1997-1980 Part 4: Academics at Wayne State

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Mike

More of the same and a tasty side dish. Continue reading →

I arrived at Wayne State with a masters degree in speech communication from Michigan. If I wanted to get paid to coach debate, I had to be a graduate student. Since I already had a masters, that meant that I needed to commit to work towards a PhD.

PhD candidates were required to take a given number of additional graduate-level classes. A few had to be outside of the department. Repeating classes in the same basic subject taken at other institutions was perfectly acceptable.

A dissertation was also required. The basic requirement was that it include original research in an important topic under the aegis of speech communication. My unhappy experience in that endeavor is described here.

PhD candidates at Wayne State were required to make three oral presentations. The audience for all three was the student’s committee of “advisers”, which consisted of three professors from the speech department and one from another department. The advisers could ask questions, make statements, and suggest improvements. At the end each presentation met and told the candidate whether he passed or failed.

The required presentations were these:

The oral examination. The outside adviser was not included in this exercise. Each adviser could ask any number of questions about any subject.
The defense of the prospectus for the dissertation. The prospectus is a printed document that outlines the purpose of the study, the plans for research, and the method of evaluation.
Defense of the dissertation.

In general, Michigan is a much more demanding school than Wayne State. These figures are from 2019:

	Acceptance	Graduation
Michigan	23%	91%
Wayne State	73%	38%

This does not mean that every department at U-M was better. I was not favorably impressed by the faculty in my area of the speech department at Michigan. My favorite teacher at U-M (Dr. Cartwright) was in the psychology department. The one impressive person at U-M’s speech department (Bob Norton) did not take teaching speech seriously. I would say that the speech professors at Wayne State were slightly better.

The graduate students in speech communications at both schools impressed me equally little. Practically none of them would have been able to handle a rigorous curriculum, as in a math, science, or language department. I studied the bare minimum amount to get by, and I had no difficulties with any of the classes.

I think that I took at least one class from every professor who resided on the fifth floor except George Ziegelmueller¹, who had been in the department for ages. I don’t remember George teaching any graduate-level classes while I was at Wayne State. If he did, it was probably in directing forensics.

Here are my impressions of the other teachers. They are listed in alphabetical order, with the ones whose names escape me at the bottom.

I think that Steve Alderton_², whose first year was 1977-78, taught a class in group communication. I don’t remember much about it. Steve got his PhD at Indiana, which had a very good reputation in speech circles.

Both George and Steve were on my dissertation committee. That experience is described here.

A museum in Esperance, Australia has some of Skylab’s actual debris on display.

I remember taking a class from Jim Measell³, but I don’t remember what the subject was. Sheri Brimm was in the class with me. That experience is described here.

In July of 1979 the Skylab satellite fell into earth’s atmosphere and broke into a lot of debris. Jim removed a ceiling tile from over his desk and scattered some fairly realistic-looking electronic parts around his office in hopes of persuading people that pieces of the satellite had crashed through the roof of Manoogian.

Barb O’Keefe³, earned her PhD at the University of Illinois, a gathering point of disciples of George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. I think that her husband was also a devotee. She taught a class in communication theory, in which she described the “evolution” of communication theory. The second-to-last step was systems theory, which she dismissed because a system is never truly closed. Of course, that is true. The researcher tries to exclude externalities when possible and account for them when it isn’t. However, the externalities exist regardless of which construct is used to analyze the transactions.

The culmination, according to Barb, was PCT, which postulates that people have dichotomous (i.e., two dimensional) constructs that they use to evaluate everything. Examples are light-heavy and tall-short. I asked her about colors, and she replied with something like, “Oh, there’s an answer to that.” She never looked it up or told me where I could find it. She was quite intelligent and an effective teacher, but she was also a “True Believer”, and that scared me.

She also really upset me when she let slip that she thought that debate training “turned students into monsters.” I kept my distance from her.

This picture is from before the days when I knew Ray Ross.

I remember taking one seminar from Ray Ross⁵, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. It might have been about persuasion. All I remember is that it was the least demanding of all of the courses that I took, and everything that he taught was at least twenty years old.

Lie Ray, Gary Shulman received his PhD from Purdue. I took two of his classes. The first was statistics, which covered much of the same material as the class that Bob Norton taught at Michigan. The number of students enrolled was more than for Bob’s class. I remember that everyone was assigned a topic to explain to the class. Most of these topics were very straightforward, but the one that I was assigned was a complicated statistical tool that I had never heard of. I spent a lot of time working on my lecture, but it was just impossible (IMAO) to present it in a fashion that was comprehensible for speech students within the time limit, which I think was fifteen minutes. I got a bad grade on this exercise. This was the only time in my life that I complained about a grade. It didn’t matter; I aced the tests.

Gary’s other class, which, as I recall, was taught at night, was industrial communications. Vince Follert and Pam Benoit were also in this class. We had several exercises to perform as teams of three or four. The catchphrase was “Learn by doing”. The first project challenged each team to construct a castle using some tools that each group was provided—a stapler, some tape, string, some crayons, and construction paper. The castles were then judged on sturdiness, height, and esthetics.

