccommodation, it is also a logical focus for thefamous “asymmetric reaction” about which thePentagon rightly worries. What does a militaryestablishment do when it cannot match US mili-tary capability globally? One response is to focus onthe vulnerability and the criticality of US spaceassets as a way of negating a lot of what the UnitedStates otherwise can do with its military. This is amajor concern that must be taken into account indeveloping rules of deployment in space.

If you listen carefully to what leading areas of ourmilitary establishment are saying, the United Statesis projecting the capacity to observe everything onEarth, to attack what we do not like, and to denysimilar capability to everyone else. Needless to say,that message is received with profound discomfortin many parts of the world, particularly in Beijing.The Chinese, in raising their concerns, are basicallysaying, “It won’t work out that way,” and they areasking for negotiations to develop rules of accom-modation that would ban direct weapons and setother guidelines for mutual protection in space.

For the last decade, the United States has been refus-ing to negotiate over the whole subject of spacepolicy, saying that it will do as it pleases. The par-ticipants in our study feel that the American pub-lic needs to be more engaged in determining whatour balance of interests should be and what kindsof rules we want, knowing that we carry out morethan military activity in space. Important commer-cial activities and scientific exploration, as well astraditional military support operations, could beplaced severely in question if current conditions

persist and if no agreement on rules is negotiated.It is overwhelmingly in our interest to devise andenforce such rules, and it is very foolish to refuse tonegotiate about the use of space. We believe that ifthe majority of US citizens were aware of ournation’s position, they would want a more bal-anced policy—but they are not aware of it. It is ourduty to raise questions, pose issues, encourage peo-ple to think about them, and suggest constructiveanswers. That is what the Academy’s project onspace policy is all about.

The Humanities Indicators Project

Francis Oakley

In 1998 the Academy launched its Initiative for theHumanities and Culture. Let me start by describ-ing that program in general, and then go on tofocus on the aspect of the enterprise in which I ammost deeply involved.

The initiative consists of several distinct but inter-related undertakings, all of them responsive to thatquintessentially humanist injunction to “know thy-self.” First, the Academy is leading a sustained effortto create an improved system for gathering empir-ical data about the humanities and, with that inview, has created an informal consortium that

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Francis Oakley (Williams College)

includes many of the nation’s leading organizationsin the humanities and in higher education. Second,the Academy is sponsoring a series of research stud-ies about the evolution of the humanities disci-plines, the institutional settings that provide sup-port for the humanities, and the influence of cul-tural diversity on the development of the humani-ties in the United States. Two volumes are nowbeing prepared: one edited by Academy PresidentPatricia Meyer Spacks (University of Virginia), theother by David Hollinger (UC Berkeley). Third,although it is not formally part of the humanitiesinitiative, the Academy’s newly created VisitingScholars Program has special significance for thehumanities because fellowship opportunities forpostdoctoral fellows and junior faculty in thehumanities are comparatively scarce.

Having been involved in the humanities initiativesince its inception, I want now to focus on itsresponse to the lack of reliable sustained data ofthe sort that can facilitate meaningful comparisonsamong disciplines, institutional sectors, and mo-ments in time. Stephen Raudenbush (University ofMichigan) and I cochair the Academy’s leadershipgroup on data development. One of the Academy’sgreatest strengths is its ability to involve in thiseffort Fellows who are preeminent social scientists,as well as others from classes with an interest in thehumanities. Our working group, the HumanitiesIndicators Consortium, includes economist RobertSolow (MIT), former US Census Bureau directorKenneth Prewitt, and Columbia University provostJonathan Cole, as well as representatives from lead-ing scholarly organizations and federal agencies withan interest in data collection, such as the NationalScience Foundation, the National Endowment forthe Humanities, the American Council of LearnedSocieties (which I currently serve as president), theAssociation of American Universities, and the Na-tional Humanities Alliance. Together, we hope toshape a cost-effective research strategy that will min-imize duplication of efforts and bring much-neededcoordination to data collection.

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Data collection may seem something of a dry topic,perhaps, until one pauses to ask why it is, after all,that those of us in the humanities seem to find itso very hard to convey to others the significance ofwhat we do, its importance for national well-being,or even the status and current condition of thehumanistic endeavor to which we bring so pas-sionate a commitment. This problem, in all itscomplexity, cannot be resolved by any single orsimple mode of approach. Part of the problem, Isense, is that we ourselves do not always under-stand what we do, or why we do it, or why it is asimportant as we instinctively take it to be. At leastpart of the reason for that failure of understandingis that even when we try to comprehend what weare doing—by placing it in a larger context, forexample, or by viewing it from a broader or a com-parative perspective—we find that we lack the sup-portive and interpretive tools provided by the sys-tematic gathering, organization, analysis, and dis-semination of the type of pertinent data long avail-able to those whose task it is to interpret the natu-ral sciences not only to the larger public but also tothemselves. In the humanities, such data are eitherlacking or, if collected, are inconsistently assem-bled, hard of access, poorly disseminated, inade-quately analyzed, unwittingly ignored, and rou-tinely underutilized.

Early in our discussions, a number of AcademyFellows contrasted the lack of reliable empiricaldata in the humanities with the wealth of resourcesavailable in the sciences and engineering. Morethan a quarter-century ago, some members of theinitiative’s steering committee had participated inthe creation of the Science and Engineering Indicators(SEI), and they proposed that we take its statisticalprofile of American science as our model. The SEIhas grown into a robust set of data indeed; updatedevery two years, its datasets provide information onenrollments, the workforce, and research and devel-opment, as well as on regional, racial, and genderdifferences in educational and career patterns.

It is one of our misfortunes in the humanities thatwe have nothing at all comparable. We don’t even

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know if the state of the humanities is better orworse than it was, say, fifty years ago. How couldwe? We do have gross figures, at least for the yearssince the late 1960s, about the number of degreesawarded in arts and sciences subjects nationally,but we simply don’t know, for example, whether ornot there’s been a decline in the numbers of under-graduates taking individual courses in humanisticsubjects, nor do we really know if there is any truthto claims that colleges and universities are aban-doning requirements that students take courses inWestern civilization. One targeted study has sug-gested, surprisingly and counterintuitively, that theoverall percentage of institutions requiring stu-dents to take a course in the history of Western civ-ilization has risen to almost 50 percent over thepast quarter century. We confront, in effect, a situ-ation in which educational policymakers lack cru-cial information about roughly half of the disci-plines that form the core of liberal arts education.

The need for basic empirical data is particularlyurgent now, when new economic, curricular, andideological pressures threaten support for thehumanities. In recent years, foundations, scholarlyassociations, and individuals have issued reportsoffering often pessimistic assessments of the healthof the humanities and the quality of research andteaching in individual disciplines. Not all of thosereports rest on secure factual or statistical bases,least of all the more polemical studies that assert adecline in the amount and quality of teaching inthe humanities. Neither the critics themselves northe characteristically wounded (if occasionally tru-culent) respondents have shown much interest inthe pertinent statistical data, even when they areavailable. Instead we get a species of disheveledanecdotalism, and a free-fire zone is created foreye-catching and sensationalist claims, matched alltoo often by analytically flaccid and apoplecticallysloppy responses. Clearly, this is not good enough.And it is here that the Academy’s project on human-ities indicators comes into play.

Earlier this year, the Academy issued an OccasionalPaper on the problems of databases in the human-

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ities. Entitled Making the Humanities Count: TheImportance of Data, the report includes a detailedexamination of existing databases in the humani-ties, with particular attention to their utility foranswering the kinds of questions routinely ad-dressed by the Science and Engineering Indicators.In it we concluded that existing humanities datasources are limited in usefulness because of incon-sistent measurement techniques, small sample sizes,and a failure to update these materials regularly. Insum, we have found that neither policymakers norprofessionals in the humanities are well served byexisting data collection efforts. We hope to solvethese problems of coordination and planning aspart of the Academy’s ambitious effort to improvedata collection.

This initiative is still in its infancy, but we are al-ready seeing some positive results. The Rockefellerand Hewlett Foundations, among others, have pro-vided support for our work. In addition, member-ship organizations representing the humanities arebeginning to work together to make data collectiona platform on which we can build.

It is, I believe, one of the Academy’s glories that itspurview extends to so broad a range of intellectualendeavor. It embraces the full gamut of disciplines,and its mission, accordingly, is to try to serve all ofthem. W. E. B. Du Bois once observed (he wastalking about the Housatonic River) that we willbe judged by what we neglect. By embarking on itshumanities initiative, the Academy, with all itsmanifold obligations, will not be judged for havingneglected the humanistic disciplines. I celebratethat fact.

The Changing Relationship Between Congress and the Court

Robert C. Post

The Academy is launching a study of the contem-porary relationship between Congress and the fed-eral judiciary. At issue are questions of great impor-tance for the future of democratic governance inthis country. The steering committee consists of

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Jesse Choper (UC Berkeley), Abner Mikva (Uni-versity of Chicago Law School), Linda Greenhouse(New York Times), Nelson Polsby (UC Berkeley),and myself. This diverse committee will, we hope,develop an interdisciplinary approach to analyz-ing and, hopefully, ameliorating the severe ten-sions that now afflict the relationship between thelegislative and judicial branches of the federalgovernment.

To understand these tensions, I must ask you toremember your high-school civics class, in whichyou no doubt learned that the government of theUnited States had only limited powers. Thefounders of our country created a federal govern-ment that had only the powers given to it by theConstitution. State governments, by contrast, werebelieved by the founders to hold plenary power,meaning that state governments could exercise anypower except that which had been taken away andgiven to the federal government. This distinctionbetween federal and state power persisted until thetwentieth century. It made a certain amount ofsense in the context of a nation that was highlydecentralized. But although the federal govern-ment left a rather small footprint on the life of thenation in the eighteenth century, its role grewincreasingly important as the country grew eco-nomically more integrated throughout the nine-teenth century. Regulation of the single nationalmarket created by the expansion of the great rail-

Robert C. Post (Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley)

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road lines—a market that far transcended theboundaries of individual states—increasingly cameto be seen as a federal responsibility.

