American Academy of Asian Studies

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

The American Academy of Asian Studies was a graduate level school founded in San Francisco in 1950 by the businessman Louis Gainsborough, who provided its primary funding, and Frederic Spiegelberg, a Stanford professor of Sanskrit and comparative religion who served as the Academy's director of studies. Its founding premise set it apart from conventional university religious studies departments: Asian philosophy and religion were taught as living paths to changed consciousness meant to be practiced, not as purely academic subjects to be studied from the outside, a distinction the Academy's founders treated as central to its whole approach rather than as an incidental difference in teaching style.

Alan Watts joined the faculty in 1951 at Spiegelberg's own invitation, teaching alongside figures including Haridas Chaudhuri and the painter Saburo Hasegawa. The Academy brought together scholars and practitioners in a combination American universities of the period rarely attempted, treating Zen, Vedanta and Taoism as traditions to be entered through direct study and practice rather than only catalogued from a lecturer's podium, an approach that drew students seeking a different relationship to Asian religious thought than a conventional seminary or university department offered.

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.