Pam, whom I knew to be a good artist, was in our group. I gave all of the construction paper and crayons to her and told her to decorate them so that we did not finish last in esthetics. The rest of us then affixed one end of the string to one of the ceiling panels next to a wall. We then stapled the decorated paper to the string and taped the whole contraption to the wall. It looked nothing like a castle, but it was by far the tallest, easily the sturdiest, and as esthetically pleasing as any. De gustibus non est disputandum. We won the competition, but Vince claimed that we cheated.

In the second, much longer exercise, we had different roles in a factory that made some doodads from tinker toys. I was the foreman in the first segment. Gary never prohibited us from rearranging the furniture, and so I ordered that the desks of the people who were charged with locating the pieces moved so that they were next to those of the people who assembled them. This made everything very efficient and made the rest of the exercise, which culminated (on Gary’s order) in a strike of employees who were as jolly as Santa’s elves, totally inappropriate.

I had heard through the grapevine that getting a consulting gig with one of the auto companies was the Holy Grail for the faculty members in the speech and psychology department. I never found how many, if any, completed the sacred quest.

I am not sure that I ever saw this face in my three years at WSU.

I am pretty sure that I never met Geneva Smitherman⁷. I may not have even seen her. I have no recollection of where her office was. She definitely taught classes while I was at Wayne State. However, I never took any, and nobody that I knew well did either.

A surprisingly large number of graduate students in Wayne State’s speech department held outside jobs. A fairly large portion of this group took all of Prof. Smitherman’s classes and very few others. One of these students took the class that Ray Ross taught that I was in. She confided that she had many friends who would not take classes from any of the other professors. It was actually feasible to get a masters degree at Wayne State using this approach. If the student was willing to write a thesis (supervised by Prof. Smitherman), it could be accomplished in only a few years.

The effect that Prof. Smitherman and her ideas had on the department as a whole is discussed here. Jimmie Trent was the chairman of Wayne State’s speech department up until 1972 or 1973. I don’t know when Prof. Smitherman was hired, but it is fun to speculate that Jimmie hired her as a parting gift to the department. She is eight years older than I am. The timing could be right.

There was also a professor in the department who taught classes in rhetoric and oratorical analysis. I am not certain whether I took any of them or not. I definitely remember that he brought his adolescent son to our house on Chelsea one evening to witness one of our D&D adventures. We would have let them join the party of adventurers—I had a computer program that could generate a character in seconds and generate a nice printout with all of the characteristics. They declined the invitation.

I took one graduate-level class in psychology. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but he was both entertaining and handsome. I was more interested in the first characteristic than the second, but I did notice that about 80 percent of the students were female. I wanted to ask this professor to be the “outside” member of my PhD committee, but he was on sabbatical.

I found the psych students in this class to be no more capable than the graduate students in the speech department. I received an A with very little effort.

In one class session the psych professor discussed oral exams. He said that it was very difficult for the faculty members to assess the performance of the candidates. In general, they were mostly surprisingly awful. He said that some professors used a 10 percent standard. That is, if 10 percent of the answers seemed acceptable, that was good enough.

He also mentioned an exception. He told us about one fellow who was not considered a very good student. However, his performance in the oral exam was the best that any of the professors had ever witnessed. It turned out that he worked as a ~~disk jockey~~ (whoops; the meaning of that term has changed in the intervening years) “presenter” at the college’s radio stationed, and he was used to ad-libbing and responding to unexpected questions.

Well, if a little radio time had that effect, I figured that all my years of debate experience would certainly serve me even better. I did not waste even one hour cramming for my orals, and I passed with flying colors.

I took one other class; I cannot even remember the exact nature of the subject matter. It might have concerned statistics for the social sciences or the the use of computers in social science research. The instructor was weak. I remember that on one of his multiple-choice tests he asked for the definition of an algorithm. When he graded the test he marked the right answer (a set of rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving) wrong and refused to admit that it was a mistake. I might have dropped the class or just stopped attending.

One desk that should have been empty had my marvy body in it. So what?

You may be wondering how a student could have “just stopped attending”. Well, the university had a requirement that the prospectus be presented and defended before completing the coursework. I don’t remember the details. I was not ready to write my prospectus on time, and, besides, I was busy coaching debate. So, for a semester or two I attended classes for which I had not registered. This was not the smartest scheme that I had ever devised, but, since I did not pay tuition either way, I could not see that it would harm anyone.

I do not understand why none of my instructors challenged my presence. I am quite certain that the university provided every instructor with a roster of all enrolled students.

Occasionally someone who was not on the roster attended one of the classes that I taught. I took attendance every day and, in a friendly way, challenged all the interlopers. Occasionally they were just guests of one of the enrolled students⁸. None of the people whom I challenged ever came to a second class.

