Lawrence S. Bacow © Donna Coveney

Tufts President Lawrence S. Bacow, television news legend Walter Cronkite, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan are among the more than 200 scholars, authors and public officials elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 2003 class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel Prize winners and four Pulitzer Prize winners. They are elected by current academy members for their contributions in the fields of mathematics and physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts and public affairs and business.

Annan, the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is joined on the list by fellow Nobel laureates Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and performer, and University of California physicist Donald Glaser. The list, which honors experts and intellectuals, also includes recording industry pioneer Ray Dolby and William H. Gates Sr., philanthropist and father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The induction ceremony for the academy's newest members will take place October 11 in Cambridge, Mass.

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholars to cultivate art and science, "which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation's oldest and most illustrious learned society," academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks said.

A full list of the new members is available on the academy web site at http://www.amacad.org/news/new2003.htm