Nevertheless, the United States Supreme Court,true to the original understanding of the founders,continued to review congressional statutes to deter-mine whether they were consistent with limitedpowers granted to the federal government by theConstitution. Even as late as 1918, for example,the Court was prepared to strike down a congres-sional statute prohibiting the transportation of theproducts of child labor in interstate commerce.The Court argued that the federal government hadnot been given the power to regulate local condi-tions of manufacturing. Only the states could reg-ulate these conditions.

The emergency spawned by the Great Depressionsmashed this conceptual distinction between federaland state power. The lesson of the Depression wasthat the nation was a single, integrated economicentity, so that the national dimensions of the crisiscould not be addressed unless Congress were freeto regulate economic transactions that had previ-ously been deemed to lie within the exclusivedomain of state power. At first the Supreme Courtsought to maintain the old boundaries betweenfederal and state power, striking down New Dealstatutes that regulated manufacturing within thestates. This caused a constitutional crisis, in whichFranklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the USSupreme Court with new and sympathetic justices.Eventually, the crisis was resolved when JusticeOwen Roberts switched his vote, leading to thefamous quip by T. R. Powell about “the switch intime that saved nine.” As a result of the crisis, theSupreme Court abandoned its efforts to police theboundaries of federal power. Instead it defined itsrole as reviewing otherwise valid exercises of feder-al power to see if they were consistent with consti-tutional rights.

Because the crisis of the New Deal was resolved inthis fashion, most of us have come of age in aworld in which the federal government effectivelyhas plenary power to address what it perceives to

be national needs. After 1937 the Supreme Courtrefused to strike down federal statutes on thegrounds that Congress didn’t have the power toenact them. This regime of constitutional law,which has been called the New Deal Settlement,came to an abrupt end in 1995, when five justices,appointed by Republican presidents determined torevive the values of federalism, coalesced into apowerful voting bloc capable of determining thedirection of the Court. In the 1995 case UnitedStates v. Lopez, the Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, on the ground thatthe act was beyond the power of Congress. Sincethat time, the Court has indicated that it is seriousabout striking down congressional statutes that arebeyond the boundaries of federal power. For exam-ple, the Court has invalidated important provi-sions of the Violence Against Women Act, and ithas narrowly interpreted the reach of federal crim-inal and environmental laws in ways that areexplicitly designed to sidestep ultimate questionsof constitutional power.

From the perspective of those of us who study con-stitutional law, these decisions constitute a pro-found revolution of potentially immense signifi-cance. They signify that the national legislature nolonger has the constitutional power to addresswhat it deems to be national needs. The Court,rather than the Congress, will determine the reachof national authority. This shift is enormously con-sequential, and it underlies the great tension thatnow permeates the relationship between Congressand the Supreme Court.

It is not, however, the only source of that tension.I will quickly mention three other causes of therelationship’s deterioration. First, there is a growingdispute between the Court and Congress aboutwhich branch has authority to interpret theConstitution. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amend-ment gives Congress the power “to enforce, byappropriate legislation, the provisions of this arti-cle.” The provisions of the Fourteenth Amend-ment that Congress is thus empowered to enforceinclude the right to due process of law and the

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right to equal protection of the law. In a recentseries of cases, however, the Supreme Court hasinvalidated federal legislation enacted pursuant toSection 5, on the ground that Congress’s interpre-tation of these rights conflicts with the interpre-tations of the Court. The Court has, in effect,asserted a monopoly on the power to interpret theConstitution.

This claim of exclusive interpretive authority isof great significance. It alters over a century ofcontrary practice. It basically transforms our Con-stitution into what Franklin Roosevelt once calleda “lawyer’s contract,” as distinct from a “layman’scharter” of rights. Acting on this claim of exclusiveinterpretive authority, the Court has struck downas unconstitutional provisions of numerous stat-utes, including the Violence Against Women Act,the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the AgeDiscrimination in Employment Act, the Ameri-cans with Disability Act, and the Patent and PlantVariety Protection Remedy Clarification Act. TheCourt has found that these statutes violate consti-tutional principles of separation of powers becausethey reflect Congress’s effort independently tointerpret the Constitution, an effort that infringeson the Court’s preemptive “duty to say what thelaw is.”

In striking down these statutes, the Court has exer-cised its power of judicial review, which authorizesthe Court to check what it perceives to be congres-sional actions that overstep constitutional limits.But this check is countered by the many constitu-tional means given to Congress to check what itregards as judicial overreaching. There are numer-ous such mechanisms, which range from deter-mining the scope and range of judicial jurisdictionto the setting of judicial salaries. By far the mostimportant avenue of congressional influence, how-ever, is the confirmation process, which is a secondadditional source of tension in the relationshipbetween Congress and the judicial branch.

The Senate can ultimately control the complexionof the federal judiciary because it must approve the

appointment of all Article III federal judges. Al-though the appointment process for Supreme Courtjustices was highly contentious throughout most ofthe nineteenth century, levels of disputation havereached new heights since the unsuccessful nomina-tion of Robert Bork in 1987. At the heart of thesedebates are ideological contests about the constitu-tional identity of the nation. We will see whethercompeting visions of constitutional structure beginto influence the confirmation process. As of now,however, the Senate seems incapable of conceptual-izing its role as monitoring the constitutional ideol-ogy of nominees; it has instead displaced these con-cerns to issues of individual character, or to the ques-tion of whether a candidate is within “the main-stream,” whatever that may mean. The rules ofengagement in the confirmation process remainhighly murky and obscure, despite the increasingimportance of that process. Moreover, nominationsto the lower federal bench have become infectedwith the same ideological polarization as have nom-inations to the Supreme Court. This is a recentdevelopment of great significance.

The third source of tension involves the more mun-dane but ultimately more important process ofstatutory interpretation. Congress regulates thecountry by passing laws. These laws are not self-enforcing; they must be interpreted and applied bycourts. In the past few years, the basic principles ofstatutory interpretation have become highly con-troversial. Some justices contend that courts oughtnever to review legislative history when seeking tointerpret statutes, whereas others deliberately lookto all available forms of information that mighthelp a court understand the meaning of legislation.It has therefore become unclear what pieces ofinformation, in addition to the actual text of astatute, will actually count as authoritative indiciaof legislative intent and meaning. The smoothcooperation of Court and Congress is correspond-ingly undermined, and law enforcement through-out the United States is undercut.

So, to put the matter bluntly, the relationshipbetween the Court and Congress has become ex-

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tremely problematic in the past decade. This is anunsettling development to anyone who cares aboutthe effective operation of the federal government.Some Fellows of the Academy believe that theAcademy, as a nonpartisan witness of recent devel-opments, with a strong independent interest inpromoting principles of good governance, mightfacilitate a constructive dialogue that could reachacross the chasm now separating Congress fromthe federal courts. We have accordingly launchedan Academy project addressed to the current ten-sions between the Court and Congress. We have atwo-pronged strategy.

The first prong is to convene groups of justices andjudges, on the one hand, and members ofCongress, on the other, for off-the-record conver-sations. We hope that these meetings will serve twopurposes. The first is to facilitate communicationbetween Congress and the courts that will reducethe possibility of misunderstanding and to maxi-mize cooperative efforts to confront commonproblems. We had our first meeting last year in theLibrary of Congress, and it produced a frank andstimulating discussion. We hope to be able to insti-tutionalize these conversations. The second pointof these meetings is to develop an agenda for futurescholarly research. If disagreements betweenCongress and the courts can in any respect bediminished by impartial and interdisciplinaryscholarship, the Academy stands ready to sponsorsuch research.

The second prong of the project’s strategy is to pro-duce scholarship relevant to ameliorating the cur-rent tension between Congress and the judiciary.We are now pursuing two inquiries. The first con-cerns the nomination process for the federalappellate courts. The headlines now are full ofconfirmation battles regarding judges nominatedto the US Courts of Appeals, including MichaelMcConnell and Miguel Estrada. This is a new his-torical phenomenon. There is a real question, how-ever, as to whether the ideological orientation ofCourt of Appeals judges can affect the ultimateshape and direction of the law. Appellate court

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judges argue that their work is so bound and super-vised by the Supreme Court that there is relativelylittle room for the exercise of judicial discretion.But is this true? Law professors and political scien-tists tend to think that the composition of inter-mediate federal courts makes a great deal of differ-ence. Lobbyists and special interest groups clearlybelieve that this is the case. There is thus disagree-ment about the empirical facts of the matter. Wehope to be able to study the influence of ideologyon decision-making in the US Courts of Appeals.The outcome of this work is relevant to the confir-mation process of appellate federal judges.

The other scholarly inquiry that we are pursuingconcerns the question of statutory interpretation.There are many different, competing theories ofhow a court should interpret a statute, and oftenthese theories lead to different conclusions aboutthe operative meaning of federal legislation. Weintend to identify controversial cases that turn onquestions of statutory interpretation and then toexamine carefully the history of the relevantstatutes. We will compare this history to theassumptions underlying different theories of judi-cial interpretation. We will, so to speak, put thesetheories to empirical tests. Although this work willnot definitively settle the jurisprudential questionsinvolved in statutory interpretation, because thesequestions often have strongly normative compo-nents, our study should nevertheless illuminatethese questions. We hope that it might provide asolid foundation for more efficient cooperationbetween Congress and the judiciary. We expect thatas future meetings occur between members of thejudiciary and members of Congress, additionalscholarly inquiries will be placed on the Academy’sagenda.