My failure to enroll went undetected for quite a while. When someone in the administration finally noticed I was ordered to report to the dean’s office. He grilled me about why I did this. I told him frankly that I had no excuse, but I wanted to do whatever was necessary to get back in good standing. He grilled me about this over the course of a handful of interrogations. He apparently thought that my actions were part of a nefarious scheme.

I discovered during these exchanges that the school was reimbursed by the state based on enrollment numbers. So, what I did cost Wayne State some money. Of course, it also saved the state of Michigan the same amount of money.

I also had to go to track down the instructors and ask them to submit grades for me. Fortunately they were all still on campus. None of them gave me the slightest bit of grief.

Of course, if I had stopped attending a class because I could no longer tolerate it, I just never asked for a grade. I had plenty of credits without those classes.

I spent a lot more time researching than I did studying for these classes, which for the most part, I considered useless. None of my research concerned anything that I had studied in classes at Wayne State. It was concentrated in two areas: 1) the social science research that used the ten standard questions in the “shift to risk” research, and 2) the medical research concerning hemispheric specialization. The former was compiled in anticipation of doing a dissertation on some aspect of the area. The latter was because I was intellectually curious about the subject. In the late seventies almost no one outside of the medical community was aware of all the recent breakthroughs in understanding the function of the brain.

There was no Internet; there were only libraries. I had boxes full of 3″x5″ file cards on both subjects. I used the “shift to risk” file to prepare my prospectus. I used the hemispheric specialization data for a paper that I submitted in 1980 to the Journal of the American Forensic Association⁹. I wrote it in response to a two-part article in the journal by Charles Arthur Willard¹⁰ (whom I knew as the debate coach at Dartmouth College) entitled “The Epistemic Functions of Argument: Reasoning and Decision-Making From A Constructivist/Interactionist Point of View”.

I knew that Dr. Willard, like Barb O’Keefe, received his masters and PhD degrees from Illinois in the speech department that promulgated Personal Construct Theory. My paper presented a short review of the current state of the neurological evidence about the way that the human brain makes decisions. It argued that some of the fundamental elements of PCT were inherently inconsistent with the fundamental postulates of PCT.

Before sending my paper to the same journal I let George read it. He agreed with me that people in communications theory were not conversant with research by neuroscientists. He asked me if I was sure about “all of this”. I assured him that when something was questionable I had been careful to include disclaimers.

My paper was quickly accepted for publication, but the principal reviewer wanted me to make a few minor changes. By then, however, I had decided to change careers. I let it drop.

1. George died in 2019. A press release from Wayne State can be read here.

2. While writing this I discovered that only a few years after I departed in 1980 Steve Alderton changed careers entirely. He got a law degree and then became (for almost three decades) an official of the federal government, a world traveler, and an artist! His obituary is here.

3. Jim Measell left academia in 1997 to specialize in public relations. His experiences are described here.

4. Barb O’Keefe Northwestern https://dailynorthwestern.com/2019/08/14/campus/school-of-communication-dean-barbara-okeefe-to-step-down-in-2020/

5. Ray Ross died at the age of ninety in 2015. He was at the Battle of the Bulge! His obituary is here.

6. Gary is a professor of strategic communication at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Information about him can be found here. I wonder if Jimmie Trent hired him.

7. It appears that Geneva Smitherman is now at Michigan State. Here is her Wikipedia page.

8. The most memorable of these occasions was when one of the students brought her identical twin sister. This was the same student who started one of her speeches with, “I want to take this occasion to introduce all of you to my best friend, Jesus.”

9. The journal’s title was later expanded to Argument and Advocacy: the Journal of the American Forensic Association.

10. Charlie Willard has a Wikipedia page.

1975-1976 U-M: Debate

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Mike

Finally made it to NDT! Continue reading →

The U-M team in 1975-1976 was, of course, a little different from the previous year’s. Don Goldman and I still comprised the coaching staff. The team lost two debaters. Mike Kelly had graduated, and Tim Beyer had decided not to debate after his freshman year. So, Wayne Miller debated with Mitch Chyette all year, and Don Huprich debated with Stewart Mandel. Two freshmen joined the team, Dean Relkin and Bob “Basketball” Jones.¹ Bob knew Don Huprich; I am not sure how Dean found out about the team.

The financial situation was even worse than in the previous year. The travel budget remained the same, but Paul Caghan was no longer around. Even if he had been, I doubt that I would again have requested a stipend for his girlfriend. Also, I had high hopes that in March Wayne and Mitch would qualify for the National Debate Tournament in Boston. We would need to find financing for that somewhere.

Prisons use lots of land. Have you ever been to Leavenworth?

The debate topic for the year was “Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a comprehensive program to control land use in the United States.” Wayne and Mitch ran an affirmative case about the Army Corps of Engineers. Don and Stewart’s case was about coal pollution and solar heating/cooling. I liked the latter a lot more than the former.

