Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
For two of the past three years, the Conference on World Affairs has been the target of protests by a small group of women calling themselves, among other things, Women in Support of Castration.
The women are deeply offended by the CWA program, which lists the people who chair panels, regardless of gender, as “chairmen.” They don’t care for the CWA’s logo, either–a famous Da Vinci drawing of an anatomically correct male.
To express their displeasure, the women have disrupted panels by exposing their breasts and chanting slogans, to the puzzlement and occasional cheers of the international crowd. They have held topless press conferences, urging the “castration” of sexist language while wearing plastic penises on their noses.
A stickler for proper English, Higman insists that “chairman” is an acceptable term for both genders and cites several authorities for its use. He rejects the term “chair”–“I’m not a piece of furniture”–and abhors the neologism “chairperson.” (On occasion he refers to himself as “Higperson,” just to tweak the sensibilities of the politically correct.) No matter how many angry women disrobe, he’s not about to reconsider the conference terminology.
“What you would be doing is succumbing to a fringe group,” he says. “When I was chairman of my department, I hired more women in one department than any other chairman in the University of Colorado. More women. Vastly more. And I still call them women. I don’t call them `wo-people.’
“The English language should not disappear one word at a time, even because of political movements. We’re being anti-PC, violently and steadfastly, and proud of it.”
Although the bare-breasted protests made the pages of Playboy, Higman dismisses them as inconsequential. After the last one, he says, “I went down the streets of Boulder, and women–age 22, 28, 34–would see me and come over and grab my hands. They don’t like these bitches, either! You’d be amazed, if you dug into it, the number of women who think the extreme feminists are making affection and love between men and women more difficult.”
Several female conference veterans see the protests in a different light. “It’s hard to do what they did,” says Toni Dewey, a former Motorola executive who served on the CWA steering committee before resigning after the 1991 protest. “When I first got involved with the committee, one of the first things I brought up was how come we were still calling people `chairmen’–it seemed so dated. Howard wouldn’t even discuss it.
“I persisted; I even brought in some books on the subject. Then this protest happened, and I could see their point of view so clearly.”
“Howard is a terrible, terrible sexist,” says Tracy Ehlers, who left the committee a few months after Dewey. “I’m not going to take issue with the logo, but I can’t tell you how many times I would bring up the `chairman’ issue at a meeting and would be huffily rebuffed, in a nasty way. He had made a decision, and that was it, period.”
One former participant says Higman called her “girlie”–a term he reportedly used in a conversation with the female police officer who arrested him in October. Higman says he’s “never used the word `girlie’ in my life.” He does, however, plead guilty to having called a young female staffer “dear” before being set straight.
The larger issue is not nomenclature but the degree to which women and minorities have a voice in Howard Higman’s house party. Despite increased efforts to recruit “new faces” for the panels, the number of women in the CWA hovers around 20 percent, and the percentage of black, Asian and Hispanic participants has been even lower. (Of the 97 speakers at the 1993 conference, 86 were white; only 19 were women.) “Gender and racial balance is a major issue,” Adam Hochschild says. “In 1992 I was on a panel about South Africa, which I’d just written a book about, and we were four white men and one white woman. I felt embarrassed.”
Hochschild says he conveyed his concern about the lack of minority participation to Higman on several occasions, to no avail. After eight straight years of invitations, Hochschild hasn’t been asked back to the CWA this year–an omission that may have something to do with his critical comments about the conference in a Daily Camera article a few months ago.
“You don’t invite someone to your house who wrote a letter to the newspaper saying you serve bad food,” Higman says.
The chairman argues that the CWA’s percentage of women participants has been higher than CU’s percentage of female faculty and administrators for many years, and that the conference is “terribly diverse”–albeit not in the ways people expect; for example, two years ago an economist from Ghana stunned the crowd by asserting that several African nations had been better off under colonial rule.