Universal Basic and Secondary Education

David Bloom

Joel Cohen (Columbia and Rockefeller Univer-sities) and I cochair the Academy’s project on Uni-

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versal Basic and Secondary Education (UBASE),an extremely ambitious undertaking focused onthe rationale, means, and consequences of provid-ing quality basic and secondary education to all theworld’s children.

The starting point for the UBASE project is thathuge numbers of school-age children in developingcountries are not currently enrolled in school. Thedeficits, concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, are especially pronounced amonggirls. Although access to primary school has in-creased sharply in recent decades, the same cannotbe said of secondary school. In addition, the qualityof the education offered at both the primary andsecondary levels leaves much to be desired, judgingby careful examination of a wide range of inputs,outputs, and practices of educational systemsthroughout most developing countries.

None of these observations is novel. Back in 1990,representatives of 155 countries gathered in Thai-land, took note of a qualitatively similar picture,and pledged that they would achieve universal pri-mary education by the year 2000. But today, in2002, the world is still a long way from achievingthat goal. And now the world has graciously givenitself a fifteen-year extension for the achievementof universal basic and secondary education, asreflected in the Millennium Development Goals of

David Bloom (Harvard School of Public Health)

the United Nations, which are taking shape as thecentral imperative and unifying theme of all effortsat international development.

The UBASE project may not be novel in terms ofthe stylized facts that motivate it, but it is somewhatnovel in several other respects. Its novelty has to dowith its focus on both primary and secondary edu-cation, its attention to educational quality as well aseducational access, and its recognition that freshthinking is needed if we are to pick up the pace ofeducational development. It also has to do with thefuture orientation of the project—in other words,the need to plan for tomorrow’s world, not yester-day’s. Finally, the UBASE project recognizes thatthe issues under study are inherently complex. Thecomplexity extends beyond the bounds of any sin-gle discipline and necessitates disciplinary rigor aswell as interdisciplinary cooperation.

Getting one’s arms around UBASE is a rather daunt-ing task, if only for the great breadth of the concept.Our project attempts to deal with this issue byadopting an approach that deconstructs the chal-lenge of UBASE into seven main components. Thefirst component focuses on basic education facts, andthe nature and quality of the data that underpinthese facts. The second looks at the concept of uni-versal education from the standpoint of its intellec-tual and programmatic history, and also covers itseconomic, social, political, and ethical rationales.The third component concerns the demographic,social, political, cultural, and economic conse-quences of achieving universal basic and secondaryeducation. The fourth examines the goals of pri-mary and secondary education in widely differentsettings and how we assess progress toward attain-ment of those goals. The fifth component focuseson the harsh realities of the field, on problems ofimplementation, and on the use of technology indelivering more and better education. The sixthtakes up the politics of educational reform, inrecognition of the fact that such reform is not sim-ply a technical exercise but also a political challenge.Finally, the seventh component deals with the cost

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of UBASE and the distribution of that cost amongdifferent possible payers.

Each of these components is built around a studyteam that comes together periodically for intensivediscussion and review of background synthesescrafted by the team’s leader(s). In order to promotethe overall coherence of the project, Joel Cohenand I, as well as most of the study team leaders,participate in all the meetings of all the studyteams. These teams typically consist of eight to tenindividuals from North America and beyond,reflecting a range of disciplines and various degreesof research experience in education and interna-tional development. The project is still at an earlystage, but several dozen scholars have already par-ticipated as study team members or as distin-guished project advisers. Several dozen more couldbe described as avid consumers of our products. Iwould also note that the Academy is proving to bean ideal sponsor for the UBASE project because ofits independence, its academic standards, and itsextraordinary convening power—not to mentionthat it offers a superb meeting venue.

All the UBASE project papers and related materi-als will be accessible on the Academy’s website. Weintend to publish the papers as a volume, or per-haps as a special issue of Daedalus. During thethird year of the project, Joel and I plan to craft amonograph on UBASE, using the backgroundreports of the study teams as key building blocks.

The UBASE project is supported by a generousthree-year grant from the Hewlett Foundation,along with several grants from individual donorsand foundations.

Notwithstanding the breadth and complexity of theUBASE project, we do have some humility withrespect to our goals. For example, we are not at thispoint taking up the deep question of whether theworld’s limited resources would be better devotedto education or to other aspects and indicators ofdevelopment, such as improved health, governance,and infrastructure. Nor are we endeavoring todeliver a detailed plan for achieving universal basic

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and secondary education. We think there is asmuch contribution to be made in formulating theright questions as in answering them. We aspire toinform and stimulate the global dialogue on educa-tion with some new frameworks, ideas, examples,and evidence. We hope to inspire a new cadre ofresearchers to focus on this area. Advocacy effortsdo not fall within the purview of our project.

We welcome your thoughts on these efforts, as wellas your participation in what we hope is a worthyendeavor. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, inneat anticipation of the spirit of the UBASE proj-ect, “We cannot always build the future for ouryouth, but we can build our youth for the future.”

Visiting Scholars Program

James Carroll

As you have gathered from the preceding projectreports, the Academy is something of a movablefeast. It’s a network that defines itself loosely acrossthe nation and the world, yet there is a strong incar-national center: the House of the Academy inCambridge. Those of you who are here for the firsttime, as well as those who visit often, are aware of its

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Historian James Carroll

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generous hospitality, defined by its commitment tointerdisciplinarity, to service, and to intellectual,artistic, and professional distinction. I am privilegedto speak about one of the Academy’s newest initia-tives, its Visiting Scholars Program (VSP), whichrepresents yet another commitment: to fosterresearch by scholars who show promise of becomingleaders in their fields.

As chair of the program, I joined the Academy’sOfficers in welcoming the inaugural group of sevenpostdoctoral fellows and junior faculty in Sep-tember. They were chosen by a distinguished groupof Academy Fellows who reviewed over a hundredapplications. Already accomplished in their ownright, they represent a range of disciplines and areengaged in inquiries that are closely related to theAcademy’s ongoing projects and studies. To giveyou a sense of the variety of their topics andapproaches, I would like to tell you about theirspecific research projects.

We have three junior faculty members. Eric Bet-tinger of Case Western Reserve is examining theimpact of school vouchers in Colombia, SouthAmerica—an investigation that will contribute tothe Academy project on universal basic and sec-ondary education. In the area of security studies,Page Fortna of Columbia University is investigat-ing the concrete effects of peacekeeping in interna-tional civil wars and exploring what differencepeacekeepers make in the aftermath of conflict. Inthe humanities, a cultural biography of F. O.Mathiessen, the Harvard scholar of American liter-ature, is the research focus of Jay Grossman ofNorthwestern University.

Among our postdoctoral fellows, historian DavidGreenberg of Columbia University is examiningthe role of ideology in the confirmation ofSupreme Court justices—a study linked to theAcademy project on Congress and the Court.Another historian, Andrew Jewett of the Universityof California, Berkeley, is analyzing a group of sci-entists, social scientists, philosophers, and writerswho believed that science could strengthen demo-

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cratic government in America during the first halfof the twentieth century.

Two postdoctoral scholars in twentieth-centuryliterature are also at the Academy this year. In a rein-terpretation of American modernism, Joseph Entinof Yale University is considering how writers, artists,journalists, social scientists, and doctors interpretedthe lives of immigrants, African Americans, and theunderclass. Anne-Marie Mikkelsen of the Universityof California, Irvine, is carrying out research on agroup of American poets whose emphasis on social,political, and economic inequality was a reflection oftheir own marginal status in society.

Associate scholar Andy Zelleke, a J.D. from HarvardLaw School and doctoral candidate at Harvard Bus-iness School, is completing a study of governanceand leadership structures in British and Americanbusiness organizations, in association with the Acad-emy’s project on corporate responsibility.

In the spring, senior scholar and Academy FellowDavid Hollinger of the University of California,Berkeley, will visit the VSP to develop a history ofthe effects of twentieth-century demographic andsocial changes on the humanities. My own researchon the history of the Pentagon further extends theAcademy’s studies of American government andbusiness institutions.

Taken together, the participants in the VSP mirrorthe Academy as a community. Just as our Fellowsconduct their independent research and enrich theAcademy by their contributions to its program, sothe Visiting Scholars carry out their own studies,interact with each other as a closely knit group,and participate in such Academy activities as proj-ect conferences and workshops, as well as StatedMeetings and informal gatherings at the House.The VSP is a new embodiment of the Academy’shistoric mission to foster and advance knowledge.

Remarks � 2002 by John Steinbruner, Francis Oakley,Robert C. Post, David Bloom, and James Carroll,respectively.

Photos � 2002 by Martha Stewart.

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STATED MEET ING REPORT

Education Reform:A Report Card

Marshall S. Smith, Program Directorfor Education, William and FloraHewlett Foundation, and Professor ofEducation, Stanford University

Commentary: Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University

The following presentation was given at the 1858th StatedMeeting, held at the House of the Academy in Cambridge onApril 10, 2002. At the event, the Academy honored FrederickMosteller (Harvard University) and Howard Hiatt (HarvardMedical School) for their work in placing the health and welfareof children on the Academy’s agenda. Richard Light (Harvard)spoke about Mosteller’s distinguished career in educationalresearch, and Jerome Kagan (Harvard) cited Hiatt’s manyaccomplishments as director of the Academy’s Initiatives forChildren Program. A summary of the tribute appeared in theSummer 2002 Bulletin (pp. 9–13).

Marshall S. Smith

Two years ago, I ended a seven-year stint as under-secretary of the US Department of Education.Tonight I would like to talk a little bit about quan-titative studies—how I thought about them in thegovernment and what I think might be done toimprove them. I’ll start with some history, goingback forty years or so; then I’ll talk a little bit aboutmy sense of our progress. I will close with a briefreport card on reform, as interpreted through thewords of John Adams.

