Conference on World Affairs

History

The Conference was founded in 1948 by Howard Higman, a professor of Sociology at the University. He ran the conference until he retired, shortly before his death in 1995. The Conference resumed in 1996, and was directed for 16 years by Professor James Palmer, currently by John Griffin.

Content and panelists

The conference started out as a forum on international affairs, but, under Higman, morphed into a discussion on a multitude of topics. 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. Half of a panel typically consists of experts on that panel's subject, and half with people having no professional connection to the topic, who offer fresh perspectives and insight. Only a one-line topic for the panel is announced two or three weeks before the conference. The panelists are given no other direction or guidance about what they should say.

Each year the conference hosts over 100 panelists, and conducts over 200 sessions. All sessions 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 at the 62nd Conference on World Affairs (in April, 2010) was estimated to be over 92,000. Numerous distinguished people have served as panelists over the years, including Patch Adams, Betty Dodson, Buckminster Fuller, Adam Hochschild, Arianna Huffington, Andy Ihnatko, Molly Ivins, Henry Kissinger, Paul Krugman, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Yitzhak Rabin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Studs Terkel, and Ted Turner.

2015-16 Controversy

In 2015, the Conference on World Affairs was in the local news surrounding the appointment of a new faculty director, John Griffin. This included the former community chair, Jane Butcher, announcing that she would no longer participate in the conference.

Two opinion pieces were written by Daily Camera editorial page editor Dave Krieger. They were titled, "Now that it's broken, how to fix the CWA" and "Coup d'etat at CWA". Krieger’s second editoral (previously linked) is a response to the guest opinion by CU-Boulder’s chancellor, Phil DiStefano, written in support of the CWA’s new director John Griffin.

Since that time and as DiStefano promised in his editorial, a committee was formed in the summer of 2015 and tasked with the development of a strategic plan for the new Conference on World Affairs. CWA director emeritus Jim Palmer wrote this guest opinion for the Camera in response to the assertion that the CWA had never had a strategic plan.

In addition to some volunteer leaders leaving the Conference, some CWA staff also departed. Staff members (Bryan New, Casey Koehler and Piper Jackson-Sevy) resigned throughout the period of November 2014 to April 2015. Until recently the one remaining staff member, Maura Clare, was on administrative leave since April, while human resources issues were “under investigation” by CU’s Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC). Maura Clare is no longer an employee, as of December 2015.

In the fall of 2015, Stephanie Rudy was elected by the volunteers to replace Jane Butcher. She and faculty director John Griffin assembled a committee, made up of both veteran volunteers and new ones, to prepare the 2016 conference. The line-up for the 2016 conference was announced in March 2016 participant list, and includes both veteran participants and new ones, as has been the past practice. The 2016 conference will be conducted April 4–8.

The CWA is governed by a board selected by both community volunteers and by the university administration, and includes volunteers, faculty members, and students [1].

Cinema Interruptus

One of the events of the conference is the Cinema Interruptus, hosted for many years by film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert selected one movie and showed it late afternoon at the beginning of the week, in a normal, uninterrupted way. Then, for a total of 8 hours spread over the following four afternoons, the movie was dissected almost on a frame-by-frame basis. Ebert, or anybody else in the audience, could pause the movie at any point, and comment about any aspect: plot points, acting or directing techniques, camera movement, frame composition, etc.

Roger Ebert moderated Cinema Interruptus from 1969 to 2006. In 2008, he shared an explanation on the program's beginnings:

"This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."

I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them. A couple of years later, when I started doing shot-by-shots at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, the conference founder, Howard Higman, described this process as "democracy in the dark." Later he gave it a name: Cinema Interruptus. Perhaps it sounds grueling, but in fact it can be exciting and almost hypnotic. At Boulder for more than 30 years, I made my way through a film for two hours every afternoon for a week, and the sessions had to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate attendance that approached a thousand."

While Ebert was recovering from cancer surgeries in 2007 and 2008, RogerEbert.com founding editor and CWA participant, Jim Emerson, stepped in to moderate during his absence. Ebert returned for 2009 and 2010, but mainly as a contributor, using his computer as his voice in order to participate. In 2011, Ebert announced that he would not be returning, and Emerson would carry on as moderator.

The Cinema Interruptus film-viewing process started in 1975 and continues to the present.