Anchoring Humanities in Business

Business is a deeply humanistic activity. At their best, businesses address human needs, train and develop people, and provide good and meaningful work. Businesses contribute in meaningful ways to addressing our biggest social issues—climate change, healthcare, economic inequality and the inequality of opportunities.

From June 17th to June 20th, , The Aspen Institute, The Business of Teaching and CBS will be hosting the Aspen Undergraduate Consortium, an international debate event where 120 educators and deans from 40 academic institutions from the EU and the US will be participating. Their focus is to strengthen education in both the liberal arts and business, by focusing  on curricular and co-curricular approaches that integrate the two. In other words, one of the main questions for the debate will be; how can students make sense of the world and their place in it, and prepare themselves to engage responsibly in the life of their times? And how can new approaches to teaching contribute to a combination of the liberal arts  and business, so that students with career aspirations in business can be better equipped to make high quality business decisions?

Over 2.5 days, the aim is to inspire teaching faculty and deans to innovate in the classroom by sharing practical, “state of the art” approaches to blending the liberal arts and business.

Motivation

Since 2016, Copenhagen Business School has deepened this work by hosting The Business of Teaching - a series of course-development workshops for faculty who are seeking to bring humanistic and artistic perspectives to business problems.

The opportunity to host the 2018 Aspen Consortium is the culmination so far of a longstanding investment on the side of CBS in the agenda. This engagement began in 2012, spearheaded by the HoDs of MPP, ICM and DBP and has involved academic directors and leading teaching faculty from MPP/ICM (now MSC)/DBP. In this manner, it has paved the way for the broader CBS engagement that was the hope from the beginning, and which can now be fully realized with the reputational impact of bringing all these great schools to CBS. The connection with the Aspen Institute remains a strong example of CBS’s efforts at forging links between North America and Northern Europe.

Details

The event will take place June 17-20, 2018. We will open at 6pm on Sunday, June 17th and close at 2pm on Wednesday, June 20th.

For more information, contact associate professor Rasmus Johnsen rj.mpp@cbs.dk