In 1974-75 I had worked with Tim and Stewart Mandel primarily on strategy and the construction of individual arguments because their presentation skills had already been pretty well honed in high school. In 1975, on the other hand, I needed to devote more time with Bob and Dean to fundamentals.

Dean Relkin’s word rate per minute was without a doubt the lowest of anyone that I ever heard in an intercollegiate debate. There was never any doubt that Bob had to be the second affirmative. Almost everyone in college typed up the first affirmative constructive speech, which was then delivered word-for-word. Generally, the only exceptions were to add a joke or two that might be appreciated by the judge. The speech would ordinarily be delivered at a conversational pace—considerably slower than the other seven speeches.

The first affirmative speech that was designed for Dean could be read aloud by any of the other guys in seven or eight minutes. So, their affirmative case contained, by necessity, fewer arguments than anyone else’s. This was not necessarily a significant disadvantage. Sometimes debaters present more arguments than they can defend.

This is Tom Rollins. I could not find a photo of Dean Relkin.

Dean had a skill that considerably helped offset his shortcoming in the speed department. He had exceptionally good word economy—the ability to state an argument in the most compact manner. In fact, the only debater whom I have ever heard with better word economy was the legendary Tom Rollins² of Georgetown, who won the top speaker award at NDT in 1975 and then again in 1978. He was runner-up in 1976.

To address the speed problem in the other three speeches we decided that it would be best for Dean to give the first affirmative rebuttal and both second negative speeches. Most speakers giving the 1AR, a five-minute speech that follows fifteen minutes of arguments from the negative, spoke at a very rapid rate. Dean could not match them, but his phrasing was so good that he almost always was able to answer all of the 2NC arguments and also do a pretty good job of dealing with the most important points in the 1NR.

The second negative posed a different set of problems. Most of Dean’s constructive speech could be written out ahead of time, and he was fully capable of coming up with new arguments. The problem was that the 1AR might present so many answers that Dean could not get through them all in his rebuttal. So, he needed to learn how to select one or two of his best arguments against the affirmative plan and strive to win the important points supporting those points. He also needed Bob to select an argument or two that he (i.e., Bob) had presented in 1NC and defended in 1NR for Dean to “pull through” in his rebuttal. They had to practice this quite a bit, but eventually they got it down.

Bob also had a problem that was difficult to deal with. I noticed in practice debates that he would sometimes skip an argument. In a debate this is tantamount to conceding it. Doing this even once could easily turn a victory into a defeat.

All debaters took² careful notes when the opponents were speaking on a “flow sheet” with several columns. In one column were the opponents’ arguments. In the next column were written the planned responses in shorthand. That column served as the outline for the speech.

I decided to ask Bob Jones to participate in a mini-debate. Someone would read a first affirmative speech. Bob would take notes and prepare a first negative constructive for me to listen to. Ordinarily I would also take notes on my flow sheet, but in this case I just watched Bob while the other participant read the case.

After about a minute or two I called a halt to the exercise. I noticed that Bob was holding his pen between his middle two fingers. His thumb was barely involved at all. This might be a good grip for a bear, but there are many better ways for a creatures with opposable thumbs to write. Bob’s approach forced him to lift his hand after every few characters to see what he wrote, which, considering that none of his fingertips were in contact with the pen, could be just about anything. Try it yourself!

I was flabbergasted. Aside from hiring a first-grade teacher to come to the Frieze Building to teach him how to write, I could think of no practical advice for him. I occasionally awoke in the middle of the night fretting over this problem.

I did have one unexpected visitor in the Frieze Building that year, my cousin John Cernech, Terry’s older brother. He may have called before he arrived. If not, I do not know how he found the debate office.

He told me that he was a dean at Quincy College (Quincy University since 1993) in Illinois. It was a Catholic school of a little over one thousand students. I had no idea what being a dean entailed—Animal House was not released until 1978—and did not press him about it. That he was administering a college surprised me a little. He was two or three years ahead of me in high school, and academics was not his specialty.

John is the man on the left in this photo taken in 2012. He has a PhD and was a VP at Creighton University at the time.

He might have told me about Terry. Somehow I learned that he was managing a pizza restaurant.

He was very cordial as he asked me about what I had been up to. I told him about my classes and the debate team. I may have told him about living in Plymouth and Sue; I don’t remember. It probably would have been courteous to invite him to lunch or dinner, but I didn’t. I naturally assumed that he had come to spy on me for someone in my family. I may have been mistaken.

As a present Sue had a replica made for me of the original shirt. The only thing missing is the C. I still wear this to bridge tournaments.

I think that this was the year that the blue Michigan Debate tee shirts appeared on the circuit. The guys still dressed nicely for the preliminary rounds, but they broke out the tee shirts for elimination rounds. “Michigan Debate” was imprinted on the front in maize; the debater’s name was on the back.

They got one made for me, too. The front of mine had a “C” to denote my status on the team. The back said “Prof. Wavada”. This was in honor of the mythical Professor Wavada (wuh VAH duh) who was often announced as a judge for elimination rounds. Of course I was not a professor. I had never even taught a class in anything anywhere.