Forty years ago, in the 1960s, various activities ineducation were influenced by empirical studies. Iwill not argue that empirical studies drove such devel-opments as the passage of Head Start and Title I.Lots of other things that went on in the sixties—in-cluding the civil rights movement and other socialmovements of those times—were far more impor-

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tant than quantitative studies. Nevertheless, impor-tant quantitative studies were carried out, and theywere part of the mix. A famous study of the effectsof preschools, conducted in Ypsilanti, Michigan,contributed to (and was certainly cited during) thepassage of Head Start. Among the researchers whowere influential in that era, none exceeded JeromeBruner. His landmark book The Process of Education(1960) was a crucial factor in the generation of arange of educational programs and experiments inthe 1960s, including Title I and Head Start. Duringthe early 1960s, I believe, Jerry was also a memberof the President’s Advisory Panel of Education.

Title I—the federally funded supplemental readingprogram for at-risk first-graders—changed thenature of evaluation in this country. A new federalprovision—a Robert Kennedy amendment—re-quired that every Title I project in the 14,000 localeducation agencies in the country had to be evalu-ated. The few words in that provision heightenedthinking about evaluation in a major way.

In my own first research experience outside of theuniversity, in the summer of 1965, I was on a teamthat helped to evaluate the Title I program inBoston. We spent most of that summer arguingabout whether we should be measuring only out-comes—only student achievement—or whether

Speaker Marshall S. Smith (William and Flora HewlettFoundation; Stanford University)

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we should also be measuring some of the back-ground variables and intervention processes thataffected achievement. That argument continues,thirty-five years later. I think we know quite a bitmore about it now than we did before, thoughpeople on both sides are still as passionate.

Many of you are familiar with James Coleman’sreport on Equality of Educational Opportunity,issued by the government in 1966. The findings ofthat report and subsequent reports building onColeman’s survey, especially Racial Isolation in thePublic Schools, were instrumental in stimulating alarge-scale social experiment: the widespread busingof students to achieve racial integration in US pub-lic schools. The consequences of that experiment,and of early evaluations of both Head Start andTitle I—many of which were slightly negative—began to change a lot of people’s thinking aboutwhat kinds of investments the country should bemaking in education, as well as in other areas.

I recall a phone call I got in 1969 or 1970 fromPat Moynihan, then domestic policy adviser forPresident Nixon. During his first stint at Harvard,from 1966 to 1969, Pat had been influenced by theColeman report to believe that perhaps educationdidn’t quite have the effect he once thought it had.Also, Head Start evaluations had led him to thinkthat Head Start didn’t quite have the intendedeffect. During the call, I was in my kitchen inCambridge with two very young children, while hewas in his office in the White House.

Pat had been advocating in the government for thenegative income tax. He asked me whether I wouldrather put $1,000 into a family to cover one year ofHead Start for one of its children or put $1,000into that family to buy food, clothing, and shelterby means of a negative income tax. I convenientlyducked the question by saying I’d do both. But thequestion was an important one because it signaledan orientation toward thinking about what kindsof interventions would have the greatest effect—anorientation that was possible only because therehad been empirical studies of at least some of thevarious domestic interventions.

Later on, in the 1970s, methods were developedfor synthesizing the results of quantitative studies.Richard Light and Paul Smith started that off witha little article in the Harvard Educational Review.Gene Glass came up with the concept of meta-analysis, which advanced research synthesis dra-matically. During the 1970s, we in educationbegan to look at qualitative studies more—and insome ways, qualitative studies began to drive outempirical studies for the next fifteen years.

This was a phenomenon of some importance. Welost some of the momentum around empiricalstudies, I believe—but at the same time, we gainedsome real insights into theories of intervention andinto the ways and processes of classrooms, schools,and other organizations. So on the one hand, ourfield drew a sharp distinction between qualitativeand quantitative that should never be drawn, in myview. This led to an almost ideological battle in thefield of education. But if you look carefully downthe middle on this one, you will find that thosequalitative studies provided valuable insights thatallowed people to begin to piece together the find-ings of research on how students learn and howteachers teach, and to apply those findings to situ-ations that were more complex. Those insightsgained us a great deal.

Then came the 1980s. Many of you will rememberthe 1983 government report titled A Nation atRisk, which relied on international quantitativedata to assess education policy. Increasing attentionalso was focused on national assessments and testscores. Great growth occurred in cognitive science,yielding useful theories on how people learn. Theeighties also brought the class-size experiment—amassive randomized field trial that has had anenormous effect on policy over time.

As we moved through the 1990s and into the newmillennium, almost every state in the nation adopt-ed a framework of standards-based school reform.The intent of the reforms is to bring resources, poli-cies, and assessments into alignment with standardsthat specify clear and explicit goals for student learn-ing. The assessments are used for accountability

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purposes. This is a package that has bipartisan sup-port. It started with strong support by the Clintonadministration and is now being supported by thecurrent administration.

An increased emphasis on accountability, reflectedin the standards-based reforms, has also influencedother parts of our society. Accountability based onquantitatively measurable outcomes has movedboth the government and the private sector tobecome much more sensitive to the kinds of effectsthat can be measured. In many areas, includingeducation, that has sometimes led to a narrowing ofthe kinds of outcomes people worry about, whichmay be a negative byproduct of the policy. Weseem to value what we measure, rather than rigor-ously measure what we value. Consequently, if weassess only things that are easy or inexpensive tomeasure, we may end up placing value on thewrong things. This happens too often in education.Nonetheless, measures focus people’s attention. Theemphasis on empirically based accountability hascreated coherence out of incoherence in manyinstances, not least in the government.

The positivist belief in the value of empirical andverifiable findings has also increased attention tothe empirical evaluation of education policies andpractices. This—unfortunately, in my view—hasresulted in a rash of dramatic statements about ran-domized field trials being the “gold standard” of

Left to right: Jerome Kagan and Henry Rosovsky (both, Harvard University)

research. This form of rhetoric often implies thatother forms of research are inferior, rather thanthat they provide different kinds of data and dif-ferent insights. In fact, the fascination with ran-domized trials seems to have been elevated to anideological level by some. The National ResearchCouncil addresses the issues of different method-ologies for different purposes in an elegant newreport. On the other hand, the interest in random-ized trials may be seen as a counterbalance to anequally ideological perspective of many in the late1980s and early 1990s who regarded qualitativeresearch as the only path to truth.

The concerns about effectiveness have not onlyheightened attention to methodological issues; theyhave also resulted in increased attention to theory.The National Research Council, for instance, hasissued some excellent books on theories of learn-ing, including how children learn to read and domathematics.

Program evaluation has benefited from this. We arebeginning to marry good and appropriate method-ologies with better theory, and our evaluations arebecoming more and more powerful and useful forpolicy development. Anthony Petrosino’s work atthe Academy on theory and evaluation is becom-ing very influential. We better understand the chal-lenges of implementation. We are also seeingimprovements in synthesizing the results of priorresearch. The inception of the Campbell Collab-oration in the late 1990s was a formal way of begin-ning to approach the synthesis problem.

Of course, technology is changing many of therules right now. It is changing our ways of model-ing and our ways of organizing data. It is changingour access to data in dramatic ways. In the human-ities and arts areas, the opportunities for new formsof research and analysis are extraordinary. Throughtechnology, we are now able to do things we couldn’teven dream of doing before.

At least four of the major events or findings in theseareas can be traced back to Fred Mosteller. Thereare surely many other links with which I am not

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familiar; I will note just four of his importantcontributions in areas that I have mentioned. Heplayed a very significant role in interpreting theColeman report; gave extraordinary legitimacy tothe class-size study; fostered strides in syntheticanalysis, both as Richard Light’s mentor and asa supporter of the Campbell Collaboration; andmade major contributions through his work on theNational Assessment of Educational Progress inthe early days.

In 1957 I took a course with Fred. Ever since, I’vecarried a Mosteller quote in the back of my mind,and I looked it up the other day in the 1953 editionof the Handbook of Social Psychology. What I foundjust goes to show that Fred hasn’t changed hisbeliefs about the importance of carefully planned,theoretically driven research designs. Mosteller andBush wrote, “In no circumstances do we think thatsophisticated analytical devices should replaceclean design and careful execution, unless very un-usual economic considerations arise.” Clear think-ing should prevail.

Now, let me ask a rhetorical question: If we knowso much about all of this, why don’t we have bet-ter policy? Other countries appear to have stronglinkages between improved knowledge and im-provement in their schools. Back in the fifties, theNational Science Foundation developed a set ofvery exciting and rigorous math and sciencecourses in response to the challenge represented bySputnik. For a good while during the sixties, lots ofschools in the United States adopted those cours-es, and some actually still use them. In general,though, they began to die out around 1969 or1970. Yet they were used in other countries for farlonger. Materials based on US research are pickedup and used by other countries fairly regularly. Yetin the United States, the curriculum materialsdeveloped through NSF investments in the 1950sand 1960s lasted only a while, and materials devel-oped in the 1990s have been largely unused—some having been bought and then shelved bypublishers that did not want them competing withtheir own textbooks.

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But the publishers are not the only culprits. Thegovernance system can also be part of the prob-lem. In the United States, we have an amazinglycomplex policy environment. California alone, forexample, has seven different state agencies that in-fluence the development and implementation ofeducation policy. The elected state school officerand state governor are both Democrats, but theydon’t talk to each other, because they’re battlingover the turf. A variety of other groups out thereare also in the fray. California has term limits, sothere is almost no legislative memory. And the leg-islators seem to evaluate the quality of their termon the basis of the amount and number of legisla-tive items passed rather than the effectiveness andcoherence of the laws. This is not just a problem inCalifornia; state and federal legislators have thesame disease. California also has government bypublic proposition, which means that anybodywith a lot of money can put anything they pleaseon the ballot. Consequently, a cacophony of chaoticprovisions is placed into law, and that makes effec-tive governance almost impossible.

