Abstract

"Where did the Humanities Go? Humanizing Adult Education for Management at the University of Chicago’s Startup of the Aspen Institute and for the Public in Harvard University’s Origins with the Ikeda Center"

Kenneth Kimura, Harvard University (kck371@mail.harvard.edu)

Abstract

Background: For fifty years, the humanities crisis has preoccupied American higher education scholars who contentiously debate the loss of their once lofty status. The decline and reversing it overshadows the question of where else the humanities have gone during the rise and fall, obscuring what this article argues are subtle but important shifts to adult education experiments for management and young professionals outside campus.

Purpose: Analyzing the University of Chicago’s startup of the Aspen Institute and Harvard University’s relationship with the Ikeda Center, this article demonstrates: (1) The central position of humanities when founding these universities (2) The origins of humanistic missions they respectively share with the Aspen Institute and Ikeda Center (3) The methods by which Aspen and Ikeda create and spread humanities knowledge (4) The humanistic objectives for management and young professionals and how they relate to the public purpose of citizenship in a worldwide context.

Design: A comparative intellectual history of universities founding institutes across different decades.

Findings and Conclusions: Post-WWII management education in Aspen reunified western humanities, fusing Germanic and Anglo-American traditions. Yet, it later evolved policymaking knowledge for managers giving rise to a neoliberal ethos of globalized citizenship recasting the public good of freedom via markets. After the Cold War, eastern humanities in Buddhist humanism and American Transcendentalism embraced through religious pluralism to promote global citizenship at Ikeda. Western humanities traveled elite managerial routes toward technocratic policy conferences and research. Eastern humanities started with elite conferencing and publishing shifting to adult education dialogues for young professionals. A post-WWII neoliberal market agenda with a legacy in Aspen contributed to ending a Cold War but also a post-Cold War era evoking backlash upon which eastern humanities thinking for academic elites opened populist fronts of global citizenship based directly on humanistic world peace rather than peace via western business.