The guys were not receptive to my idea for much snazzier uniforms. I envisioned the debaters wearing maize (the color, not the plant) shirts with blue ties arrayed with maize wolverines; these ties were on sale in Ann Arbor. Over these shirts we would wear blue blazers with the school seal emblazoned on the breast pocket. The debater could add his own name on the back in maize letters. The trousers would be a tasteful maize and blue plaid. The footwear would include maize socks and white bucks with a bold block M in blue on the toe of each shoe.

I remember changing into my tee shirt whenever I was chosen to judge an elimination round. During the very first time that I wore it the room became uncomfortably chilly. I shivered so much that it became difficult too take good notes. Nevertheless, I never covered up the school colors with a jacket.

Don Goldman escorted Bob and Dean to several nearby tournaments. I remember taking the pair to two. The first was a varsity tournament at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The guys did a terrific job. They actually qualified for the elimination rounds. I was really proud of them.

I had learned from Dr. Colburn that Juddi and Jimmie Trent were both professors in the speech department at Miami. I looked them up. I was disappointed that I did not get to talk with Jimmie, but I did spend a little time catching up with Juddi. She did not seem to have changed much. I certainly had, at least in appearance. I wonder what she thought of the bearded cowboy with glasses that I had become.

I also drove Bob and Dean to Novice Nationals at Northwestern. Three things stand out in my memory from that tournament. At the beginning of the event David Zarefsky was master of ceremonies at an assembly. He started by directing our attention to the “continental breakfast, which you all know is a euphemism for coffee and donuts.” A few people laughed.

He then presented the tournament’s staff. One of the Northwestern coaches was female, and she was very hot. I don’t remember her name. When Zarefsky introduced her he mentioned that “she had served in every conceivable position.” I guffawed, but no one else had even the slightest reaction. It was a little embarrassing.

A unique feature of the Novice Nationals was the way that the schedule for the preliminary rounds was determined. All eight rounds were set before the tournament began. They divided the country into four geographical sections. Each team met two teams from each section. I really liked this format.

Northwestern drew the line through Ypsi.

At the assembly one of Northwestern’s many coaches announced that the staff was having a contest. I don’t remember what the prize was, but they challenged the attendees to deduce the determinants of the sections. I spent a little time on this and submitted my list of teams in each section. At the final assembly they announced that there had only been one entry in the contest. They awarded me the prize and announced that I had only made one mistake. I think that I had Central Michigan and the University of Detroit in the wrong groups. The dividing line between the eastern group and the east-central group went through Ypsilanti MI.

After seven rounds Bob and Dean still had a chance to qualify for the elimination rounds. Unfortunately in the last round they faced a very good team from the University of Kentucky. Bob and Dean were on the negative. I had judged UK’s case several times, and we had plenty of time to prepare for this round.

I suggested to the guys that they should use the Emory switch in this round. That is, Dean would give his plan attacks in the first negative. Bob would analyze the advantages claimed by the affirmative in the second negative. In addition, Bob might be able to answer part of the second affirmative’s refutation of Dean’s disadvantages. Dean would have the entire five-minute 1NR to resuscitate his plan attacks. Bob would give the 2NR and pick the best arguments to sell. He had never done this speech before, but he had a lot of experience with this speech, and the mindset is similar.

The guys agreed to try it. Kentucky still won the debate, but both Bob and Dean thought that the switch gave them an enormous tactical advantage. They both thought that they would have been embarrassed if they had used their standard approach.

One of the Kentucky debaters later talked with me about the switch. She complained that the Michigan team only did that because they knew that they could not win with the usual strategy. This was, of course, true. She did not claim that the switch was illegal or unethical. She did not even argue that it was inappropriate for a novice tournament. When I asked her if Bob and Dean should have just rolled over and conceded, she just walked away.

It just occurred to me that this might have been Bob and Dean’s final debate. I wonder.

The first tournament for the four varsity debaters was again at Western Illinois. Wayne, Mitch, Don, and Stewart piled in Greenie and I drove them to Macomb. I don’t remember the details of this trip, but Wayne Miller has assured me that he and Mitch made it to the final round.

On Saturday at this tournament I must have had a round off from judging. I remember walking by myself over to Hanson Field where I watched part of a varsity football game through the chainlink fence. I don’t remember whom the Leathernecks played that day or what the score was. It wasn’t Michigan Stadium, but it was real football, and I enjoyed it.

The highlight of this tournament for Wayne Miller was not the trophy that he fondled through most of the grueling return trip. It was learning the saga of Herm the Sperm, which I related somewhere in the middle of the Land of Lincoln.