The most telling numbers, however, have to do with the audience. According to the CWA’s own estimates, the 1990 conference drew approximately 28,000 people. The total was 23,000 in 1992, and just slightly more than 19,000 last spring–a dropoff of nearly a third in four years. And many of those in attendance, conference organizers admit, are not students but “townies,” including a substantial contingent of senior citizens.
“Have you been to the conference lately?” asks Ehlers. “You feel like you’re visiting your mother in Florida.”
“You tend to see the same faces, and you don’t see the kind of student participation that should be there,” says Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, a former astronaut and a fixture at the conference for more than a decade.
Schweickart says he complained about the “ingrown” nature of the conference, “but nothing’s changed. I ultimately decided it wasn’t worth my time. It’s not that productive.”
Schweickart met his wife, defense analyst Nancy Ramsey, at the conference several years ago. Ramsey says she won’t go back, either. “The people who came to speak on foreign and military affairs were always repeats–including myself,” she says. “They were charming and interesting people, but it was like reading an old newspaper. Why would students come back to hear the same thing over and over?
“Frequently at panels you’d see maybe fifteen kids. You have to ask, why is the university putting money into that?”
Higman says today’s students are more interested in padding their resumes than they are in world affairs. Other committee members talk about the job offers students have collected from mingling with conferees.
“It’s a precious open forum between students and the community and the world,” insists Julianne Steinhauer, a committee member who is also active in alumni affairs.
So why aren’t students turning out in droves? “Most of the students don’t even know about it because the faculty’s not involved any more,” contends Jane Butcher, a longtime CWA organizer whose involvement in the event dates back to her own student days. “You need faculty from the major departments to get students involved. That’s how it worked in the 1960s.”
Butcher, Ehlers, Dewey and Maxine Hitchcock, a longtime friend of the Higmans, all say they left the committee because they were frustrated by Higman’s autocratic manner and his resistance to new faces and fresh ideas. And they claim the chairman’s conduct has cost the CWA the support of the very people who could rejuvenate the event: the CU professors, many of whom used to require that students attend the conference.
“You won’t find many active faculty on the committee, because they can’t stand Howard,” says Ehlers. “It became a waste of my time to go in there and have to listen to him rant and rave for an hour and a half and then try to get in my list of participants in the last ten minutes of the meeting.”
“It was one thing to be yelled at all the time,” Hitchcock sighs. “It didn’t bother me because I know him so well. If I got mad, I got up and walked out of the room. But it’s frustrating not to have a real give-and-take in a committee situation.”
Butcher says Higman repeatedly shot down her efforts to bring in new speakers and new “hyphens”–CWA lingo for that friend of a friend who can persuade some sought-after speaker to forgo the usual honoraria and come to Boulder. “Two years ago I had a hyphen to Anita Hill,” she says. “Howard told me nobody was interested, and wouldn’t discuss it any further. When I tried to bring it up before the committee, he told me to shut up and get out.”
Higman vehemently disputes Butcher’s account. “I would have adored having Anita Hill here,” he says, and proceeds to detail his own efforts to contact her. It’s an “illusion” that he runs the conference, he adds; as he sees it, his role is “keeping people out of each other’s playpens…so that they all get to talk without interfering with each other.”
CWA meetings have “the pretext of being very democratic,” Spenser Havlick says. “You’re always encouraged to give other ideas, views that are different from Howard’s. But maybe your ideas aren’t always taken seriously.”
But then, Havlick admits, his own attendance has been spotty. “I can’t afford the time those meetings consume,” he says. “They’re extremely long, they’re rich in anecdotes, folklore–kind of like an eclectic seminar in current and past events.”
One of Higman’s most protracted battles with the committee was over a novelist who appeared on CWA panels for several years despite the fact that many organizers considered him an arrogant boor. Hitchcock says the committee voted unanimously to not invite him back, but Higman refused; he says he persuaded the committee to give the speaker another chance. Higman finally “disinvited” the writer after he supposedly abused a host’s hospitality by bringing home a surprise playmate–an example, Higman says, of the chairman bowing to the will of the committee.
