Howard Higman

Howard Higman (25 April 1915 – 22 November 1995)  was an American sociologist^[1] notable as the founder of The World Affairs Conference in 1948

To begin with, at the beginning of the ‘60s Quigg Newton was the President of C.U. He had been a former mayor of Denver, and after he had campaigned for the Senate and lost, he went over to the Ford Foundation. He came after Ward Darley.

Ward Darley had created a big furor by making CU the first university in America to outlaw the alumni from restricting membership in fraternities by excluding Jews, Blacks, and Catholics. He got the Regents to adopt a rule that the national organizations of Pi Phi, Theta, Kappa, Beta, Sigma Chi and Sigma Nu, which had provisions that only allowed White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants would be forbidden from campus. The local fraternities and sororities had no choice in the matter – the national organizations enforced these restrictive policies. He fancied himself as quite conservative, but took this position. This was prior to the Civil Rights Movement. If the local fraternities or sororities wanted to restrict membership themselves, they could do anything they wanted to and have their own rules. But he insisted that outsiders couldn’t impose the rules on them.

They were all in the national charters, so the national organizations concentrated on defeating that. They spent thousands of dollars on trying to defeat that, and they failed. The pressure on Darley was tremendous and it had an impact all over the country. The fraternities like Sigma Chi wouldn’t bow, so they kicked the Sigma Chi chapter off campus.

And then Newton came in and was very responsible for upgrading the deteriorating architecture on campus. The faculty were very opposed to having five hundred inmates in one, huge dorm for reasons of spirit and morale. The quality of the architecture had been declining for years. Newton cancelled a five hundred person men’s dorm even though it was hundreds of thousands of dollars into the planning and design stage. He just cancelled it and got new architects who revised the plans and started from scratch. They upgraded the architecture a great deal.

Did he mainly want smaller buildings?

He created Williams Village with all those small cottages and houses. That replaced one, big, five hundred-room dorm. He went to Beluchi and Saki at Harvard and Yale and got them out here as advisors. They discovered that the layering of the sandstone looked more and more like wallpaper (in the recent buildings). The Engineering Building won a prize for the finest architecture that year.

His biggest problem was that he had a football coach who was violating all the rules, Tony Grandelious, even though he was a total victor. He had been an assistant-coach at Michigan State and came out here and was a total success as a coach.

But he got punished by his peers because he was raiding his former territory for players at Michigan State. So they punished him for violating rule two and rule seven. Newton set up an investigation of the whole thing and it became quite a scandal. So he answered by saying that he hadn’t violated rules two and seven, but instead, had violated rules one, three, four, five, six, etc.. So he fired Grandelious. Nobody could believe it. He was total winning football coach and we were going to bowl games and everything. And that started a rift between Newton and the alumni and he left.

He was followed by Joe Smiley, and that’s when the sit-downs . . . the anti-Vietnam war stuff got started. When Martin Luther King was shot, that was when they had the first riot on the campus. The students marched on Smiley’s residence and demanded all kinds of rights, including inclusion of minorities in the student body.

We had, at the time, seven Mexican-Americans on campus, and forty two Blacks, all of whom were on football scholarships. Smiley came out on the balcony and announced that he was going to set up a program for minority students. He also announced that he was going to put me in charge of designing the program.

I read about it on the front page of the Denver Post that night, and he’d never spoken to me about anything. I called him up and said, “Joe! What’s this I read about you putting me in charge?” And he said, “Well, your name came off of the top of my head. I was conferring with the students and heard that you were training VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteers.”

I started the Educational Opportunity Program. We rushed out to recruit Blacks from the ghettoes and what were then called Spanish-Americans or Latinos. They later came to be called Chicanos.

Was it a real riot, like the Detroit riots?

There were just a couple of thousand students storming the Administration Building, waving and yelling. They didn’t break anything. But there weren’t any minority students at the time.

The other demand that they had was an end to in loco parentis – the idea that the university was their local parent and we locked up girls at 8 o’clock in the dormitories. It was about the time of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Smiley allowed the National Convention for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to hold its convention in the Student Union Building. He not only allowed them to do that, but also to restrict coverage of the meetings by the Press. This seemed to the conservatives in the Administration and the Board of Regents to have been a concession to the radicals – a caving-in.

He came into disfavor with certain regents. He left! That was the year that the Senate Committee on Internal Security accused the University of Colorado of having a teach-in against the war in Vietnam and being fermented by “wild-eyed” professors on the Boulder campus.