Herm was an extremely industrious sperm. He started every morning with his Daily Dozen, a set of exercises design to maximize his strength, stamina, and—above all—speed. The afternoons he spent in the pool working on his strokes. His goal was to be not just the best sperm, but the best in every stroke—butterfly, backstroke, and freestyle.
Herm had nothing but contempt for the other sperm. “Go ahead,” he told them. “Just sit there lounging around smoking cigarettes. One day, when the lights flash and the alarms sound, you’ll regret it. That’s when it will be every sperm for himself, and you just know that the first one to reach and penetrate the egg will be none other than yours truly, Herm the Sperm.”
A few of the sperm tried to emulate his devotion and energy, but they soon gave up. Herm had set the bar too high.

Then one day the lights did flash and the alarms did blare. Sure enough, Herm sped past the tens of millions of his brethren. They knew they could never pass him, but they still pressed forward. That is just what they were designed to do.
Then, to their amazement they saw Herm attempting the hopeless task of swimming against the stream. “Get back!” he cried at the top of his lungs. “Get back! It’s a blow job!”

My recollection of the rest of the tournament schedule is very spotty. Wayne and Mitch usually qualified for the elimination rounds, but they did not win any tournaments. Some of the specific recollections that I have don’t concern debating or coaching.

I remember standing with Mitch at the back of the auditorium at Emory University in Atlanta. The debate director was a formidable woman with a powerful voice, Melissa Maxcy⁴. Mitch could not help himself. He turned to me and whispered, “Thunder Woman!”

The Georgetown tournament was memorable for a couple of reasons. Stewart asked me to point out some of the more famous debaters. Our guys had on suits or at least sports jackets. One pair that Stewart was interested in was Ringer and Mooney, the guys from Catholic University whose affirmative case legalized marijuana. I said, “See that guy over there playing the air guitar and the tall skinny guy in the flannel shirt and the worn-out jeans. They are Ringer and Mooney.”

Bill Davey stopped in at the tournament to work the room laying on his inestimable charm. At the time he was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. He already knew Wayne and Mitch. I introduced him to Don and Stewart.

All the guys on the U-M team were much more comfortable debating affirmative. I told them about how successful Bill and I had been on the negative with the Emory switch. Wayne was not interested, but Mitch was rather eager to try it. As much as anything, I think that he just wanted to start his 1NC with “Flip your flows; here come the P.O.’s.”⁵

The most popular case that year called for the termination of nuclear power plants. Wayne found an article in which the author stated that leaving the uranium in the ground would cost thousands of lives because of the radiation from some element, radium I think. He thought that this evidence absolutely destroyed the “nukes” cases.

I was always skeptical about claims that appear in only one article. I pointed out to Wayne that the article did not specify over how many years these deaths would occur. It turned out that the half-life of radium was over sixteen hundred years!

Mitch and Wayne were at one point were experiencing difficulties with their Army Corps case when Mitch was asked in the first cross-x period, “How much is a human life worth?” No matter what Mitch responded, the negative had a clear path to a worrisome plan attack. I suggested that Mitch respond with a question:”Do you mean under the plan?” When they answered yes, he would then say that it would be “exactly the same as under the current system.” This seemed to work.

I could be wrong, but I think that only three of us went on the “Eastern swing” trip to Boston. I got angry at Mitch when he reported that he could not find a critical piece of evidence in a recently concluded round. I flung my legal pad across Harvard Yard in disgust.

My philosophy was, “If you can’t find it, you ain’t got it.” I did not think that anyone whom I coached spent enough time keeping his/her evidence orderly. One of my major frustrations in coaching was that I could never convince any debaters to implement my policy of numbering every divider section and putting that number on every card in that section.

I did a fair amount of research on prisons. I was convinced that a really strong case could be made for prison reform. Don and Stewart added it to their solar power case for a while, but they usually emphasized the solar case in rebuttals.

Debaters in those days wrote their names on the blackboard. Wayne and Mitch liked to goof around a little if they thought that the judge would appreciate it. They would sometimes call themselves “Mitch Egan” and “Wolva Reenes”. For Carl Flaningam of Butler they called themselves the Schidt Brothers, Sacco and Peesa.

As I mentioned, the top two debaters from Catholic University, Ringer and Mooney, ran an affirmative case that legalized marijuana. It was exceptionally difficult to attack. Their plan included a federal board to oversee the plan; they would sometimes even specify that the judge for the round would be a member of the board. However, all of the advantages came from legalizing cannabis, not regulating it. I suggested that we run a counterplan that was basically their plan without the board. We used it when we faced them, but we never defeated them.

I was conscientious about turning in my expense reports promptly after tournaments, but I don’t think that I earned any Brownie points with the department’s administration.

My most embarrassing moment in the seven years that I spent at U-M came during the high school debate tournament. It fell to me to announce the results at the final assembly. I made a serious error in scoring the speaker points, and, needless to say, no one checked my work. Some of the people to whom I awarded trophies did not deserve them. I had to purchase duplicate trophies for the real winners and send to all the schools that attended letters that acknowledged and apologized for the mistake.

Don Goldman and I went out for a drink after we found this out. It was the only time in my entire life that I really felt compelled to drown my sorrows.

