COMMENTARY : PUTTING OUR MOUTHS WHERE OUR MINDS ARE

The unique meeting of the minds here has been called the world’s greatest think tank. Or, as movie critic Roger Ebert puts it, in a switch on Thorstein Veblen, “the leisure of the theory class.”

Ebert has taken a week off in April every year for 19 years in order to attend the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, which just had its 40th annual conclave. It brings together more than 100 men and women--ambassadors and architects, educators and economists and editors, movie makers and musicians, scientists and sociologists--to exchange ideas both informally and at some 200 panel discussions, lectures or debates.

We can all be linked in ways that are only revealed under such rare and stimulating conditions. Subjects vary; they may be lightweight (“Upwardly Mobile Cuisine”), cryptic (“Television Movies--AIDS, Incest & Drugs”), provocative (“The Resurgent Condom”) or as cerebral as a consideration of global survival.

The conference was conceived by Howard Higman, 71, a Boulder-born professor of sociology who recently retired from the University of Colorado but continues to mastermind the event. Higman and his 31-member committee invite guests who are expected to take pleasure in meeting not simply counterparts in their own areas but a broad range of concerned people.

The university does not pay participants to attend the conference. They or their employers pay the fare, and they are not reimbursed for taking part in the sessions. Instead of staying in hotels, all are billeted at a local home.

“We try to get people with many interests,” said Elizabeth Weems, who has been with the conference since its inception. “It’s more stimulating for people to become involved in topics with which they are not normally associated.”

If you are not taking part in a certain session at a given time, you may be torn between looking in on, say, 10 meetings at 2 p.m. or a dozen more at 4 p.m.

Typically, one afternoon--when I was busy discussing “The Uses and Abuses of the English Language” with such fellow panelists as Christopher Bigsby, professor of American Studies at a university in Norwich, England--I was unable to attend any of the following sessions:

“Third World Development--Women as a Force of Change,” with, among others, Maureen Bunyan, the eloquent co-anchor of “Eyewitness News” at WUS in Washington; “Things to Come: Utopias and Dystopias” with such discussants as Carl Hodges, a key figure in the building of the Biosphere in the Arizona desert (where eight volunteers will be sealed inside for two years to determine the feasibility of manned space bases); “Surviving as a Musician,” with composer Johnny Mandel and composer/saxophonist Bob Wilber, and other sessions dealing with the Democratic Party, the media (“Is TV a Public Service?”), college athletics, chemical warfare, education (with Peola Butler Dews, whose main speaking assignment was on “The Psychopoetry of Black America”), architecture and the Constitution.

Thus, Mandel, in addition to taking part in several music panels, also was on hand as a speaker on “Corporate Use and Misuses of the Media,” on “Ethics in Business” and on “The Trend Toward Teen-Age Movies.”

Ebert, in addition to offering a daily series of analytical examinations of the Robert Altman film “Three Women” with extensive Q&A; sessions in the large Macky Auditorium, spoke at smaller classes entitled “What I Want to Do When I Grow Up” and “The Role of Sound Radio and Serious Writing” ( sound radio is the British term for radio as opposed to TV).

On “Civil Rights and the Rights of Blacks,” one of my assigned sessions, the panelists included LaDonna Harris, the president of Americans for Indian Opportunity, and Col. Robert Dews, U.S. Army (retired), husband of Peola Dews, who tried to convince us that his Army experiences proved that the opportunities for blacks are now better in the military than in civilian life.

The discussions attracted audiences (admission was free) of local citizens, conference participants and students in varying proportions. Nowhere was this more evident than at the “Is Rock and Roll Dead?” panel, for which teen-agers showed up in droves.

The panel’s composition was hardly ideal. It included Bob Wilber, who began with a two-word answer--”No, unfortunately”--and proceeded to state that the music industry’s profit motive is behind the entire rock movement. The young crowd didn’t seem to relate either to him or to Sally Fay, a member of a musical comedy trio who, though she dropped such names as Cyndi Lauper, Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen, was given to such oversimplifications as “People are still tapping their feet.”

It took Langdon Winner to get close to the nitty-gritty. Now a professor of political science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he is the author of “Autonomous Technology” but has written for Rolling Stone. Winner pointed out that artists such as Van Morrison and Paul Simon are neither primitive nor adolescent, but deplored the layers of artificial gimmicks on MTV and asked: “Where is the immediacy of performance? The pulse of rock is strong, but its heart is weak. Why are you not all bored to death and hungry for something new?”

Surprisingly, toward the end of the session, in reply to a question “Is rock ‘n’ roll stagnant?,” a show of hands revealed that the majority of the youthful audience agreed.

A larger crowd was on hand for the plenary session that brought together former astronaut Russell (Rusty) Schweickart and Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Alekandrovich Dzhanibekov. Both spoke, with a series of slides as illustration, about the space experience. The Soviet speaker brought a sense of drama to the evening with his poignant expression of hope that space technology can be used to benefit human beings. This appearance was the first in a series of lectures he and Schweickart will make on a round the world schedule.

Ironically, this discussion, their first together, was to have taken place at West Point, but the appearance there was canceled “for security reasons.” Security was no problem here, and the two men were able to socialize quite freely after their session.

That it was possible to present Schweickart and Dzhanibekov was characteristic of the initiative that seemed to pervade this conference, and typical of the resourcefulness of Prof. Higman. Born on this campus in 1915, he decided early in life that he wanted to learn everything. Among his special loves are cooking (“I couldn’t afford a French chef, so I decided I’d better be one”), architecture, gardening (for the same reason--he couldn’t afford an architect or a gardener), painting, arguing, drinking. As Elizabeth Weems said, “He’s like a combination of Barnum and Bailey, Julia Child and Leonardo da Vinci.” (Conference participants were given a Da Vinci logo button.)

Higman brought his brainchild into being because he sensed the need for intelligent outside influences in his own town. He joined the faculty in 1946 and began planning the conference the following year.

Now heavy set and walking with a cane, Higman may have slowed down physically, but his brain remains irreversibly active. Over the years he has enjoyed such debates as the one he moderated between Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt and, perhaps less happily, an encounter with Marilyn Van Derbur, a former Miss America, then a CU senior, who goaded him into an attack on the FBI. He was rewarded with a stinging rebuke in the Rocky Mountain News by J. Edgar Hoover.

The conference has been accused of a left-wing bias. At this session, in fact, the most provocative speech I heard was given by Andrew F. Neil, the youngish, Scottish-born editor of the Sunday Times of London, who declared that the event has become “a haven for right-thinking left-leaning minds” and indicted us for “spending too much time pining for a better yesterday.”

His accusations could not have been based on complete evidence, since there were so many sessions--on El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Ronald Reagan, nuclear war, national security and Muslim fanaticism, to name just a few--that no one listener could take it all in. Moreover, the political sessions, it seemed to me, provided heated disagreements among left, right and center.

When I tried to engage Neil in a discussion of his speech that evening at a party (the participants gathered at some local residence every evening), it was difficult to steer him toward the subject; he was too busy discussing the relative merits of Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, or expressing his admiration for the Miles Davis-Gil Evans “Sketches of Spain” album. The extent to which an interest in jazz has pervaded the thinking community amazed me. It seemed as though one could throw a dart at one of these parties and be reasonably sure of hitting a jazz fan.