The American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) is the somewhat less "selective" cousin of the National Academy of Sciences, which covers not only the NAS fields, but also the arts, humanities and social sciences (the latter get some representation in the NAS but not much). (The AAAS is "more selective" than the comparable academies in, e.g., Britain and Canada, however, which elect far more members relative to the size of their university system than does AAAS.) The AAAS is also the ultimate "popularity" contest, as existing members vote on new ones (on a scale of 1-4) and elections follow clear patterns of influence, as friends elected then get their other friends elected in subsequent years (I'll discuss this in more detail using philosophy as an example soon). This accounts for the "rich get richer" pattern of AAAS elections and also the sometimes shocking omissions (e.g., in philosophy, Henry Allison and Larry Laudan--they didn't have the right friends apparently). The AAAS was closely tied to Harvard from its origin, so unsurprisingly Harvard dominates membership, even to this day: someone who reaches the age of 70 at Harvard without being elected must really be someone not well-liked or respected by his or her colleagues (Alan Dershowitz, now emeritus at Harvard Law School, is an example). There are several medical-related sections in the AAAS, so I've again marked those schools that lack a medical school (or only just added one) with an *; schools with an especially high-powered medical school are marked with an #.
1. #Harvard University (490)
2. #Stanford University (296)
3. *Massachussetts Institute of Technology (238)
4. *University of California, Berkeley (227)
5. *Princeton University (197)
6. University of Chicago (196)
7. Columbia University (192)
8. Yale University (181)
9. New York University (139)
10. University of California, Los Angeles (127)
11. Cornell University (93)
12. Northwestern University (87)
12. University of California, San Diego (87)
14. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (85)
15. *California Institute of Technology (79)
16. #University of Pennsylvania (74)
17. University of Wisconsin, Madison (67)
18. #University of California, San Francisco (66)
19. #Duke University (59)
20. #Johns Hopkins University (56)
21. #University of Washington, Seattle (55)
22. Brown University (40)
23. *University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (39)
24. University of Virginia (38)
25. *University of Texas, Austin (35)
26. #Washington University, St. Louis (34)
27. University of California, Irvine (33)
28. *University of California, Santa Barbara (32)
29. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (31)
30. Indiana University, Bloomington (29)
I didn't survey enough schools to extend the ranking beyond the top thirty, but here are some other schools I did check:
University of California, Davis (26)
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul (26)
University of Southern California (25)
*University of California, Santa Cruz (23)
Boston University (22)
Emory University (19)
Ohio State University (19)
*Rice University (19)
University of Florida, Gainesville (18)
*City University of New York (17)
University of Maryland (17)
University of Notre Dame (17)
*Arizona State University (16)
Stony Brook University, State University of New York (15)
University of Oregon (15)
University of Arizona (14)
University of Rochester (13)
Georgetown University (11)
*Texas A&M University (9)
Michigan State University (8)
*University of California, Riverside (6)
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