In each octafinal pairing the sum of the seeds should be 17. If favored teams win, the sum of their seeds should be 9, 5, and 3 in subsequent round.

At some point I noticed that the tournament brackets that Dr. Colburn had provided in an appendix to his book on debate were wrong. At first he denied it, but in the end he admitted that I was right. I guess that no one checked his work either.

For the district tournament Wayne and Mitch decided to use Don Huprich’s case on solar heating and cooling. I am not sure whether this was my idea or theirs, but I definitely supported it. Don helped them a lot to prepare.

Augustana and Northwestern again received first round bids to the National Debate Tournament, and again no other team from District 5 received one.

Wayne and Mitch went 6-2 at districts and qualified comfortably. So, we finally got to go to the NDT, which was sponsored by Boston College, but held at a hotel in downtown Boston.

I don’t remember who paid for the trip. We definitely took Greenie across Canada again. Wayne and Mitch finished in the middle of the pack.

The weather was good, and the ladies of the evening were out in the Combat Zone.

I have only two strong memories. One was from the evening on which we accidentally wandered into Boston’s Combat Zone, which was only a few blocks from the hotel. This was a completely new experience for a Catholic lad from Kansas.

I also recall the evening that we spent exchanging evidence and ideas in the room of one of the debaters from, I think, Eastern Illinois. They had no idea what to say against Catholic’s marijuana case. We told them about our counterplan. They were intrigued enough to write it down. Mitch pontificated the opening sentence for them: “Once upon a time, when men were men and giants roamed the earth …”

Once again the only teams from District 5 that made it to the elimination rounds were the two pairs that received first-round bids, Northwestern and Augustana. The tournament was won by Robin Rowland⁷ and Frank Cross⁸ from KU, the two guys for whom I voted in the first elimination round that I ever judged at the tournament in Kentucky in 1974.

The drive back was long but by no means onerous.

Later we learned that the team’s budget had been cut drastically for 1975-76. For most purposes the program had been eliminated. Dr. Colburn’s title was still Director of Forensics, but the budget was not sufficient to attract anyone who was serious about debate. I still had a class or two to take, but I would not be the coach of that team. Don Goldman had finished his masters. I don’t know what he did next.

1. “Basketball Jones featuring Tyrone Shoelaces” was a popular song released in 1973 by Cheech and Chong. They somehow convinced an unbelievable assortment of people to help them. The song’s Wikipedia page is here.

Bob Jones contacted me in 2018 or 2019 about finding a bridge club in southeast Connecticut. He is a Diamond Life Master, a very high rank. In 2021 he lives in Marietta he lives in Marietta, GA.

2. Tom Rollins has had a fascinating career. You can read about some of it on his LinkedIn page. Among other things he founded The Teaching Company. I purchased several of its courses. I enjoyed listening to them on my Walkman while jogging.

3. In the twenty-first century laptops have replaced paper in nearly every area of debate, including note-taking.

4. In 2021 Melissa (Maxcy) Wade is the Executive Director Emeritus of the Barkley Forum at Emory University. To read about her career click on her picture on this webpage.

5. P.O. is short for plan objection. This includes disadvantages and arguments that the plan will not accomplish what the affirmative team claims.

6. Carl Flaningam practices law in Skokie, IL. His LinkedIn page is here.

7. Robin Rowland has taken to wearing bow ties at KU. His Wikipedia page is here.

8. Frank Cross died in 2019. His obituary is here.

1967-1969 Part 2: U-M Debate

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Mike

Debate in the middle years. Continue reading →

A primer explaining the format and other details of intercollegiate debate can be found here.

Fall 1967: When I returned to school after the summer of 1967, I discovered some very important changes in the debate program at U-M. Dr. Colburn was still the Director of Forensics, and Jeff Sampson was still coaching. Juddi (pronounced “Judy”) Tappan, a high school coach from Belleville, had been added to the staff. My recollection is that in her last year at Belleville two girls from her team had won the state championship.

Juddi’s assignment at U-M that year was to coach the novices. She had a very good crop. I think that both of those girls from Belleville came to U-M. One might have participated in debate for a short while, but by the time that the tournament season started, neither was involved. The four principal players were Bill Davey, an exceptionally smart guy¹ from Albion, MI, Ann Stueve from Kentucky, Jim Fellows, whom I never got to know very well, and Alexa Canady from Lansing. All four of them were almost certainly better debaters than I was when I first set foot in the Frieze Building a year earlier. They all definitely had more experience than I did.

I think that there was one other coach, but he spent little time with any debaters and none with me.

For me the debate season began bizarrely. Jeff Sampson escorted me and either Bob Hirshon or Lee Hess to Expo ’67 in Montreal to debate against two guys from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh about abortion. The whole debate only lasted for a little over thirty minutes and was attended by the coach/escorts of both teams and three ladies who had years earlier passed the age for which family planning is much of an issue. The guys from Duquesne had done quite a bit of research and presented a lot of serious arguments. We mostly told jokes.

