(Lake Martin Specific)
111,163 messages
Updated 5/11/2024 6:02:40 PM
Lakes Online Forum
83,617 messages
Updated 5/10/2024 5:51:05 PM
Lakes Online Forum
5,193 messages
Updated 4/3/2024 3:47:36 AM
(Lake Martin Specific)
4,169 messages
Updated 4/16/2024 3:16:57 AM
Lakes Online Forum
4,169 messages
Updated 4/15/2024 11:05:05 PM
Lakes Online Forum
4,260 messages
Updated 3/24/2024 9:24:45 AM
Lakes Online Forum
2,976 messages
Updated 3/20/2024 11:53:43 PM
(Lake Martin Specific)
169 messages
Updated 5/31/2023 1:39:35 PM
Lakes Online Forum
98 messages
Updated 4/15/2024 1:00:58 AM
|
|
|
|
Name:
|
MartiniMan
- 
|
|
Subject:
|
The Aspen Institute
|
|
Date:
|
3/25/2009 10:34:29 PM
|
|
I am glad you suggested I google it as I frequent the Federalist Society. After doing some research it explains a lot about your warped views of what the founding fathers intended for this country. The institute was actually run for a time by a CNN exec. Trustees include Madeleine Albright (Halfbright as I like to call her), cosmetic moguls and Saudi Princes? Just who I want to learn about the Constitution from....not! They even go out of their way to say they are not liberal.....methinks thou doth protest too much.....especially with all their financial woes. That about says it all for any Conservative.
Mountain Air
CNN's head decamps for the Aspen Institute. So what's the Aspen Institute?
By MARK LASSWELL
Walter Isaacson's letter to colleagues on Jan. 13 came as a surprise, and not just for the obvious reason. He wrote that he was quitting as chief executive of the CNN News Group. That was news enough. But he added that he was quitting to become president of the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute?
Mr. Isaacson described his new job as "a perfect match because it offers a chance to do things I truly love or want to do: writing, exploring ideas, engaging in policy issues, and seeking solutions to social and international problems." Sounds nice enough.
But just as the former Time magazine managing editor found that his considerable skills weren't as well suited to the role of TV news executive as he might have imagined--Fox News Channel is now picking its teeth, having eaten CNN's lunch--the Aspen Institute could prove to be an awkward fit as well.
A place that describes itself as "a global forum for leveraging the power of leaders to improve the human condition" might seem ideal for a big-media refugee interested in pondering really big ideas. What the Aspen Institute may really require is less the author of "Kissinger: A Biography" than the sort of manager sought by many beleaguered nonprofit institutions nowadays: the glorified fundraiser and publicist.
Mr. Isaacson is taking over Aspen at a time when it faces ebbing interest in its programs, a straitened financial outlook and the aftermath of an interim president's rancorous departure last fall. That, plus the fact that when Mr. Isaacson's job news swept through the chattering class, the institute's reputation in Washington was so negligible that many chatterers were more likely to be familiar with the Aspen Institute of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Mr. Isaacson's new employer could probably do with a facelift. Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of America, founded the Aspen Institute in Colorado in 1950 as a gathering place for business leaders, artists and philosophers eager to contemplate society's underlying values. The institute's signature was, and remains, its summertime executive seminars, which are intended to inspire leadership by studying the works of, say, Aristotle, John Locke and Martin Luther King. And a little institute-sponsored river-rafting helps clear the cobwebs. Over the past half-century, Aspen has developed a second area of emphasis on policy, moved its base to Washington and opened offices in Berlin, Tokyo and elsewhere.
Certainly the institute has been able to attract big names to its board. Current trustees include Madeleine Albright, cosmetics mogul Leonard Lauder and Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. But despite the institute's heavy-hitting friends, it has seen happier times financially. In 2001, total revenue fell 29% from the year before, to $37 million from $52 million. Unaudited figures indicate that its net assets will drop for the second year in a row in 2002. Still, chief financial officer Amy Margerum says that trustees and funders "rallied" in 2002, "and I think they're going to rally even more with Mr. Isaacson onboard. The board's really excited about it."
What is all this money used for? Well, there are roundtables like "Comprehensive Community Initiatives." Or seminars like "Justice and Society." That seminar, the institute announces, "brings together participants from diverse backgrounds to discuss the meaning of justice and how a just society ought to deal with issues such as private conduct and public mores, the extent of entitlements, the breakdown of long-established hierarchies of race and gender"--among other things, of course. A policy program called "Ethical Globalization Initiative: A Human-Rights Based Approach to Globalization" seeks "to integrate human rights norms and standards into a more ethical globalization process and to support local and national human rights capacity building efforts."
Hard to believe, but despite that sort of rhetorical enticement, the institute's seminars ($7,500 per person for a week-long executive session) have lost some of their allure in recent years. Elmer Johnson, the former interim president, says one of his main jobs was rebuilding attendance when he took over in 1999: "Seminar enrollments had dropped off pretty precipitously," he says. "The picture was looking very bad." Mr. Johnson, a prominent Chicago lawyer, "abruptly resigned" in August, the Washington Post reported at the time, "amid mounting budget problems" and conflicts with the institute's board over his "decision to run the think tank from Chicago."
It's an indication of how little prominence the Aspen Institute has in Washington that the Post would call it a "think tank," as if it were a hotbed of research and publication like Brookings and Cato. News articles after Mr. Isaacson's announcement did the same thing. "Calling it a think tank is not the way to go," Mr. Isaacson says. "It's fundamentally an educational institution that promotes leadership based on values."
Despite what would appear to be a sobering budget and a need for the Aspen Institute to gets its message out at least well enough for reporters to know how to describe it, Mr. Isaacson is happy with the status quo. "You might have to raise the visibility in order to get more people to donate to it, if that's what you wanted, but that's not a need at the moment," he says. The "deep and loyal community" of Aspen supporters will insure its smooth running, he believes.
For the time being, then, the Aspen Institute will remain best-known for the role played by its 1,100-acre campus on the Wye river in Queenstown, Md., in two bittersweet episodes during the Clinton administration: as the site of the Wye accord reached by Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu in 1998 and as a posh holding pen for Elian Gonzalez during the Cuban child's adventure in the U.S. legal system three years ago. The Clintonian whiff of the place is in keeping with Aspen's reputation as a way-station for liberal wonks in resortwear.
Abigail Thernstrom, the author and U.S. civil-rights commissioner, found that during her service on the institute's Domestic Strategy Group in 1992-97, the make-up of the twice-yearly gatherings "was at least two-to-one liberal." Not to worry, though, Ms. Thernstrom says, because "I never had a sense that we were engaged in important work." Mr. Isaacson rejects the liberal label and says that Aspen is "bi-partisan and institutionally neutral, but tends to try to find resolutions based on balancing conflicting ideas and values." The institute's roots, he notes, are in "that sort of moderate Republican businessman type."
Mr. Isaacson may like the Aspen Institute pretty much just the way it is, but his predecessor expects that the place will change--for the better--under his stewardship. "It sounds to me," says Mr. Johnson, "like Walter Isaacson's going to bring a lot of magic to the plac
|
|
Reply
Back
Search
Off-Topic Forum
»
Alabama Lakes
»
Lake Martin
Login
|
Home
