American Philosophical Society Taps Three Yale Faculty Members

New Haven, Conn. — Three distinguished Yale University faculty members recently were inducted to membership in the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.”

Election to the APS honors extraordinary accomplishments in all fields. The APS is unusual among learned societies because its membership is comprised of top scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Members are organized into five areas: the mathematical and physical sciences; the biological sciences; the social sciences; the humanities; and the arts, professions and leaders in public & private affairs.

Those Yale Faculty honored at the April 27, 2007 annual meeting are:

David R. Mayhew, Sterling Professor of Political Science, is a preeminent authority on American political partisanship, the behavior of U.S. legislators, particularly incumbents, and the effect of politicking on policy-making. Mayhew’s groundbreaking “Congress: The Electoral Connection,” first published in 1974, is considered a classic in its field.

A Connecticut native, Mayhew received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and his doctorate from Harvard University. He has been teaching at Yale since 1968, was named the Alfred Cowles Professor of Government in 1982 and Sterling Professor of Political Science in 1998. In 2000–2001, he was John M. Olin Visiting Professor in American Government at Nuffield College, Oxford.

He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hoover National Fellow, a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of the American Political Science Association National Council, a member of the board of overseers of the National Election Studies of the Center for Political Studies and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other important and influential works that he has authored include “Party Loyalty Among Congressmen” (1966); “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals” (in Polity, spring 1974); “Placing Parties in American Politics” (1986); “Divided We Govern” (1991); America’s Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich (2000); and “Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre” (2002).

William E. Odom, Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, is a former three-star general in the U.S. Army who served as director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan and was a leading authority on military intelligence in the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

A graduate of the West Point Military Academy, Odom was in the military liaison mission to the Soviet Union in Potsdam, Germany, 1964–66; served as a Lieutenant Colonel in Vietnam, 1970–71; and was military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, 1972–74. From 1977 to 1981, Odom was assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, and he was assistant chief of staff for intelligence in the U.S. Army, 1981–85. In 1984, he was promoted to Lieutenant General. Odom was Director of the National Security Agency, 1985–88.

Odom earned Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia in 1962 and 1970, respectively. Among the academic positions he held were professorships at West Point and associate positions at the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia. Odom began teaching at Yale in 1989, and the same year he became director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute.

Odom counts among the numerous books he has authored, “The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization” (1974); “The Collapse of the Soviet Military” (1998), for which he won the Marshall Schulman Prize; “Fixing Intelligence for a More Secure America” (2003); and, with Robert Dujarric, “America’s Inadvertent Empire” (2004). His articles have appeared in such publications as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Washington Quarterly and Military Review.

His op-ed pieces have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, among other national newspapers, and he frequently appears on network news programs, including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline and BBC’s The World Tonight.

Harold Hongju Koh, Dean of Yale School of Law and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and has served as its 15th Dean since 2004. From 1998 to 2001, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Koh is a leading expert on international law and a prominent advocate of human and civil rights. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court and testified before the U.S. Congress more than 20 times. He has been awarded 10 honorary doctorates and two law school medals and has received more than 25 awards for his human rights work. He is recipient of the 2005 Louis B. Sohn Award from the American Bar Association and the 2003 Wolfgang Friedmann Award from Columbia Law School for his lifetime achievements in International Law. He is author of eight books, including “Transnational Legal Problems” (with H. Steiner and D. Vagts) and “The National Security Constitution,” which won the American Political Science Association’s award as the best book on the American Presidency.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, a former Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Century Foundation. He sits on the Boards of Overseers of Harvard University, the Board of Directors of the Brookings Institution, Human Rights First, the American Arbitration Association and the National Democratic Institute.

A Korean-American native of Boston, he holds a B.A. degree from Harvard College and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was Developments Editor of the Harvard Law Review, and served as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.


The American Philosophical Society’s current activities reflect the founder’s spirit of inquiry, provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas, and convey the conviction that intellectual inquiry and critical thought are inherently in the best interest of the public. Past members are scientists, humanists and public personages including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Marshall, John James Audubon, Robert Fulton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur; Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, and George Marshall. Today the Society has 943 elected members, 791 who are citizens or residents of the United States and 152 from more than two dozen foreign countries. Since 1900, more than 200 members have received the Nobel Prize.