So he left and Thieme came from the University of Washington. He inherited the minority programs which had been started under Smiley. The students were very, very activist then. That’s when they suddenly wouldn’t major in anything useful.

I remember going down to give a talk to the Cactus Club in Denver. I was telling them why the university was in such trouble – because everybody wanted to major in sociology. We had very few teachers in sociology. There were twice as many professors in economics and nobody would sign up for economics or history or engineering. They all wanted to major in sociology. I was telling the Cactus Club about this and there was a man there who’s son was obviously a problem to him. He was glowering.

What is the Cactus Club?

It’s a Denver club for intellectuals. It’s kind of like the Cosmopolitan Club in Washington, DC. It’s made up of architects, doctors, lawyers, writers, and painters. It’s strictly not bankers and businessmen. In fact, there’s a rivalry between the Cactus Club and the Denver Athletic Club. They pride themselves on being intellectuals and professional-types. It’s a luncheon club.

I was telling them that the reason the university was in trouble was because the faculty didn’t meet the demands of the students. And you can’t just reassign professors to teach another subject. You can’t tell history professors to go teach sociology.

Suddenly this man, I thought he had apoplexy by the way he acted, wanted to know why the students wanted to major in sociology. I said, “Well, I can give you two reasons – one that you wouldn’t like and another that you’d like even less. Which one do you want?”

He said, “What’s the one I would like?” I said, “One is that they’re aware that the world has a lot of problems. Poverty, and the treatment of minority groups, war, the Bomb, Cold War, etc.. And they’re under the illusion that sociology can solve all those problems.

“What’s the reason I wouldn’t like?” I said, “They’ll major in anything that doesn’t lead to employment.” The key words in those days were “relevant, macrobiotic, biodegradable.” I knew a Ph .D from Berkeley who quit his job to become a carpenter and wreck buildings. They went around willfully rejecting all of the external symbols of corporate America.

They would have sit-ins to protest CIA recruitment on campus. They just figured out everything that the corporate world did and then they didn’t do it. They wouldn’t wear a necktie for anyone, anywhere. They would cut holes in clothes and loudly profess avoidance of marriage, as such. Not necessarily cohabitation. A popular slogan was, “Make love, not war.”

They invented a word that has become a regular part of the language right now, and it no longer means what it did right then, and the word is “lifestyle.” “Lifestyle” was not in the vocabulary before these people came along.

They would be hauled in because they wouldn’t shave and they’d be covered with hair and they didn’t wash very much. They wouldn’t think of wearing a three-piece suit.

Do you think these people were less intelligent than the college students of the ‘40s or ‘50s? Were they lacking something intellectually?

No. No. Not at all. They were angry. They were rejecting what they perceived to be the hypocrisy and what they perceived to be the shallow values of the military-industrial-complex. They were rejecting the Army, Navy, patriotism, corporations, the consumer society, and the man in the gray flannel suit.

They adopted uniforms that were deliberately intended to be offensive. They didn’t shave and wore tons of hair. The most heinous thing that you could do to them would to have given them a butch haircut. That would have practically been an obscenity to have that kind of haircut.

They were exactly the reverse of the yuppies – the complete opposite. The idea of the consumer . . . they rejected varnish. Wood was better if it looked like railroad ties. The coffee table was better if it was made from an old spool from a telephone line with splinters in it – nothing like Danish Modern or Sterling Silver. They went for macrame, straw, rope, and green instead of flowers.

Even though they came from families of doctors and lawyers, they’d go out and get jobs as cab drivers or go for forestry and, ideally, move to Idaho. They’d have a wood stove and chop wood.

They’d form communes and have no money. They had rejected the consumer gesellschaft – they felt you didn’t need money. These students were, of course, a minority. They were characteristic of Berkeley, Boulder, Wisconsin, Harvard, Chicago and Columbia, primarily.

They were at the confrontation at the Chicago National Convention in 1968. This group of revolting students were upper-middle class students. They overwhelmingly had parents who were doctors of medicine, lawyers, or architects. They went around being fanatically pro-minority. The CU students, for example, over the objection of the corporate structure, the Regents, voted to tax themselves ten dollars a semester to go into a fund to give away to Blacks. The Administration’s position was that this was racist. The students insisted on it.