On the other hand, as I learned during my yearswith the government, policymakers actually do lis-ten. I was in the Clinton administration for sevenyears, in a policymaking role, and I don’t thinkthere was any major issue where quantitative re-

Ellen Lagemann (Harvard Graduate School of Education) andThomas Payzant (Boston Public Schools)

search didn’t enter into the picture. There’s no rea-son to think that it made a telling contribution,but people thought about it, worried about it, andlooked at it. In some instances, research—forexample, the Tennessee study of class size—reallytipped the balance because it changed people’sviews in the Office of Management and Budget,the president’s office, and Congress.

Generally, however, the effect sizes in research stud-ies are small. If effect sizes are small, and if multi-ple studies are done, we are likely to get a distribu-tion of effects that covers zero and goes into nega-tive territory. As a consequence, anybody whowants to argue any position can base the argumenton empirical research.

Let me spend a couple of minutes on a report cardon education reform, just to give you some sense ofwhere I think we stand today. I’m not going torelate it back too much to empirical research—justa little bit. It’s a complicated picture. We have a setof standards-based reforms now that are in theirearly adolescence—nine, ten, eleven years old atbest. In California, they’re only three or four yearsold. So nationwide, these reforms are goingthrough tremendous growing pains.

Although there are still many debates over thereforms, I believe they have begun to have someeffect over time. Math scores on the NationalAssessment of Educational Progress have risen sig-nificantly in the fourth and eighth grades—by overa grade level—in the past six or seven years. That’squite a bit of progress. And that’s not just for whitestudents; it’s also for African American, Hispanic,and Asian students.

We have individual states that do very well in theinternational studies. It is a difficult thing for us, asa country, to be compared with Singapore, or evenwith Holland, or Denmark, or Norway. One mightthink that Minnesota, for example, would comparemore closely with Norway or Sweden than wouldthe entire United States—or that some fairly small,well-off area of the United States might comparemore closely with Singapore than would the whole

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United States. When we do look at places that arewell off and compare them with Singapore, ourstudents do pretty well. They don’t quite reach thelevel that the students in Singapore do, but they arecompetitive. When we look at how Minnesotadoes, compared with the Scandinavian countries, itactually does very well.

Some states have shown significant gains in manyregards over the past few years. Texas, North Carol-ina, and Connecticut—all states that have pushedthese standards-based reforms hard—show goodgains in reading and mathematics. As for Massa-chusetts, we’ll see—there’s a big debate here. Vir-ginia, Maryland, and other states have shown sub-stantial gains. Nonetheless, we have a long way togo, especially for our least advantaged.

Many think that US education reform is taking usmuch too far in the direction of testing and assess-ment. Others think that perhaps we are not push-ing hard enough. I was pleased to find support formy own views on the reforms in David Mc-Cullough’s book John Adams, which I read on myplane trip here. I was struck by two quotes fromAdams on education because they fit with myassessment of where we stand right now.

Here’s one of them, written about 220 years ago:“A memorable change must be made in the systemof education, and knowledge must become so gen-eral as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer tothe higher.”

I would venture to say that the lower ranks of soci-ety today are almost as low on the education totempole as they were 220 years ago. We haven’tchanged that particular phenomenon in our society.We still have people at the bottom, and we can pre-dict who they are, by and large. We know wherethey live. We know what the problems of theirschools are—and we haven’t done enough about it.So our reforms haven’t done very well on that par-ticular dimension.

The second quote that impressed me was from aletter John Adams wrote to John Quincy Adams at

around the same time. John Quincy had just beendenied admission to Harvard, despite havingdemonstrated his extraordinary abilities. He’d beentold that he would have to complete several monthsof tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw inHaverhill in order to go to Harvard.

Apparently, Adams was a bit concerned that JohnQuincy would study too hard and get too involvedin his Greek. He wrote to him, “The smell of themidnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraudyourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not be ina hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was aninquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to knowthe most exceptional scholars and question themclosely: “Ask them about their tutors, manner ofteaching. Observe what books lie on their tables.Ask them about the late War, or fall into questionsof Literature, Science, or what will you.”

There is a message of caution for us in Adams’sprophetic words. We may be losing, in our passionfor increasing achievement test scores in mathe-matics, reading, and science, the breadth of knowl-edge and understanding that needs to be developedin all students if they are to be productive citizensof our increasingly complex society.

Jerome Bruner

I want to comment first on what I see as some ofthe deep wisdom in Mike’s analyses, emphasizingsome things that he didn’t have a chance to discussin detail. Then, after that, I want to offer a slightlydifferent perspective with regard to where weAmericans stand internationally in the World Ed-ucation League. In doing so, I want to use a lessonI learned from Fred Mosteller, who has been myfriend and mentor for many, many years, startingback at Princeton in another century. Fred likes tosay, “In comparing performance scores, don’t justpay attention to the means. Look at the variancetoo.” Well, that’s what I want to do: look at vari-ability. I’ll turn to that presently.

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But let me look first at some of the lessons thatMike set forth in his talk. The first was that therehas to be a good fit between what a program foreducational improvement is seeking to improve,and how it goes about assessing its results. Inassessing a program, to put his point briefly, youcan’t just use any old standardized test. The assess-ment test needs to fit the objectives of your at-tempted intervention. There are no all-purposeassessment procedures that fit all needs. Adequateassessment has to be relevant to the theory behindthe intervention program you are evaluating. Youcan’t fly blind—but that, in effect, is what you endup doing if you don’t design your assessment to fitthe objectives of your intervention.

I remember this classic problem from the early daysof the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC),one of the first curriculum reform efforts of the1960s, directed by Jerrold Zacharias and FrannyFriedman at MIT. A lot of people urged them toevaluate the PSSC curriculum effort with the stan-dardized physics tests available at the time. Zachariasreplied boldly, “Hell no, we’re not teaching that kindof physics.” So PSSC developed new assessmentprocedures (with the help of the Educational TestingService) geared to their own instructional objectivesand to their own ideas about what it meant tounderstand physics. It was a real step forward.

Indeed, every educational intervention programhas some underlying theory that shapes it, implic-

Left to right: Commentator Jerome Bruner (New York University), MarshallS. Smith, and Vice President Louis Cabot (Cabot-Wellington LLC)

itly or explicitly, and the more explicit it is, the bet-ter the evaluation will be. Even when the theory is“simply” that small classes get better results thanlarge ones, as in Fred Mosteller’s now famouslysuccessful Tennessee Study, there is an underlyingtheory that is not as simple as it seems. If youmindlessly attempt to replicate it, as they did in thestate of California, the chaos is unbelievable. Firstof all, the way in which you set up small classes hasto have some mind for who’s teaching. Teachingsmall classes requires skills in communicating.

So, what of California’s replication? They didn’thave enough teachers available, so they began hir-ing teachers willy-nilly—and got more than theusual proportion of weak and inexperienced ones.Small classes also require more classrooms, not justcorridors or hastily remodeled closets and bath-rooms. It’s not surprising that “reduced class size”didn’t bear fruit in California.

But there’s more to it than that. We don’t fullyknow why smaller classes work better, given theright conditions; we haven’t thought through thequestion. Is it that smaller classes lead to a differentstrategy on the part of the teacher, to different dis-course patterns? Do they change the teacher-pupilauthority relationship? We need a lot more theoryto proceed wisely.

Let me give an example. I have been studying thefamous preschools in Reggio Emilia in Italy. Here’sa surprising finding: when a teacher asks a childsomething, she waits for an answer. If the child hassome difficulty answering, the teacher typicallyasks the other children in the class to help littleGiovanna or Giuseppe figure out an answer, and adiscussion starts. The context changes: knowledgeseeking becomes communal. I’ve seen some aston-ishing scenes there. I’ve even started using thisapproach teaching graduate students. I’m still try-ing to think through the theory behind it, andeven making a little progress. As Mike has beentrying to tell us, people need to think about whatthey have in mind with their interventions. Thenthey’ll be able to evaluate properly.

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Now I want to move on to Fred Mosteller’s admo-nition about attending to variance. I’d like tolook at it from the point of view of Americanperformance on the tests now being widely usedfor comparing adult “literacy” in the nineteenmost well-off countries in the world, includingtop-ranking America. These tests, devised by theOffice of Economic Cooperation and Development,are thoughtfully designed and carefully translatedinto the different languages required. There arethree subtests: one for ability to recognize prose, asin news stories and the like; another for “documentliteracy,” or the ability to understand order forms,tables, and so on; and a third for “quantitative lit-eracy,” or knowing how to perform such tasks asbalancing a checkbook and figuring a tip. Let’s takea look at some findings from these tests.

First of all, as everybody knows, America doesn’tdo well on international tests. For example, amongthose nineteen well-off countries, we’re ninth onthe prose score, fourteenth on the document score,and thirteenth on quantitative—twelfth amongnineteen on the composite score. You’d think,given our riches, we’d do better than that.

But where we undoubtedly lead the world is in vari-ability, or dispersion. American standard devia-tions on all the tests are just about at the top. Forexample, on the prose test, we rank first in the sizeof our standard deviation; on the document testand on the quantitative test, we rank second. Welead the world in the standard deviation of com-posite scores—the most diverse country in thewell-off world.

If you look at the test-score difference between thetop tenth percentile and the lowest tenth percentilein each country, again we lead the pack. Our low-est percentile is way, way down; our top tenth isway, way up. America seems to have a gift for fos-tering maldistribution or inequality. No country inthe civilized world can match us in terms of themaldistribution of wealth, the gap between richand poor. And it seems, too, that none can matchthe gap we create between our most literate and

least literate countrymen. Ours is a diversity ofinequality.

