Intellectual Gab Fest a Tribute to Iconoclasm : Ideas: World Affairs Conference gathers an eclectic group of thinkers to ponder concepts, debate issues and arrive at no conclusions.

Unlike President Bush, heiress Karen Baum believes that broccoli is valuable, as desirable as something else that is green and nutritious--money.

But too many people equate wealth with the size of their bank accounts, which are really only abstract numbers, Baum told a seminar here the other day.

“There’s more importance placed in the symbol of the money than the tuna or the broccoli or the potatoes it can buy,” the 27-year-old philanthropist, jazz singer, poet and pottery collector said. “I am a materialist, I’d rather convert money into pottery.”

Baum, 27, came to the World Affairs Conference at the University of Colorado here this week, along with a few other scions of family fortunes, to express her opinions on myths about money and what it means to be rich.

The North Carolina resident and her fellow inheritors were among about 100 intellectuals, writers, artists, academics, architects, musicians, critics, social activists, bankers, businessmen and journalists who paid their way here for the 43rd installment of a conference that has become a Rocky Mountain monument to iconoclasm--and, in some cases, flagrant provocation.

Even before a word had been uttered, the Rocky Mountain News had already been provoked into editorializing Sunday that the conference was an exercise in “scorched earth” by “academics, pundits, media hounds and other questionable members of society.” The newspaper also grumped that “it appears that a great deal of intellectual assault and battery will be committed--much of it after thoughtful premeditation.” It singled out for special mention the subjects on which Baum and her colleagues would speak--two seminars entitled “Robin Hood Was Right” and “Growing Up Rich and What We Did About It.”

Wrapping up today, the conference also offered participants and audiences 130 other two-hour seminars on topics ranging from “Capitalism Gone Berserk” to “Robots’ Rights” to “Support Groups as the New Religions.” For the globally minded there have been a plethora of panels on communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe and the import of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union.

That modest selection only hints at the all-encompassing, free-wheeling, free-thinking, contentious, happy, intense, nonstop nature of a gathering that contains elements of a lecture series and encounter group, a barroom argument and a weeklong party.

Beginning daily at 10 a.m. and continuing to 6 p.m.--lunch break optional--participants, students and residents could partake of their choice of panel discussions followed by question-and-answer sessions that were sometimes heated. For instance, an exploration of rap music reportedly concluded with university students accusing panelists, all of non-rap-generation age, of being out of touch.

Meanwhile, Baum--whose fortune derives from her grandfather’s success as an investment counselor--and her cohorts were causing their own share of consternation with views of money that sometimes dumbfounded their audience and fellow speakers. Though she is an activist who donates money to projects such as low-income housing, Baum said one of her missions in life is speaking out on behalf of “nice rich people.” She added, “I think if people were honest about what it’s like to be rich, there wouldn’t be such a mad rush to get there.”

Baum’s comments earned a riposte from fellow panel member Wendy Watriss, a photographer and co-founder of a Texas fund that helps grass-roots organizations. “You can’t be rich with impunity,” Watriss said. “It doesn’t do society any good that there are nice rich people.”

A woman in the audience who said “getting food out of dumpsters was how I kept myself in school,” expressed incomprehension of Baum’s blithe attitude about money. “What is that? I don’t understand that,” she said. Another listener expressed similar feelings after the seminar had ended. “It was real uncomfortable for me to stay in there,” he said. “I don’t think I can go back (to another meeting that included Baum).”

Paul DuPont Haible, who said he inherited $500,000 at age 21, told the same audience that he and others like him represent a growing number of people with inherited wealth who are socially concerned and want to give a portion of their money to activist causes. Haible, 40, who is on the staff of San Francisco’s Vanguard Public Foundation, said he has given away about half of his capital to various causes, including his own attempt to found a halfway house for released prisoners.

“If I had $5 million, I know I’d be real busy passing that money around . . . I know a lot of people who need access to cash to do a lot of things,” said Haible, one of many heirs to the DuPont fortune.

In their way, Haible and Baum appeared to symbolize an unstated theme at the conference--dissatisfaction with the Reagan era and its perceived emphasis on getting and spending, and an attempt to define, however cloudily, what comes next.

