In 1933 Wiener was elected to the National Academy of Science but soon resigned, repelled by some of the aspects of institutionalized science he encountered in the Academy.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1933, but resigned a decade later, giving as his primary reason his opposition to prizes, special honors, and exclusivity in science. In Ex-Prodigy he wrote:
. . . my early rejection by Phi Beta Kappa [while an undergraduate at tufts college] has strengthened me in a policy on the basis of which I have resigned from the National Academy of Sciences and have discouraged my friends in attempts to obtain for me similar honors elsewhere. . . . My reaction is essentially the same at the present day as it has been for nearly forty years—that academic honors are essentially bad, and that other things being equal, I choose to avoid them.
His reasons for resigning from the Academy are amplified in his letter of September 22, 1941, to Dr. Frank B. Jewett, then president of the Academy:

The academy operates in at least three distinct roles, and to my mind these roles are not compatible with one another. . . .
As to the third purpose of the Society—the conveying of honors—I have no sympathy at all. I have always regarded exclusiveness as an attribute chiefly of use in selling unwanted junk to parvenus. I do not wish to belong to any scientific organization which has more than one grade of membership.
. . .
As to medals, prizes, and the like, the less said of them the better. The heartbreak to the unsuccessful competitors is only equalled by the injury which their receipt can wreak on a weak or vain personality, or the irony of their reception by an aging scholar long after all good which they can do is gone. I say, justly or unjustly administered, they are an abomination, and should be abolished without exception.' With these convictions I can only resign from the National Academy of Sciences and rectify the error, committed under the well-meaning appeals of my friends, which I committed in accepting membership in it. . .•.

President Jewett's reply, dated September 24, is as follows:

While I still feel you are making a mistake and that you can render better service by staying inside the Academy and using your influence to make it conform more nearly to what you think it should be, I realize that you alone must judge your desires. I am sorry I have not been able to dig up a problem which would show you the value I see in a body like the Academy, even though it is not all I myself should like to have it. However, one cannot always produce white rabbits out of a hat on demand.
Whatever your final decision, believe me to be your friend.

On October 14, 1941, the Council of the Academy met and later telegraphed Wiener: "Resignation accepted with regret."