The Financial Crisis Alan Watts's Deanship Survived

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Alan Watts became the American Academy of Asian Studies's academic dean in 1953, a role he held until 1957, and it was in that capacity that he kept the school operating through a serious financial crisis in the mid 1950s, one severe enough that it might otherwise have closed the Academy a full decade before it eventually did close. His four years in the dean's chair sat at the center of the Academy's institutional survival through that stretch, a role distinct from his better known work as a public lecturer and writer on Asian religion.

The Academy did survive that 1950s crisis, but not the disagreement that followed a decade later: it closed in 1968 after an internal dispute over accreditation split its faculty and leadership. Haridas Chaudhuri's own departure from the closing Academy was not simply an ending. He went on to found the Cultural Integration Fellowship, which in time grew into the California Institute of Integral Studies, a school that today still traces its own institutional lineage back through the Academy that Gainsborough and Spiegelberg had founded eighteen years earlier. The 1968 closure therefore marks not the end of its approach to Asian religious study but its transmission, through Chaudhuri's own further institution building, into a school still teaching under a different name and a different founding generation today.