Let’s see. There were 20,000 students times ten, so they raised two hundred thousand dollars per semester to support students for room and board and anything else. It was financial aid restricted to Blacks and Mexicans. And slowly, other groups joined and they all renamed themselves. The Negroes renamed themselves Blacks; the Mexican-Americans renamed themselves Chicano; and the Indians became Native Americans. The Orientals became Asians. Then they formed organizations of all kinds.

It was all melded into the anti-war movement. It wasn’t just an anti-war movement, however. A lot of people think that it was, but that isn’t true, because students were revolting in Paris, and (France wasn’t) fighting in Vietnam. They revolted in Mexico City. They weren’t fighting in Vietnam. It was a student revolt against the commercial liaison, the bigotry, the hypocrisy that they believed to exist in the business world, not the professional world.

See, you could go into law, provided you only defended the minority groups. You still had it, with you Kunstlers, Abby Hoffman – law was perfectly respectable as long as it was to overthrow the establishment or the government. But making money wasn’t worth it. And you didn’t accumulate “stuff” like three-piece suits and BMW’s.

The hippies were from high-income families. Their parents hadn’t had to struggle. They hadn’t seen careful use of money – they weren’t interested in it. They hadn’t been deprived and weren’t worried at all about what they’d live on or how they’d get a job. All they knew was that they weren’t going to be hypocritical.

Did they change in later years?

They changed and became ordinary people. Certainly – they all did. It was as if they’d all been off on a nightmare or a dream. They overwhelmingly (changed). Famous people did – people like Jane Fonda’s husband, Ted Turner. The present mayor of Washington, who is now as Yuppie as you can be, had been in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) down in the South in the Civil Rights movement. That whole gang sold out, took off their hippie clothes, got three piece suits and got jobs with United Airlines, married the person they’d been sleeping with and shaved.

The police were in confrontation with them because they would come close to violating laws – the simple, little laws like urinating in public or smoking marijuana, doing drugs, or getting stoned. Then they’d be hauled in and they’d defend themselves by saying, “You don’t like my lifestyle.” (By) lifestyle they meant living in a shack or a cabin and having bare feet and the rejection of J.C. Penney’s, (the) middle class or upper-class.

The term lifestyle now can mean something respectable. When it originated, it referred to rejection of normal clothes, normal food, normal furniture and normal houses. Now, with the Yuppies, you can have a lifestyle of BMW’s and Perriere. Now it’s just a generic word, but it started out as counter-culture lifestyle. Everything (then) was alternative.

What made the ‘60s the way they were, as opposed to the ‘50s or ‘40s? What caused youth to rebel?

The ten years of the ‘50s was a reaction to the horror at the end of World War II. America was the first country in the history of the world that got involved in a war and came out ten-times richer than when it went into it. It was unheard of.

And here was an impoverished world. You could have frozen to death in England, France or Germany. And then came the Bomb and the McCarthy excesses and the gigantic fear of communism. That was in the early ‘50s and then Eisenhower came in and he rose to high levels of abstraction. He was sort of this head of state, super-politico person that was above politics. That was the era of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Corporate structure was eulogized. Students all majored in engineering and business administration. They were going to work for corporations and had “proper” wives, station wagons, and four children starting with boy-girl-boy-girl.

I remember a vice-president of GE here recruiting and advising students that if they weren’t married yet that it would be to their advantage to do so. They could then subject their prospective wives to the wives of their superiors, and if they approved of them, they’d have a better chance of going further in the company than if they brought a dissident woman into the system – and they swallowed that!

If you want to understand the ‘60s, it was a reversal from reading William White’s The Organization Man, (about) this huge takeover in America of conformity. Spectorsky’s book, The Crack in the Picture Window, all of this typified what was coming out of the universities – Eisenhower, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and conformity.

Then, along came the invention of testing people for promotion. You’d take all of these batteries of tests that psychologists had thought of to see if you were a GE man or a JC Penney’s man. Dave Riesman wrote an article about it called The Found Generation. It was the opposite of the late ‘20s when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book The Lost Generation. The Found Generation found everything. The proper clubs: The JC’s and the Rotary Club. The Episcopal Church (and) the Baptist Church . . . the way you reared your kids. The gray flannel suit was the uniform . . . so that was the Eisenhower theme.

Then came the McCarthy stuff, and it was terrible and scary. People were frightened of The Bomb. There was China and the House Un-American Activities Committee and all that stuff. Then, suddenly, there appeared a breath of fresh air in the world – a bright young man named Jack Kennedy came along in 1960 and idealism came forward. That was typified by the Job Corps – suddenly kids were excited by the idea of this altruistic, healthy, wholesome and generous (lifestyle). They were going around the world and living in pup-tents and helping Hottentots and whatnot.