What about the history of all this? Are we gettingbetter or worse in literacy, in comparison withother well-to-do nations? We can estimate this bylooking at different age groups, and what comes outis not encouraging. Our youngest Americans—agessixteen to twenty-five—rank fourteenth out of nine-teen in the world on the composite literacy score.The age group twenty-six to thirty-five rankseleventh. With the group that is thirty-six to forty-five years old, we go to fifth place. And the twooldest groups, ages forty-six to fifty-five and fifty-six to sixty-five, are second and third in the worldranking. So either America is falling behind, or therest of the world is surging ahead, in literacy.

How much of this has to do with immigration?Our native-born Americans ranked tenth out ofthe seventeen countries on which there were immi-gration figures. Our foreign-born ranked sixteenthout of those seventeen countries. Our own pasthistory suggests that when immigrants get segre-gated in caste conditions, as in our inner-cityslums, second-generation “immigrants” continueto lag behind or even get pushed down further. Soimmigration is an issue, alright, though not anenormous one numerically.

I suspect, though, that the ones who are falling fur-thest behind world standards are poor blacks andpoor second-generation Latinos. Yet there is anirony in this decline, for we know from intensivestudies that with improved teacher expertise andclassroom conditions, these groups can be greatlyhelped. If we in America are willing to do some-thing about it, plenty can be done. But not muchis being done. So our world position remains par-lous—not to mention the conditions that suchinequalities produce here in the United States.

If we follow Mike’s wisdom, we can begin to turnthe tide, though we will have to take measuresbeyond the usual educational ones—for instance,assuring a more equitable distribution of wealth.After all, we know that the sense of helplessness

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and despair produced by poverty is the worst blockagainst improved school performance. On thatbasis, school reform without concomitant economicreform is simply not sufficient.

So, to return to Mike’s message, we should indeedlook more deeply and more theoretically at the causesof good and poor school performance, and proposereforms that take into account what it is that makesAmerican society so prone to inequality—what itis that puts us in top position for variability in na-tional literacy.

Remarks � 2002 by Marshall S. Smith and JeromeBruner, respectively.

Photos � 2002 by Martha Stewart.

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STATED MEET ING REPORT

Science as a Window intoWine History

Carole P. Meredith, Professor ofViticulture and Enology, University ofCalifornia, Davis

The 1863rd Stated Meeting was hosted by the Academy’sWestern Center in Napa, California, on November 2, 2002. Themeeting included tours of the Robert Mondavi Winery andCOPIA: The American Center for Food, Wine & the Arts. PresidentPatricia Meyer Spacks (University of Virginia), Western CenterVice President John Hogness (University of Washington), andExecutive Officer Leslie Berlowitz welcomed Fellows and guests,as well as several newly elected members from the Westernregion.

Speaker Carole P. Meredith was introduced by Academy FellowWalter Fitch, a professor in the Department of Ecology andEvolutionary Biology at UC Irvine. Meredith, a specialist in theDNA and genealogy of grapes, brings her insights as a winemaker to her work in academia. Her remarks follow.

My husband and I live in the hills on the west side ofthe Napa Valley. We have a vineyard, and we makewine under our own label, Lagier Meredith—a com-bination of our last names. Once we began growinggrapes and making wine on our own, I developeda real understanding of the interests of my con-stituents—the grape growers and wine makers ofCalifornia. Now that I also get my hands dirty, Ithink I do my job at the university a lot better.

Over the past ten years, my lab has been lookinginto the history of some of the classic wine grapesof the world. At first we thought we were simplyworking on variety identification. There are thou-sands of wine grape varieties in the world, and evenmore names that they go by. We thought we weredeveloping a method to resolve some of the prob-lems that result from using more than one name forthe same wine grape. This becomes a technical

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issue, because people can’t talk to each other if theydon’t know they’re talking about the same grapevariety. It also becomes an economic and regulatoryissue with regard to wine labeling and the regula-tions of various governments about how beveragesmust be identified. We started out to use DNAtyping simply as a method for objectively andirrefutably identifying grape varieties in order toreconcile some of the many problems and mistakesthat exist around the world.

It rapidly became clear to us that this technologycould also be a powerful tool for understandinggenetic relationships among some of the classicwine grapes in the world and thereby resolvingquestions about their origins. I’m going to dis-cuss our findings on four varieties: two classicgrapes, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, andtwo that are particularly important in California,Petite Sirah and Zinfandel. I will start with theCabernet Sauvignon story, which represents thebeginning of our work in this field, thanks to aserendipitous discovery.

First, however, it’s important to explain how grapesare propagated, because that is key to understand-ing how a classic grape variety that is growing todayin the Napa Valley—or in France or Australia orSouth Africa—is essentially unchanged from thefirst vine of that variety, which arose many centuries

Speaker Carole P. Meredith (UC Davis)

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ago. All the classic wine grapes are very, very old.They have been maintained by vegetative propaga-tion, which means by using cuttings or buds, asyou would with geraniums. Although some smallgenetic changes have taken place in the classic vinesthroughout history, they are essentially unchangedfrom the very first vines of those varieties.

All vines propagated by cuttings or buds from apreexisting vine are essentially clones. The first vineof a given variety is the only one that grew from aseed. That seed was the result of a sexual event thattook place between two parents. In the case ofgrapevines, the two parents are always completelydifferent genetically. Except for the propagationpart—the cuttings and buds—this is completelyanalogous to human reproduction. Each personshares a lot of genetic material with both parentsyet is completely dissimilar from each of themgenetically. It’s exactly the same with a grape vari-ety. All the individual plants of that variety aregenetically almost identical to each other, but theyshare only half their genetic information with eachof the two parents that gave rise to the first vine ofthat variety. That’s a key point to keep in mind.

Cultivated grape varieties can originate in a numberof different ways. The very first cultivated grapesthat existed were selections of wild vines. Bear inmind that all crops, including grapes, are derivedfrom wild plants; they are not simply the productsof human efforts.

Along the Napa River and the creeks in that area,grapevines with bright yellow leaves climb up thetrees. They are Vitis californica—a wild vine, notcultivated. The wine grapes are all Vitis vinifera—aspecies native to Europe and western Asia. The firstgrape varieties were simply individual wild vineswith fruit that people found attractive and eventu-ally learned how to propagate. We cannot reallylearn anything about varieties that were selectionsfrom wild vines, because the wild genotypes thatgave rise to those grapes no longer exist.

Another way that grape varieties can originate is bynatural cross-pollination—either between wild

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vines and the earliest of the cultivated varieties, orbetween the cultivated varieties themselves. All ofthe work that I’m going to talk about today takesadvantage of what we can learn about these naturalcross-pollinations. Over the past 160 years or so,modern grape breeders have performed controlledcross-pollinations between selected parents todevelop new varieties. None of the classic winegrapes, however, have originated from a controlledcross; they are all so old as to predate deliberatecross-pollination between any kinds of plants, whichdid not begin until the eighteenth century.

To identify the genetic origins of a grapevine, wetake a sample of that vine and chemically purifythe DNA from the other components. We thentarget specific small segments of the DNA that wehave previously identified as existing in multipleforms (called “alleles”), and we use a process calledpolymerase chain reaction (PCR) to make millionsof copies of those small segments (called “mark-ers”). We can then compare the alleles at a particu-lar marker site in one variety with the alleles at thatsame site in another variety to establish whetherthey are the same or different. We follow this pro-cedure for each marker we are analyzing. This iscompletely analogous to human DNA profiling. If

Left to right: George Olah (University of Southern California) andGabor Somorjai (UC Berkeley)

you understand at all how human DNA profilingis performed in order to analyze genetic relation-ships among humans, then you won’t have anytrouble understanding what we do with grapes.

We look at the DNA profile of the variety we arecurious about, along with the profiles of a pair ofputative parent varieties. If we are indeed examin-ing the actual parents, the progeny variety shouldshare, at each marker site, one allele with one par-ent and one allele with the other parent. We ana-lyze a large number of marker sites in order todeduce whether or not there is a probable parentalrelationship between two varieties and a third vari-ety that we postulate to be the offspring.

Cabernet Sauvignon, as you probably know, is themost important red wine grape of the Bordeauxregion of France. Wines labeled “Bordeaux” aretypically made predominantly from CabernetSauvignon, along with Merlot and sometimes sev-eral other varieties. Cabernet Sauvignon, which isconsidered by many to be the most important andhighest-quality red wine variety in the world, iswidely grown in California and the New Worldcountries. Because the name Sauvignon is derivedfrom the old French word sauvage, meaning“wild,” many people have speculated that CabernetSauvignon is a selection from a wild vine. We nowknow that it is not. Others have speculated that theRomans brought Cabernet Sauvignon into Francefrom Albania, but we now know that was not thecase. Still others have suggested that it was broughtfrom Spain, but it wasn’t. What we learned back in1996 (this was our lab’s first discovery, and it cameas a big surprise) was that Cabernet Sauvignon isthe offspring of Cabernet Franc, a red wine variety,and Sauvignon blanc, a white wine variety.

We went on to find that it’s quite common for darkwine grapes to have one white parent. The colorform is simply a dominant trait in the case ofCabernet Sauvignon. This was a discovery of a for-mer graduate student of mine, John Bowers, whogrew up in the Napa Valley in a family that hasbeen involved with wine grapes for a long time. Wewere developing a database of the most important

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wine grape varieties so that whenever we cameacross an unknown, we’d be able to identify it bymatching the DNA profiles. At the time, we hadonly about fifty varieties in our database. One dayJohn realized that his data showed that CabernetSauvignon shared half of its alleles with CabernetFranc and half with Sauvignon blanc, whichstrongly suggested that those two varieties could bethe parents of Cabernet Sauvignon. We then usedsome statistical methods that are used in humangenetics to answer various questions: For eachallele found in the offspring, how common is it inthe whole population of grape varieties? What isthe chance that Cabernet Sauvignon could sharehalf of its alleles with Cabernet Franc and half withSauvignon blanc simply by chance? What is thechance that Cabernet Sauvignon would have thosealleles if those two varieties really were the parents?What we found, by fairly straightforward statisticalanalysis, is that it is vastly more likely that CabernetFranc and Sauvignon blanc really are the parents ofCabernet Sauvignon.

