"It got prestigious to be a speaker," Higman explains. "We didn't expect that."
In 1953 the CWA scheduled a series of panels attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy. Then-CU President Ward Darley nervously summoned Higman, who refused to organize a "balanced" panel about something as odious as McCarthyism. The chairman won the argument, and the CWA's freedom from institutional censorship was assured. Higman went on to debate beauty-pageant queen Marilyn Van Derbur in his classroom on the evils of J. Edgar Hoover--and earned a fat FBI file for his trouble.
Although the CWA still focuses on politics and international affairs, over the years its agenda has expanded to embrace the arts, pop culture and more. Featured speakers have included Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Nader, Henry Kissinger, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Huey Newton and, more recently, media superstars such as Ted Turner and Roger Ebert. (Ebert, who received an honorary degree from CU for his 25 years of CWA participation, stages a week-long film seminar; he's also found himself on panels about masturbation and national security.)
But it was the obscure and not-yet-discovered, as much as the famous, that made the CWA such an offbeat free-for-all: the street poets debating NATO generals on The Bomb, the pagan priestesses and laugh therapists knocking heads with ex-CIA spooks and publishing tycoons. One year Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys showed up on a panel on the Middle East.
"In other conferences, this kind of stuff goes on in the bar," says Higman. "You read your paper, and if you have any excitement, it's in the hotel room, not on stage. We try to put the excitement on stage."
Over time, though, the CWA became known for the off-stage excitement, too--the lavish house parties for visiting geniuses, the clubby camaraderie among veteran panelists. Columnist Molly Ivins called the event "Howard Higman's house party," and a platoon of hard-drinking British journalists sang its praises. "I have arrived back at my host's house on all fours smelling like a pub carpet," boasted Simon Hoggart in the New Statesman & Society not long ago.
Higman once estimated that the CWA was responsible for more than a dozen marriages and an equal number of divorces. It was the kind of event, one visitor noted, at which "people do the wrong things and fall in love with the wrong people and get drunk and disgrace themselves."
The notion of a boozy intellectuals' frat party may have seemed daring in the 1950s and even the 1960s; by the late 1980s, however, in certain quarters the CWA was regarded as a ghastly anachronism. Some of the complaints had to do with the event's political tilt (which was either too left-wing or too mainstream) and the preponderance of white male speakers on a campus saturated with the new orthodoxy of "diversity" and "multiculturalism." Others concerned the sheer unwieldiness of the conference, which now features upwards of a hundred speakers on more than 150 panels, many of them droning on simultaneously.
In 1990, acting on a request by Chancellor Corbridge, an ad hoc CU faculty committee prepared a lengthy report on the status of the CWA. While lauding the conference for its "rich history," the report ticked off a host of criticisms and urged new blood on the aging steering committee, stronger efforts to involve faculty and students, more diversity among panelists and a sharper focus to the event.
Chairman Higman, the report noted, was "not particularly sympathetic toward change, especially planned change," and had resisted efforts to groom a successor for his job. "It may be that the formula depends to a fatal extent on the personality of a single individual," the report stated, "...[but] we are unwilling to watch CWA merely muddle along to its eventual demise."
Higman thanked the committee for its efforts and promised to explore several of its minor recommendations. He says now that the report was "godawful," based on a biased and far too narrow sampling of faculty and CWA attendees.
"That report has no legitimacy whatsoever," he says. "I doubt if Jim Corbridge has even read it."
Corbridge didn't respond to Westword's requests for comment. But Spenser Havlick, who served on the ad hoc committee, notes that the chancellor cited the report's recommendations--and the CWA's failure to implement them--in his letter terminating CU's support.
"Howard has courageously tried to defend the status quo," Havlick says. "I think he believes he's right, that a change is a capitulation to a passing fancy. But in changing times, we need to be sensitive to the community and the university."
Whatever the report's validity, there's no mistaking the harsh and even savage tone of the anonymous comments solicited from faculty members. Asked about the value of the conference to them and to the university, their responses ranged from mildly laudatory ("Keep up the good work!") to poisonous:
"Has little to do with me."
"Very high bullshit level."
"It's a joke and a bore."
"Too much junk."
"I would like to see it discontinued and the money given to more worthy, scholarly activities."
"Sack Higman and begin again."
"Get rid of Higman."
end of part 1