“We’re not on the same timetable as Eastern Europe but we’re dealing with a system that’s kind of hollow,” Haible said. “We need a new infrastructure in place so that when the system comes tumbling down we don’t have chaos.”

But veteran conference members stressed that much of the attraction of the meeting is its seeming anarchy. That anarchy is advanced by the calculated device of loading panels with three or four of the most disparate people imaginable--for example, the panel “Capitalism Gone Berserk” included a radio talk show host, an attorney, a magazine public relations executive and an investment banker. Sometimes panel members had to speak completely off the cuff, partly because they had been drafted only minutes before the session began. Such was the fate of Yuri Zamoshkin, a Soviet expert on U.S. affairs who was hastily thrown on a panel titled “American Writing as Seen From Abroad.” Zamoshkin used the opportunity to attack America’s reading preoccupation with Cold War thrillers, specifically books by “The Hunt for Red October” author Tom Clancy.

The conference is “an improvisational theater of the mind” and “the least focused thing that I’ve ever gone to,” said June T. Golden, communications director of Family Circle magazine who has participated for the last five years. The gathering’s chief product, she added, is “a whole lot of spillage,” including articles, ideas and personal connections generated by its intellectual collisions and inspirations.

And that’s the point.

“We do not intend to arrive at a solution or an answer or to come up with a proposal for anything,” explained conference founder Howard Higman, a university sociologist. The conference’s purpose is to provide a forum for ideas, to allow audiences to “observe intellectuals debating issues in public” and to “help people form their own opinions” about current events and contemporary issues, Higman said.

The conference began in the late 1940s as a largely local forum about the United Nations, Higman said, but has grown into its current highly diversified state with participants from around the country and the world. In the past, it has attracted the likes of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and playwright Arthur Miller. Higman recalled that while Miller was in town he kept getting calls from a “Miss Baker,” who turned out to be Marilyn Monroe, whom he later married.

But despite its growth in size and reputation, the conference is still a shoestring operation. Those invited must pay their own way to Boulder. Once here, participants are housed by residents who are responsible for serving breakfast and dinner. The university provides lunch, an ample supply of coffee and the lecture halls and ballrooms for the presentations.

This week it is taking place against a backdrop of students hurrying to class and leafleting for a student government election, most oblivious to the gesticulating, garrulous conference participants. Indeed, most of those invited to the conference seemed entirely unaware of the charms of early spring in the Rockies--an attitude no doubt helped by the leaden skies, occasional rain and infrequent pellets of snow that defined the week’s weather.

But Golden, for one, said she was aware of the contrast between the potentially idyllic setting and the enclosed environment of the conference. “We come to Boulder and drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, eat sugar doughnuts and talk,” she said.

As might be expected, there were a few skeptics even in this capital of idealism.

For A. Robert Lee, senior lecturer in American studies and literature at the University of Kent in Great Britain, the gathering is a contradiction in terms.

“A world affairs conference in Boulder, Colo.,” he said with a shrug, suggesting that this university town near Denver is not the center of the universe, this week or any other. His displeasure with the conference’s title, however, did not stop Lee from giving spirited presentations at several sessions on literature and politics, in which he deplored his country’s colonial past. One consequence of colonialism, he noted, is the rise of a post-colonialism literature that is unflattering to the former rulers.

Citing Salman Rushdie, the author of “Satanic Verses” who has been under a Muslim death threat for more than a year, and other minority British writers, Lee said, “If you have had an empire, it will come back to give you an image of yourself that you don’t particularly want.”

Nor was Baum, who would not discuss specifics of her fortune, intimidated by the negative reaction she sometimes received. Saying that she believes American society needs widespread social and economic reforms, she asserted: “The whole society is sick. Everybody suffers from it at different levels of financial security.”

And that in the end, may be a unstated product of the conference: Memorable, trenchant, possibly infuriating observations from people from a wide variety of backgrounds, remarks that stand out from the gabbling blur of talk, laughter and smoky haze that enveloped Boulder this week.