This was the first time anyone had identified theorigins of a classic wine grape. Up until then, winewriters had been free to speculate whatever theywanted about a variety’s origins. There was neverany way to examine their hypotheses until we real-ized that modern genetics gives us a way to learnabout historical events that took place centuriesor even millennia ago. By combining our newinformation with what we could glean from theFrench wine literature, we were able to deduce thatCabernet Sauvignon resulted from a natural crossin Bordeaux before 1700, because the first mentionof Cabernet Sauvignon as being distinct fromCabernet Franc, with which it actually shares somephysical characteristics, was made in the early1700s.

Realizing that we had a powerful tool on our handsfor learning about important wine grapes, we be-came more deliberate in our investigations. An-other variety we have studied, Petite Sirah, hasbeen grown in California for a very long time. Ithas never been a major grape, but it has had some

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strong proponents. For a long time people thoughtthat perhaps Petite Sirah was a form of Syrah, thenoble grape of the Rhône valley in France. Weknew that was probably not the case, because theywere morphologically different, and so we began toinvestigate the origins of Petite Sirah. We obtainedsamples of some varieties that we thought wouldbe relevant, including Peloursin and Durif, bothfrom the south of France. We found that almostall of the Petite Sirah in California matched the DNA profile of Durif at every marker. Occasionally,however, we came across some Petite Sirah thatmatched the profile of Peloursin. When we investi-gated a bit further, we saw that Peloursin, althoughcompletely distinct from Durif, shares one allelewith Durif at every marker, which suggested thatPeloursin has a parental relationship with Durif.

We eventually determined that the French varietycalled Durif, which is the same as the California-grown grape known as Petite Sirah, is actually theoffspring of Peloursin and true Syrah. This came asquite a surprise to people (even though the nameused in California is Petite Sirah) because, havingbeen told that Petite Sirah was definitely not thesame variety as Syrah, people had begun to con-sider them as two completely different grapes. Infact, many regarded Petite Sirah with scorn, as ifthat grape were trying to pass as a relative of Syrah.When we discovered that Petite Sirah is Durif andconfirmed that it is not Syrah, its detractors

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The garden at COPIA: The American Center for Food, Wine & the Arts(Napa, CA)

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thought, “Told you so. It has nothing to do withSyrah.” But then, shortly thereafter, we found outthat Petite Syrah is the offspring of Syrah. So nowPetite Sirah has taken on an elevated status becauseof the recognition that it is one-half Syrah, andpeople are noticing the similarities. Our discoveryhas been rather helpful to the people who producePetite Sirah, because it has enabled them to gaininclusion in a trade organization called the RhôneRangers, which promotes Rhône varieties grown inCalifornia.

Having found the parents of Cabernet Sauvignonand Petite Sirah, we decided to make a deliberatesearch for parents of other varieties by selecting alarge number of candidates on the basis of certaincriteria. We enlisted the collaboration of the world’sgreatest living expert on French grapes, Dr. Jean-Michel Boursiquot, who at the time was a scientistand teacher in Montpellier. He was eager to partic-ipate in our project; after all, an American grouphad found the origin of a famous French grape,Cabernet Sauvignon, so our French colleagues wereunderstandably interested in joining our efforts.We decided to focus on northeastern France, whichis where Burgundy and Champagne are located.We chose about 300 candidates from the severalthousand varieties at the French national grapevariety collection in Montpellier, on the Med-iterranean coast of France. Many of the varieties inthat wonderful collection are no longer grown inFrance; they were rescued from remnant popula-tions in vineyards destroyed by phylloxera. Someof these varieties were saved from extinction bybeing brought to the Montpellier site, where phyl-loxera cannot survive.

Mainly, we chose varieties that looked like thosegrown today in northeastern France, or varietiesthat had some historical tie to that part of France,or varieties that historical records speculated wererelated to varieties growing in the region. We alsochose some varieties on a hunch, even though wedidn’t have any concrete basis for including them.

We generated DNA profiles for those 300 varieties,at a relatively limited number of markers, so that

we could quickly eliminate those that were notclosely related to the grapes of northeastern France.We analyzed the remaining varieties at a largernumber of markers. John Bowers developed a com-puter program that would search among the DNAprofiles of these varieties for parental relationships.We use numbers to record DNA data, and becausethe data are numerical, we can analyze them with acomputer program; we don’t have to rely on visualcomparisons of DNA bands on a gel.

Among the 300 varieties analyzed, we found 26pairs of parents for 26 varieties. Much to our sur-prise, however, those parents were not 26 differentpairs. We found that 16 of the varieties had thesame pair of parents: Pinot, which is the classicgrape of northeastern France, and Gouais blanc, avariety I had never heard of before. All of the 16 dif-ferent offspring most probably resulted from com-pletely independent cross-pollination events thatoccurred in different places and at different times.Many of those offspring are varieties you’ve neverheard of; some are no longer grown today. But oneof those varieties is Chardonnay, which is probablythe most important white wine grape grown in theworld today. Some others are Melon, a quite impor-tant variety that produces the white Muscadetwines at the mouth of the Loire; Gamay noir, thegrape from which the true Beaujolais is produced;and Aligote and Auxerrois, both important whitewine grapes in northeastern France today. All of the16 varieties with the same pair of parents are growntoday, or were grown, in a corner of northeasternFrance, the area we were targeting.

It was a great advantage to have access to a collec-tion like the one in Montpellier. If we had simplyrelied on commercial vineyards, we never wouldhave discovered some of these genetic relationships.In fact, we never would have found Gouais, one ofthe parents, because it is not cultivated anywhere inFrance today; it exists only in the collection.

You may wonder why I’m saying Pinot when thereis a Pinot noir, a Pinot gris, and a Pinot blanc. It’sbecause these are simply three different color formsof the same variety; they all have the same DNA

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profile. When we found that one of the parents ofthe 16 offspring was a Pinot, we did not knowwhich of the color forms of Pinot it might havebeen in each of the 16 cases. (We would be able tofigure that out, however, if we produced and testedsome progeny from each of the 16.)

Pinot is known to be a very old variety. A Romannaturalist, writing about the things that were grow-ing in Burgundy when the Romans arrived thereabout 2,000 years ago, described a variety thatsounds just like Pinot noir. None of the grapes thatwere grown in the more southern parts of Europeresemble Pinot at all; it has a distinctive leaf shape.Gouais blanc, a reliable, sturdy grape, was oncewidely grown in northeastern France. In fact, Pinotand Gouais were the two most widely grownvarieties in that region during the Middle Ages.However, whereas Pinot was grown by the nobilityand the church on the best sites, usually on theslopes, Gouais was grown only by the peasants onthe flat lands where they lived. Gouais was consid-ered so mediocre that it was banned at least twicein Burgundy for being just too ordinary.

Using some old French books, we were able todeduce the probable distribution of both Gouaisand Pinot in the Middle Ages. There would have

Edward Feigenbaum of the Membership Committee (StanfordUniversity), with Councilor Carolyn Shoemaker (LowellObservatory)

been ample opportunity for cross-pollination eventsbetween those two varieties, with Pinot growing onthe slopes and Gouais growing on the nearby flats.Presumably, lots of individual seedlings sprung upover the years in different places and at differenttimes, each the result of a cross-pollination betweenGouais and Pinot.

We know that Pinot was already in northeasternFrance when the Romans arrived, but Gouais wasnot. Gouais blanc is actually a French synonym foran eastern European grape known as Heunischweiss. How did it get to Burgundy? There seems tobe some fairly strong evidence that Gouais wasbrought to France by Emperor Probus of Rome.Some previous emperors had become resentful ofwine production in the provinces, because it wascompeting with wine production in Rome; for atime, Emperor Domitian actually prohibited grapegrowing in the provinces. But Probus, who had agreat interest in agriculture, liked the provinces,and he especially liked the Gauls. He was fromDalmatia, which is part of present-day Croatia. It is written that he gave the Gauls a gift of agrapevine from his homeland. We have no proof,but we can speculate that perhaps that vine wasGouais blanc.

Why are Pinot and Gouais the parents of so manyvarieties? We have never found another pair of par-ents with offspring of more than one variety. Wethink it’s quite likely that Pinot and Gouais makesuch a great combination because they arose fromcompletely unrelated original wild populations.It’s a classic example of heterosis—of geneticallydissimilar parents producing very fit and adaptableoffspring.

The most recent work my lab has been doing isprobably the most satisfying for me because it hasbecome so multidimensional: it’s not only aboutgenetics and history but also about people and col-laboration.

Zinfandel is a very important and widely grownwine grape from California. It is used to make anumber of outstanding wines, ranging from a rose

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that is called White Zinfandel to the very robustand dark-colored red Zinfandel wines that comefrom grapes grown in some of the cooler Californiaregions. For a long time, Californians thought ofZinfandel as California’s own grape, because nogrape in Europe goes by that name. It was rathernice to think that for once we weren’t emulatingEurope by using another one of its classic grapes.Here we had a wine grape of our own, and it was apretty good one too.

Nevertheless, it was obvious that Zinfandel was amember of Vitis vinifera, a European species. Be-cause there is no Vitis vinifera native to the NewWorld, Zinfandel must have originated somewherein Europe—but we didn’t know where. This mys-tery was the subject of books and a lot of specula-tion. Finding the answer was not only of historicalinterest; it also had some practical interest becausetoday’s growers of Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah orChardonnay often like to plant more than one sub-type of that variety.

