An Academic Leader's Questionable Credentials

In 1780, John Adams and other Enlightenment-influenced patriots founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more than 200 years, the organization's membership has read like a who's-who of the country's intellectual elite, including more than 250 Nobel Prize winners. The honor society's purpose, as stated in its original charter, is: "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."

But today, the Boston Globe published a front-page story that calls into question the professional virtues of Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, current president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Todd Wallack, Business reporter for The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe: "In at least two applications for federal grants over the past decade, Berlowitz said she received a doctorate in English from New York University in 1969, a degree NYU said she never earned."