Federal budget expert slated for Conference on World Affairs

Rivlin

The 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs (CWA) is set for April 9-13 on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

Last year’s CWA attendance was 90,200 at 200 sessions over five days. This year, the theme “Everything Conceivable” has been adopted as a permanent tagline in homage to veteran participant Roger Ebert. A regular attendee over four decades, Ebert frequently refers to the CWA as “the Conference on Everything Conceivable.”

This year’s keynote address will be delivered by Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and co-chair of the Debt Reduction Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Rivlin was appointed to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform by President Barack Obama in 2010. She has had a long and distinguished career in monetary policy, having served as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. She was the first director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Rivlin’s keynote, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. April 9 in Macky Auditorium, will be preceded by the Annual CWA opening keynote march. At 11:10 a.m., Rivlin will lead the procession of university administrators, CWA participants, students and volunteers along a walkway lined by a brilliant display of international flags through Norlin Quad and into Macky.

The keynote procession and address is a time-honored tradition in Boulder. Past keynote speakers include Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Miller, Charles Krauthammer and Richard Rodriguez.

All Conference on World Affairs sessions are free and open to the public, making the CWA the largest, most accessible event of its kind in the country.

A biographical listing of participants confirmed to date is now online at www.colorado.edu/cwa. The full CWA schedule will be posted to the site in late March.