Subtypes within a variety are called “clones.” Thisis an unfortunate use of the word, because in wine,“clone” means something quite different from whatit means in most biological contexts. The differentsubtypes of a variety are often adapted to slightlydifferent conditions: they may ripen a bit earlier, orhave a slightly different aroma, or have slightlylarger or smaller berries. Growers and winemakersoften have preferences, depending on the locationof the vineyards or the kind of wine that they wantto make. In California, all we had was a fairly uni-form Zinfandel that had been grown here for ahundred years or so. If we wanted to get some morediversity into that variety, we had no idea where togo. If we wanted more subtypes of Chardonnay,we’d go to Burgundy. For subtypes of CabernetSauvignon, we’d go to Bordeaux. For subtypes ofSyrah, we’d go to the Rhône. But for Zinfandel, wehad no place to go.

In the 1970s, Austin Goheen, a retired colleaguefrom UC Davis, was attending a conference inApulia, on the heel of Italy. He tasted a local wine

with an Italian colleague and said, “This tastes likeZinfandel. Can you show me the vines?” Despitebeing told that the wine was nothing but an ordi-nary local red, Austin persisted and was shownthe vines. They looked exactly like Zinfandel, andhe thought that he might have finally found thehome of that variety. The Italians called the grapePrimitivo di Gioia. Eventually, when we did DNAcomparisons, it became very clear that Primitivoand Zinfandel are simply synonyms for the samevariety. But if you look into the history ofPrimitivo in Italy, it is referred to as an introducedgrape, and it has not been grown there long at all.So Italy is not the home of Zinfandel.

The next place we became interested in was pres-ent-day Croatia, which used to be part of Yugo-slavia before it separated into its componentrepublics. The most distinguished red wine grapegrown along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, onthe Adriatic Sea—as well as on many of the 1,100islands off the coast—is Plavac Mali, long sus-pected to be the same as Zinfandel, or at least a rel-ative. The Dalmatian coast is very close to the heelof Italy, so it’s entirely possible that a grape grownthere might have found its way to Italy.

Miljenko Grgich, a Napa Valley winemaker who isoriginally from what is now Croatia, had beeninsisting for years that Plavac Mali was the originalZinfandel. He was very excited to learn of our

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Councilor Peter Stansky (Stanford University) and President PatriciaMeyer Spacks (University of Virginia) at the Robert Mondavi Winery

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investigation and wanted to help in any way hecould. Having left the former Yugoslavia a longtime ago to seek his fortune in America, he felt thatestablishing a viticultural connection between hisnew home, California, and his old home, Croatia,would make his life complete.

In 1998, after having looked at a number of sam-ples that we already had in Davis without reachingany satisfactory conclusions, I decided to go toCroatia, where I serendipitously made contactwith two scientists at the University of Zagreb,Ivan Pejic and Edi Maletic. Even more serendipi-tously, I was able to enlist the help of JasenkaPiljac, a native of Croatia. We had first met whenshe was an undergraduate in biochemistry, wash-ing dishes in my lab to earn some extra money(her parents had moved their large family to Daviswhen civil war broke out in Yugoslavia). Jasenkagraduated from UC Davis with fantastic gradesand had just returned to Croatia when I decidedto embark upon my “Zinquest.” During my firsttrip to Croatia, she was my assistant, my translator,and my companion—an all-around great person tohave at my side.

The four of us (Ivan, Edi, Jasenka, and I) traveledalong the coast and to some islands, taking samplesfrom various Plavac Mali vineyards, and then Ibrought them back to Davis to do the DNA analy-sis. My hypothesis at the time was that Plavac Maliwas a genetically heterogeneous variety. We’dalready looked at some samples of Plavac Malivines maintained in Davis. They weren’t the sameas Zinfandel, but I thought that perhaps if welooked at a larger range of samples from theDalmatian Coast, we would find some that wereZinfandel. What we found, though, was that all150 samples I brought back from Croatia were thesame as what we already had in Davis, and none ofthem was Zinfandel.

Nevertheless, we did find a striking genetic rela-tionship: Zinfandel turned out to be one of the par-ents of Plavac Mali. This came as a real surprise,because Plavac Mali is considered an old Dalmatian

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grape, whereas Zinfandel has been viewed as a rela-tively young California upstart of unknown origins.It took us quite some time to find the other parent,but we eventually found it on an island off thecoast. After my 1998 visit to Croatia, when itbecame clear that Plavac Mali was not Zinfandel,Ivan and Edi had continued to search. Every sum-mer they visited more vineyards on more islandsand talked to the growers in an effort to find everygrape that could possibly be related to Zinfandel.Eventually, they found the variety called Dobricic,which turned out to be the other parent of PlavacMali—the missing link in the Zinfandel–PlavacMali relationship.

Although we had not found Zinfandel in Croatia,we had found its genetic footprints. We were begin-ning to suspect that Zinfandel was extinct in itshomeland. When phylloxera went through Europe,it destroyed a lot of vineyards, and many varietieswere lost. Unlike the French, the people of theDalmatian Coast area did not have the resources orthe foresight to establish a regional grape varietycollection before all was lost. The damage done byphylloxera in Croatia, followed by the ravages of theCommunist government and a couple of worldwars, had all contributed to driving people off theland. We began to think we would never findZinfandel in Croatia because it had probably suc-cumbed to one of the many factors that had depletedthe genetic resources of the Croatian vineyards.

Nonetheless, Ivan and Edi kept looking, and send-ing samples back to us, in 1999, 2000, and 2001.Their search was focused on the Dalmatian Coastbetween Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritagecity, and Split, an old Roman settlement, as well asa number of the major islands in the region. Theyalways included little descriptions with the sam-ples: “This one looks a lot like Zin,” or “Take agood look at this one; this has got to be Zin.” Wekept analyzing them. None of them was Zinfandel,but many were its relatives. We were putting piecesof the puzzle together, but we were still missingZinfandel itself.

At the end of 2001, I got an e-mail from Ivan thatsaid, “This time we’ve really found it. We’ve reallygot Zin.” He had sent me the same sort of messageseveral times before, so he was starting to soundlike the boy who cried wolf. But by this time, Ivanhad managed to equip his own lab to do some lim-ited DNA analysis, even though it was very diffi-cult for him to obtain the necessary chemicals. Hesaid, “Listen, I’ve already looked at six markers.They match Zinfandel. We’ve found it. Mysterysolved.” I told him I wouldn’t be convinced untilwe had analyzed more markers at Davis. He sent usthe samples, and within a week or so of receivingthem, we’d analyzed a lot more markers. This grapematched Zinfandel completely. In Croatia, it goesby the name Crljenak Kastelanski, which simplymeans “reddish grape from Kastela,” a coastal townjust north of Split. So far we have confirmed thepresence of this grape in only one vineyard, whichhas several thousand vines in it. Only nine of themare Zinfandel, and the rest are about a dozen othervarieties. Had we waited a few more years, wemight never have found it, because vineyards getreplanted, and nobody recognized that there wasanything special about this particular vineyard.

Ivan and Edi are continuing to look for moreexamples of Zinfandel in Croatia. I was there thispast August and went with them to the vineyardwhere Crljenak Kastelanski is growing, so I could

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Left to right: David Hogness (Stanford University) and Richard Herr (UCBerkeley)

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see the vines for myself (and have my picture takenwith them!). Ivan and Edi are hopeful that theywill find this variety in more vineyards, and theywill continue to look. During my most recent visit,we went to some vineyards on the islands of Soltaand Ciovo and found some promising candidateson Ciovo.

We’ve now pieced together a possible history for thegrape variety known as Zinfandel here, as Primitivoin Italy, and as Crljenak Kastelanski in Croatia (henceour own name for it: ZPC). This variety was bornsomewhere along the Dalmatian Coast and spreadwidely throughout the coast and the islands. Wethink that some monks who emigrated fromCroatia to southern Italy in the eighteenth centuryto escape historically documented religious persecu-tion brought the grape with them to Italy, where itbecame known as Primitivo and is now widelygrown. At the same time, the grape also managed tomake its way to the United States, but we’re not cer-tain how. One possibility is that it was establishedin the Vienna grape variety collection of EmperorFranz Josef, whose Austro-Hungarian empire in-cluded present-day Croatia, and then was importedfrom Vienna by a nurseryman on Long Island.Also, a lot of Croatians have made their way to Cal-ifornia, and many are growing grapes here today. It’spossible that some of them may have brought thevariety with them.

We think that Zinfandel (a.k.a. Crljenak Kastel-anski) was once widely grown in Croatia. Diseaseprobably killed most of the vines, but not beforea chance cross-pollination took place betweenCrljenak Kastelanski and Dobricic, giving rise to aseedling that became Plavac Mali. It probably wasnot noticed that Plavac Mali supplanted CrljenakKastelanski, because they’re very similar in appear-ance, but Plavac Mali was much better able to resistthe disease pressure that had killed off the CrljenakKastelanski, and thus it became well established asthe most important red wine grape of Croatia today.

Remarks � 2002 by Carole P. Meredith.

Photos � 2002 by Lisa Jaeger.

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AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

FORTHCOMING STATED MEET INGS

March 12, 2003 at the House of the Academy

“A Tribute to Herman Feshbach and Victor Weisskopf ” by Carl Kaysen (MIT)

Speaker: Steven Weinberg (University of Texas, Austin) on“Nuclear Terror: Ambling Toward Apocalypse”

April 10, 2003 at the Boston Athenaeum

Joint Meeting of the Academy and the Boston Athenaeum

Speaker: Patricia Meyer Spacks (University of Virginia) on“How to Read a Diary”

May 14, 2003 at the House of the Academy

Annual Meeting

Inaugural S. T. Lee Lecture in the Humanities

Speaker: Denis Donoghue (New York University) on “Joyce andthe Revolution of the Word”

May 15, 2003 at the Library of Congress

Program: Judith Resnik (Yale University) and panel on “TheIndependence of the Federal Judiciary”

Save the Date: Induction Ceremony—October 11, 2003

Visit our website at www.amacad.org for updates to this schedule.