Higman concedes that it’s painful to not invite back old friends. To its credit, though, the CWA has had a high rate of turnover recently. For the past two years, more than a third of the participants have been new attendees–a considerable improvement in the conference’s “rowdy-to-dowdy” ratio.
Still, the clashes have taken their toll. Higman speaks darkly of past and current committee members intriguing against him. He blames the CWA’s image problems on efforts by Jane Butcher and her “gang” to stage a coup. “Jane wants to run the conference,” he says.
Butcher denies it. “There’s been absolutely no plotting,” she says. “Whoever has spoken to the chancellor has spoken to him on their own.”
Butcher believes Higman should step down in favor of a younger, tenured CU professor. “I think Howard’s ideas, his basic organization for the conference, are wonderful,” she says. “They’re still valid today. He needs to follow them.” The meeting of the steering committee is drawing to a close, and the guest list for the 1994 Conference on World Affairs is filling up rapidly. Members have announced a string of acceptances and rejections; Higman is urging them to whittle down their tally of potential invitees. To kick things off, he crosses out several names on his own list.
But there is a glitch. “I have done something embarrassing,” the chairman says.
“Not again,” someone groans. Laughter fills the room.
Higman beams. “I think I invited some people I had no authority to invite,” he says.
Two old friends, a scholarly couple from back East, called him the other day, and he wound up inviting them to the conference. Higman asks the committee to grant him “retroactive approval.” Most of the people in the room seem inclined to let Higman have his way. But Spenser Havlick isn’t pleased. The male half of this package deal happens to be a player in Havlick’s field, environmental design, and his “substantive contribution” to a panel is questionable.
“He has tea with everyone, trying to get to conferences instead of doing good work,” Havlick says.
Higman’s face hardens. “Is there an issue you want to vote on?” he asks.
Havlick demurs. It’s not an issue, it’s a question of “process,” the unauthorized invitation of somebody who hasn’t been to the conference in years.
Higman wants to bring the matter to a vote. “I’m perfectly capable of being instructed to disinvite him,” he snaps. “I move that I be told to tell him he can’t come.”
The motion is seconded, but there are only five votes in favor of it. The scholarly couple is added to the guest list.
Later that afternoon, Higman sits in the den of the house his father built and savors his victory. The gathering twilight surrounds him; the gas fireplace casts flickers of light and shadow across his broad, well-lined face.
“Did you see that?” he asks. “I had to make a motion that I be fired.”
It didn’t happen, of course. As Higman sees it, the regents will overrule Corbridge and save the conference–because it’s still a good investment for the university. CU’s budget is only a fraction of the actual cost of mounting such an event; in fact, Higman argues that the CWA brings millions to the campus in the form of donated services and waived honoraria.
“This conference has brought the university $6,000,000 in the last six years,” he says. “Nothing else has. What regent would want to answer to the public if they abolished it?”
But there’s another scenario, the one outlined in Corbridge’s letter. After this spring’s affair, the lights will go out. The party will be over. If the CWA returns at all, it will be as a smaller, more tightly controlled event, with a lineup of speakers more in keeping with the times. And with somebody else playing ringmaster.
“Howard’s given a lot to the community and the university, and the sadness is he can’t leave a real legacy,” Jane Butcher says. “If he’d given up a little bit, he could have kept much, much more.”
There already is a legacy of sorts, though. Almost all of the conference’s panels and speeches have been preserved on reel-to-reel tape: thousands and thousands of hours of measured debate and virulent argument, an impressive archive for a future Howard Higman Library. Here is a time capsule of what thinkers thought about war, art, sex and death in the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies–back in the era when talk mattered, before CNN and C-SPAN and MTV made the notion of “bringing the world to Boulder” seem quaint.
What Howard Higman wants is not a legacy, but three more years.
“I want to be here for the semicentennial,” he says. “I want to be the chairman of the Fiftieth Conference on World Affairs.”
end of part 2
