Conference on World Affairs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (April 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

The Conference on World Affairs is hosted annually, around the second week of April, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. It was founded in 1948 by Howard Higman, a professor of Sociology at the University. He ran the conference with an iron hand until he retired, shortly before his death in 1995. The Conference resumed in 1996, and is currently directed by Professor James Palmer.^[1]

The conference started out as a forum on international affairs, but, under Higman's guidance and inspiration, quickly morphed into a discussion of Everything Under The Sun. The core of the conference consists of panel discussions, usually with 3-6 panelists, on topics such as music, art, literature, environmental activism, business, science, journalism, diplomacy, technology, spirituality, the film industry, pop culture, visual arts, politics, medicine, and human rights. Higman liked to populate the panels half with experts on that panel's subject, and half with brilliant people having no professional connection to the topic, who would thus provide fresh insights. Only a one-line topic for the panel is announced, 2 or 3 weeks before the conference. The panelists are given no other direction or guidance about what they should say.

Panelists travel to the conference at their own expense, and are paid no fees for coming. They are housed as guests in the homes of Boulder residents who volunteer to take them in, and are provided with meals for almost all the week.

Each year the conference hosts over 100 panelists, and conducts over 200 sessions. The panels (as well as the other events mentioned below) are free and open to the public, and are held in rooms varying in capacity according to anticipated popularity, from 50 seats to 2000. The total annual attendance of all the events is currently over 60,000. Numerous distinguished people have served as panelists over the years, including Patch Adams, Betty Dodson, Buckminster Fuller, Adam Hochschild, Arianna Huffington, Molly Ivins, Henry Kissinger, Paul Krugman, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Yitzhak Rabin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Studs Terkel, and Ted Turner.^[2]

In addition to the panels, there is a keynote plenary address kicking off the conference on Monday at 11:30 a.m., given by an especially distinguished guest. There is also a jazz concert Tuesday evening, performed by top-flight musicians who attend on the same basis as the panelists (and, in fact, also serve on the panels).^[3]

The most popular event of the conference is the Cinema Interruptus, hosted most years by film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert selects one movie and shows it late Monday afternoon, in a normal, uninterrupted way. Then, for a total of 8 hours spread over the following four afternoons, the movie is dissected almost on a frame-by-frame basis. Ebert, or anybody else in the audience, can pause the movie at any point, and comment about any aspect: plot points, acting or directing techniques, camera movement, frame composition, etc.

Ebert had attended every conference held from 1969 through 2006 and calls it the highlight of his year. However, due to his prolonged illness, he refrained from attending in 2007 and 2008, with Jim Emerson substituting as the Cinema Interruptus host.

Ebert has also been a highly enthusiastic participant in the conference panels. In one such panel in 1996, he formulated the Boulder Pledge not to purchase anything offered through email spam.