[2] He has served as board chair for several organizations, including Human Rights Watch,[3] the Security Council Report,[4] and the New York State Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities.
[12] One of his signature accomplishments as president was the reconnection of The New School to its European roots through assistance provided to dissident scholars in Eastern and Central Europe, many of whom were leaders of human rights organizations in their home countries.
[9] After becoming president of the MacArthur Foundation in 1999, he worked to strengthen the organization’s commitment to a variety of issues, including international justice, human rights, peace and security, biodiversity conservation, and community and economic development.
[9] From 2014 to 2019, he served as the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers in the United States.
He is also co-editor of John Brown: Great Lives Observed (Prentice-Hall, 1973) and The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age (McGraw-Hill, 1991).