stage in the process was the convening in September 2003 of a special outside panel to review the selected group of 14 candidates for the prize. Five distinguished scholars experienced in a variety of high-quality scholarly selection procedures made up the final review panel:

David Alexander, president emeritus of Pomona College in California, vice president of the Phi Beta Kappa Fellows, and former American Secretary to the Rhodes Trust, whose doctorate from Oxford was in religion and philosophy;

Timothy Breen, professor of American history at Northwestern University, who after a doctorate at Yale has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina;

Bruce Cole, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), who hadbeen a distinguished professor of fine arts and of comparative literature at the Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana; his doctorate is from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania;

Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor emerita of history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is a noted scholar of intellectual and cultural history in the 17th and 18th centuries and a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society;

Amartya Sen, currently Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, will become University Professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard in 2004, and is a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Dr. Sen was educated at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Cambridge.

The discussion and recommendations of members of this panel were a key factor in advising