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Celebrating 60 Years 2009 Overview and 2008 Annual Report

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Celebrating 60 Years 2009 Overview and 2008 Annual Report Celebrating 60 Years 2009 Overview and 2008 Annual Report www.aspeninstitute.org 60 Years of Continuity and Change In the years immediately following World War II, Chicago businessman and philanthropist Walter Paepcke—inspired by philosopher Mortimer Adler’s Great Books seminar at the University of Chicago—decided to create in Aspen, Colorado, “a place where the human spirit can flourish.” In 1949, he assembled scholars, writers, artists, and business and intellectual leaders in Aspen to celebrate the bicentennial of the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and to consider Goethe’s legacy in the contemporary world. The following year, Paepcke created what is now the Aspen Institute. His participation in the Great Books seminar inspired the Institute’s original offering, the Executive Seminar, created to help business leaders look with fresh eyes at their lives, their work, and the world of which they were a part in order to become “more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence, more self-fulfilling.” Today, the vision and reach of the Aspen Institute extend far beyond its original roots. In policy programs, seminars, public events, and new leadership initiatives around the world, the form and force of the Institute have grown to confront contemporary challenges and matters of collective concern. But in all of its work since its inception the Institute has remained committed to the power of thoughtful dialogue, enduring human values, nonpartisan research, and the search for common ground. Over the years the Institute has attracted statesmen, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, technology pioneers, scientists, scholars, Nobel laureates, artists, musicians, and other leaders, all of them seeking to resolve dilemmas, advance policy solutions, examine the social and moral values underlying human problems, and strengthen their own capacity for self-knowledge and mutual understanding. Like the individuals who founded the Aspen Institute, they want to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real. Since its creation sixty years ago, the Aspen Institute has rarely stood still. At a time of great change and transformation, it continues to try to anticipate and shape the course of that change, serving as a place where major social concerns can be clearly seen, debated, and examined from different perspectives, all in the interest of the public service and a better future. “In his life and in his work, Goethe represented the universality rather than the specialization of knowledge; humanity rather than the nation; the dignity of the individual rather than the power of the state.” — Aspen Institute founder Walter Paepcke on the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Festival in Aspen, Colorado–the event that set the stage for the Aspen Institute. Left: The Doerr-Hosier Center, completed in 2007, is a full-service conference center on the Aspen Meadows campus. Cover: Aerial of Goethe Bicentennial Festival, (1949) by Ferenc Berko. Aspen Institute founder Walter Paepcke breaks ground for the Seminar Building (now the David H. Koch Building) on the Aspen Meadows Campus in 1953. Photo by Ferenc Berko. About the Aspen Institute The Aspen Institute mission is twofold: to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues. The Institute does this primarily in four ways: • Seminars, which help participants reflect on what they think makes a good society, thereby deepening knowledge, broadening perspectives, and enhancing their capacity to solve the problems leaders face. • Young-leader fellowships around the globe, which bring a selected class of proven leaders together for an intense multi-year program and commitment. The fellows become better leaders and apply their skills to significant challenges. • Policy programs, which serve as nonpartisan forums for analysis, consensus- building, and problem-solving on a wide variety of issues. • Public conferences and events, which provide a commons for people to share ideas. The Institute is based in Washington, DC; Aspen, Colorado; and on the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It also has an international network of partners. Contents Dawn of the Institute 9 Seminars 13 Public Programs 17 The Aspen Global Leadership Network 21 Policy Programs and Partnerships 27 Society of Fellows 43 International Partners 44 Our Locations 45 Aspen Institute Leadership 46 Staff and Program Directory 47 2008 Annual Report 48 Board of Trustees 50 Donors 60 The famed physician, philosopher, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer 8 at the Goethe Bicentennial Festival (1949), by W. Eugene Smith. Dawn of the Institute Sixty Years of Embracing the Human Spirit www.aspeninstitute.org Sixty years ago, an international convocation and music festival was held in remote Aspen, Colorado, that paid tribute to the great humanist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. An eclectic inspiration, perhaps, but this gathering gave rise to the Aspen Institute. Cultural historian and writer James Sloan Allen describes the event. 