Aspen Institute - History

History

The Institute was largely the creation of Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman who had become inspired by the Great Books program of Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. In 1945, Paepcke visited Bauhaus Artist and Architect Herbert Bayer, AIA, who had designed and built a Bauhaus-inspired minimalist home outside the decaying former mining town of Aspen, in the Roaring Fork Valley. Paepcke and Bayer envisioned a place where artists, leaders, thinkers, musicians could gather. Shortly thereafter, while passing through Aspen on a hunting expedition, Oil Industry maverick Robert O. Anderson (soon to be Founder & CEO of Atlantic Richfield) met with Bayer and shared in Paepcke's and Bayer's vision. In 1949, Paepcke organized a 20-day international celebration for the 200th birthday of German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The celebration attracted over 2,000 attendees, including Albert Schweitzer, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Rubinstein.

In 1950, Paepcke founded the Aspen Institute; and later the Aspen Music Festival and eventually (with Bayer and Anderson) the International Design Conference at Aspen (IDCA). Paepcke sought a forum "where the human spirit can flourish", especially amid the whirlwind and chaos of modernization. He hoped that the Institute could help business leaders recapture what he called "eternal verities": the values that guided them intellectually, ethically, and spiritually as they led their companies. Inspired by philosopher Mortimer Adler’s Great Books seminar at the University of Chicago, Paepcke worked with Anderson to create the Aspen Institute Executive Seminar. In 1951, the Institute sponsored a national photography conference attended by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Berenice Abbott, and other notables. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Institute added organizations, programs, and conferences, including the Aspen Center for Physics, the Aspen Strategy Group, Communications and Society Program and other programs that concentrated on education, communications, justice, Asian thought, science, technology, the environment, and international affairs.

In 1979, through a donation by Corning Glass industrialist and philanthropist Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. the Institute acquired a 1,000-acre (4 km²) campus on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, known today as the Wye River Conference Centers.

In 2005, it held the first Aspen Ideas Festival, featuring leading minds from around the world sharing and speaking on global issues. The Institute, along with Atlantic Monthly, hosts the festival annually.

Today, the Aspen Institute seminar programs include sessions such as Global Values and Leadership and Pursuing the Good Life.

In 2011, the Institute hired Ronald Schiller, who was at the time a fundraising executive with National Public Radio. Schiller became the center of a widely publicized controversy when a secretly recorded tape was released. In the recording Schiller meets with a pair of self-described Muslims who claim to wish to donate money to NPR because they approve of the political slant of its coverage. Schiller is recorded calling members of the Tea Party "seriously racist, racist people", characterizing the group as "fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move", and saying that NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding". Following the exposure, Schiller resigned from what was to be his post as the new director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program and Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Program, stating that "he does not feel that it's in the best interests of the Aspen Institute for him to come work ".