Pros
The higher up the food chain you are, the more lavish the salary—and we're talking $$$$. The health insurance is outstanding and you pay little for it. Swanky offices. Some lovely, brilliant colleagues who care deeply about the missions of their respective programs. Interesting lectures and meetings.
Cons
Aspen should rename itself the Aspen Institute for Fancy Hobnobbing—at least that would be honest. I knew something was very wrong when someone boasted during a new employee orientation about Aspen having a fundraising dinner at Monticello, glossing over the part where Jefferson owned slaves. This from an organization that claims to prioritize DEI. What I saw at Aspen was a lot of hypocrisy. Leaders who said they supported equity but denied raises to overworked younger staffers while they made over $250k a year. Black support staff berated by entitled white directors for doing monthly food purges from the communal fridges that were announced days in advance. Stories of tyrannical program executive directors abusing their staff were legion. A ridiculous structure that has programs paying 18% of their budgets to the larger institute for services like IT, communications, and financial integrity, departments that were derided for being slow and ineffective. Entire weeks passed when printers used by a lot of people did not work! Aspen leaders who pat each other on the back for a NYT story about Business Roundtable compelling companies to not solely focus on shareholder value, when the rest of the world made that argument five years before. Then the story WaPo broke about Aspen accepting SBA money when Michael Freaking Bloomberg is on its board! Only after a PR crisis unfolded did Aspen return the money. Shameful. And those interesting meetings? Lots of ideas thrown about, but whatever comes of them is anyone's guess. It's like Davos: a bunch of "thought leaders" and plutocrats gather to discuss big problems and fool themselves into thinking they're doing something meaningful. Aspen is all talk, no action. It's been trying to rebrand itself to counter this perception, but anyone with half a brain knows better. No one outside rarefied think tank circles knows what Aspen does and even within these circles, not many take the institute seriously. Aspen doesn't have the policy chops of Brookings or the media savvy and influence of AEI. It was distressing to see intelligent people I liked wrongly believe their work had any impact. Sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind. Read what Anand Giridharadas has written about Aspen; he is absolutely correct.