9 or two weeks in late June and early July 1949, Aspen brimmed with people eager to hear eminent thinkers and to listen to great music and save the modern world. Albert FSchweitzer captivated his audience with eloquent simplicity, telling them how “the spirit of Goethe” embraces both “individualism” and “collective society,” implicitly bridging the ideological divide of the Cold War. The renowned Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset explained how the “radical crisis” of Western civilization could be resolved through “a new pattern of human existence” modeled on Goethe’s resolute optimism despite the “shipwrecked” conditions of life. The prize- winning American author Thornton Wilder extolled Goethe for envisioning a “planetary consciousness” rooted in the creative energy of humankind and expressed humanistically in “World Literature.” Then Wilder concluded: “After these days at Aspen, we must all change our lives.” Dozens of other distinguished speakers from across the United States and Europe further explored Goethe’s pertinence to the post-war world. But the success of the Goethe festival came not from the formal events; it came largely from what University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, among others, dubbed the “atmosphere.” Ortega and the publisher Kurt Wolff described this as an “atmosphere of harmony” aroused by the “serious dedication of all present to things of the mind” with “the opportunity to meet informally and to talk freely and at length with some of [our] most interesting and stimulating contemporaries.” The philosopher William Ernest Hocking echoed the thought: “A large part of the happiness of the affair,” he wrote, flowed from the “incidental personal meetings” among a “variety of mankind”—speaking half a dozen languages—drawn to the beautifully remote mountain town for probing reflections on civilization. The searching humanistic discussions amid the easy cosmopolitanism infected everyone at the festival with a fresh feeling of common humanity and new promise for the future. Schweitzer remarked that the occasion “had a great meaning for me” and “spiritual significance for the USA.” Others found it “an important landmark,” “a new beginning,” “the finest experience of my life,” “a near miracle,” and so on. Billy Zaug (an old Swiss miner) putting up welcome signs for the Goethe Bicentennial Festival (1949), by Ferenc Berko. Goethe Festival attendees line up at the original Music Tent, which was designed by architect Eero Saarinen (1949). Photo by Ferenc Berko. Before the festival folded its tent, such affirmations yielded a new idea. Wilder announced it to the audience in a resolution calling for “the formation of a world council of international relations to continue the work pioneered at these sessions.” This resolution—modified by Ortega’s philosophical proposal to establish a “most novel institution” dedicated to a “synthesis of human life” and the “elegance” of cultural discipline, followed by Mortimer Adler’s addition of Great Books seminars—led to the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, inaugurated the next summer. Several decades later, when the Institute’s activities had grown more diverse and far-reaching, the name became the Aspen Institute. But the legacy of the Goethe festival persists in the Institute’s many programs bringing together, in Aspen and elsewhere, thoughtful people representing a “variety of mankind” to “talk freely and at length” about the state of the world and how to improve it in a humanistic spirit. Here the “atmosphere” of the Goethe Bicentennial celebration lives on. James Sloan Allen is the author of The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform and, most recently, Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life. The essay above is an excerpt Arthur Rubinstein on from an article originally published in The Aspen Idea (Summer 2009). Aspen Mountain’s #1 chairlift. Albert Schweitzer and friends. Interior of the Music Tent. From the Goethe Bicentennial Festival (1949), by Ferenc Berko. 11 Noted University of Chicago educator Mortimer Adler—one of the founders of the “Great Books” movement—developed the Institute’s signature seminars and led them into the 1980’s. Photo12 by Margaret Durrance. Seminars Helping Leaders Reflect and Act on Ideas and Values www.aspeninstitute.org/seminars Aspen Institute seminars help leaders reflect on timeless
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