Then you had all these assassinations: John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King – all three murdered. Lyndon Johnson was very popular when he was elected because of his opposition, who was Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was really rejected by Americans. The hippie movement came just at the end of Johnson’s Administration and was really at its height during the four years of Nixon.

Nixon was unattractive, but not incompetent. Reagan seems to be incompetent, but not unattractive. There doesn’t seem to be any relationship between Nixon and Reagan, but if you had general disillusionment, rejection, and one of the great slogans at the end of Kennedy’s years was, “God is Dead!” That has a lot to do with the seeds that gave rise to the hippie movement. Kennedy seemed to have been a bright light that was snuffed out, seeming to prove that the world is all wicked.

Wasn’t it Sartre who said that? Was it a kind of delayed reaction to the horrors of the Nazis and the gas chambers and World War II?

Yes, I think it was. In France there was a general disillusionment with France itself for collaborating with Hitler. They didn’t fight him. They sort of knuckled under and set up a Nazi government. So there was a lot of self-guilt left over in France.

How did that play into America, that God is dead idea? I remember the cover of Time Magazine in ’65 or ’66 asked, “Is God Dead?” What did that mean and how did it influence the culture?

Eisenhower ended up lying. Eisenhower sent a spy-plane over Russia and said it was a Lockheed plane, and it wasn’t. He got U2 and Gary Powers. He got walked out on. His invitation to Moscow was withdrawn. Then his invitation to Japan was withdrawn because the Japanese government felt it couldn’t guarantee his safety in Japan. So he went out with a lot of disillusionment and then Kennedy came in. Kennedy created a whole new sense of optimism, and so he was shot. And then Ruby and the Warren Commission – this was very disturbing to the social-psyche. And then drugs came in big, suddenly. When drugs started out, they were not thought to be dangerous and they were fairly fashionable. Cary Grant had decided that LSD had saved him. He loved it. There were articles in magazines about what a dandy thing acid was. With Leary and other people, it was sort of square to go around worrying about drugs.

Joints of marijuana were thought to be dandy. Cocaine, I believe, was not very dangerous because it was very impure. It wasn’t illegal, for one thing Of course, cigarettes weren’t unhealthy then either.

Boulder kind of lucked out when there was death and destruction on other campuses like Kent State. In Fort Collins, they burned down the Old Main building. The National Guard took over the University of Denver. A research building was blown up and people were killed at the University of Wisconsin.

Boulder was lucky in the person of the president, Fred Thieme. He had brilliant solutions to the problems of rioting students. After the Kent State killings, there were ten thousand CU students massed in a state of bewilderment and anger out in front of Norlin Library in April.

President Thieme came out and didn’t wear a neck tie. He wore an open shirt and rolled up sleeves and talked about what hell of a world it was and how what was going on was tragic. Vietnam, racism, assassinations, killing, and murders were talked about. It calmed the students down so much that he held a bit rally in Mackey Auditorium for the faculty. Five thousand students were outside and the faculty came forward with one resolution after another while people with megaphones relayed what was happening to the students.

These resolutions were absolutely ludicrous, like the university should sell all the stock it owned in any war-related industry such as GM, GE, and Du Pont. Everything was passed unanimously. Never wear a neck tie passed unanimously. Never to shop at Kingsley’s on the Hill passed unanimously. Never drink alcohol under any circumstances was passed unanimously. They voted not to wear caps and gowns at commencement. And Fred Thieme said, “That will end the habit of them wearing nothing underneath the gowns. Won’t it?”

It went on and on and on. It was a great love fest. It got silly after about three hours. There was a huge catharsis and all of the students up in the balcony pulled off their armbands they were wearing and threw them out. They floated down on the faculty’s heads. This was at the time when you couldn’t trust anyone over thirty to do anything . . . To end the war in Vietnam; Abolish the atomic bomb; Divide all the property evenly; Abolish Congress. It was pure communism.

Final note: My tape ran out at this point in the interview. Mr. Higman later described to me how President Thieme was able to dissuade then Governor Love from putting the National Guard on campus. In retrospect, according to Higman, this decision on the part of Thieme probably averted a major riot on campus. Mexican students had been killed up at Chautauqua by a car bomb and Regents Hall was jammed with protestors.

 

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Higman