The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 175 new Fellows and 20 new Foreign Honorary Members. Three members of the Brown community were elected: James W. Head III, the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor and Professor of Geological Sciences; Paula Vogel, the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing; and Rosmarie Waldrop, a poet, novelist and translator in Providence, who has an appointment as a visiting scholar at Brown.

Where applicants once did everything they could so that colleges would accept them, the tables are now turned: Colleges are now convincing admitted students to matriculate. Brown’s A Day on College Hill is among the efforts described in the story.

The destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and the spike in oil prices may have created a “political window” for progress in reducing greenhouse emissions in the United States, a leading climate scientist said yesterday. “This may be our last chance to get the job done,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “But you can’t always work from the top down. This must be a serious campaign.”

Four Hispanic members of the U.S. House joined Rhode Island Representatives Patrick Kennedy and James Langevin at a Brown University forum in calling for legislation to allow immigrants in the United States illegally to earn an avenue to legal residence. The four members of Congress all denounced what they called the “punitive” approach on immigration taken by House Republicans and said they hoped that a compromise measure sponsored by Senators John McCain, R-Arizona, and Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., would become law.