HOWARD HIGMAN,
ACADEMIC IMPRESARIO, DIES AT 80
Officially, Mr. Higman was a sociology professor, but that was merely an academic cover for his role as the thinking person’s Nathan Detroit, the founder and proprietor of the oldest established permanent freewheeling gabfest in academia, a weeklong extravaganza of discussion and debate that was once compared to a cross between a think tank and a fraternity party.
Whatever it was, it lasted 47 years.
Lured by the chance to meet and debate articulate, quickwitted specialists from different backgrounds and disciplines, the conference’s participants over the years included such diverse personalities as Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry A. Kissinger, Abba Eban, Henry Steele Commager, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Arthur Miller, Ted Turner, Ralph Nader and Roger Ebert, a perennially popular panelist who proved he could hold his own with the reigning resident wits when he inverted Veblen to sum up the weeklong conference as “the leisure of the theory class.”
Mr. Higman, the son of a miner turned contractor, was born in a hospital on the University of Colorado campus and grew up, as he once acknowledged, wanting to know everything. A brilliant man known both for the breadth and depth of his knowledge, he apparently majored in art as a Colorado undergraduate and then switched to sociology in its graduate school only because everything-there-is-to-know was not a recognized discipline. Although Mr. Higman served on various government committees over the years and spent four years directing a Vista training program, his abiding passion was the conference, which he started as a young instructor in part to offer students at Colorado, known at the time as a party school, an alternative to skiing—thinking.
The conference, which began with a single speaker in 1948, was originally designed as a one-shot tribute to the United Nations, but it proved so popular that the university ordered Mr. Higman to make it an annual event.
It attracted major attention in 1953, the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, when Mr. Higman stacked the panels with speakers who turned the conference into a continuous attack on the Senator’s tactics.
A measure of the conference’s popularity was that the 125 invited participants not only received no stipends for spending a week serving on one panel discussion after another, but also had to pay their way to Boulder. There, at least, room, board and local transportation were provided. The panelists bunked with local families and were driven around town by Colorado students who also served as waiters, bartenders and awed acolytes.
Like an astute hostess who makes it a point to seat the duchess next to the dustman, Mr. Higman, who once arranged a debate between Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, was a master at orchestrating creative tensions. Among other things, he required participants to take part in at least one discussion on a topic they knew nothing about. And to insure that his panelists would talk about what they knew and not what they had boned up on, he made it a point not to disclose the list of topics or panel assignments until after the participants had gathered in Boulder.
The subjects of the 200 overlapping panel discussions could be profound (“Third World Development—Women as a Force of Change”) or prophylactic (“The Resurgent Condom”).
Such a rich smorgasbord attracted 30,000 townspeople and Colorado students each year. Even so, the university suspended the conference this year, saying it had gotten out of touch with its student interests.
A chief attraction of the conference was Mr. Higman himself, a man of such enormous intellectual range that he taught himself architecture and gardening because he could not afford to hire skilled professionals, and, for the same reason, made himself into an accomplished French chef.
For all his brilliance, Mr. Higman could also be something of an absentminded professor. During a stay with a friend in Washington, for example, he once cooked an elaborate meal for 30 guests, but forgot to invite anybody, leaving his host, John Midgley, to eat beef Wellington for three weeks.
Known as everything from dictatorial to lovable, Mr. Higman could sometimes be impatient with the world, especially when it failed to keep up with his own inventive mind. Unwilling to wait for the development of portable telephones, for example, he had 17 telephones installed in his house so one would always be handy.
He is survived by his wife, Marion, and three daughters, Anne and Elizabeth of Boulder, and Alice Reich of Denver.
December 1, 1995