Surely this was an appropriate metaphor for the age: four young guys debating about the circumstances in which women should be allowed to have abortions. Moreover, two of us were not even taking it seriously.

I don’t remember that we took an airplane to Montreal, but neither do I recall a long car trip with a border crossing. I retain a rather vivid memory of a rude cab driver who pretended that he did not understand English. If we had a car, why would we take a cab? Maybe parking was an issue.

This trip was undeniably a waste of time and money; perhaps some other organization paid for it. The plus side was that we did have time to wander around the Expo for a day or so. My strongest memory of the fair itself is eating a reindeer sandwich at one of the Scandinavian pavilions. It tasted a little funny, but it was not awful.

I also remember that we attended a performance of Laterna Magika, a multi-media theater troop from Prague, which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Jeff chided me for trying to figure out what message was being conveyed.

Years later my wife Sue told me that she was also in Montreal during that period, had heard about the debate in which we participated, and almost went to it. This was five years before I even met her. So, this was almost a great story.

I considered the national debate resolution for that year, “that the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual cash income to all citizens”, uninspired. I cannot remember much about the individual arguments. Of course, debaters argued whether the states were “closer to the people” or whether in-kind payments were better than cash, but I cannot imagine that there would be enough meat there for a year’s worth of debates.

I think that I had three partners during the year:

I remember debating with Larry Rogers, a junior, at the tournament at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC). I remember that he performed brilliantly in one debate, but overall we did not do well together, and I did not enjoy the experience at all. I also remember that one morning he took what he called “a Polish shower” with Right Guard before he dressed for the debates that day. By the way, all the male debaters wore suits Larry quit the team before the end of the year.
I am sure that I debated in at least one tournament with Lee Hess, another junior, who was my partner during the whirlwind spring 1967 season. I have a vague recollection that we debated together at Ohio State, but details have escaped from my memory. Lee had a motorcycle. I think that he might have had an accident with it that semester.
My third partner was Gary Black, a senior. I think that we did well together at one tournament, but I don’t remember the details. The main thing that sticks out in my mind is that I did “outsides” on the affirmative, which meant that I delivered the first affirmative constructive and the second affirmative rebuttal. Usually, this is only done when one debater is much better than the other, but my speaker ratings were generally equal to or better than Gary’s. He designed the affirmative case; I could not have defended it with much enthusiasm.

I might have debated with Bob Hirshon at one unmemorable tournament.

Spring 1988: Just before finals for the fall semester Jeff took me, Lee, and Gary aside, and had us write down on a sheet of paper the name of the other member of the trio that we would prefer to debate with. They both chose me. Although I chose Lee, Jeff decided to pair me with Gary for the important tournaments in the second semester (January-March 1968).

Here is what I remember of that time.

Both Lee and Bob quit debating before the semester began.
Gary and I had a practice debate against Bill and Ann in which we performed badly. Juddi remarked that it was a classic case of the novices showing up the varsity. I was too arrogant to get upset by this.
Gary and I made the elimination rounds at a few tournaments, but we did not have any exceptionally good performances.
We went 2-6 at Northwestern, which was an improvement over what I had done as a freshman.
Gary and I flew unaccompanied to a tournament at Loyola of Baltimore. The field was weak. I think that we qualified for the elim rounds, but then we lost. I lost my overcoat on this trip. Another passenger evidently took mine from the overhead rack by mistake when the plane stopped in Pittsburgh.

Throughout the year ballots from several judges remarked that I should tone it down. I would start out at a reasonable volume, but after a while I got excited and started shouting. I worked on this.
Jeff did not work with Gary and me as much as he had helped Lee and me the previous year.
At the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT Gary and I were 4-4 with twelve ballots out of twenty-four, exactly average and exactly the same as Lee and I did the previous year.
Both freshman teams did quite well throughout the year. I don’t remember the details.

I think that this is a recent picture of Gary Black.

Jim Fellows decided that he did not want to debate any more.

My roommate in Allen Rumsey House, Charlie Delos, remarked that if he looked like Gary, he would kill himself.

The summer of 1968 was definitely unique. Assassinations led to destructive and bloody riots. The suburbs of KC, where I was, were not affected, but Detroit, one of the centers of the protest, is less than an hour from Ann Arbor. The police also rioted outside of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. Then Nixon disclosed the existence of his secret plan to end the War in Vietnam.

I had my first real job in the actuarial department of the insurance company that my dad worked for. My summer adventures are described here.

Fall 1968: Jeff Sampson moved on. Juddi made all the decisions about partnerships. She also did whatever coaching was done.

The team had one very talented freshman, Mike Hartmann. He had a pretty good partner, Dean Mellor.

After the election the "executive" was this guy. — After the election the “executive” was this guy.

The resolution was “that executive control of United States foreign policy should be significantly curtailed.”

I was paired with Alexa. We ran a case that banned deployment of troops to fight without a congressional declaration of war. I was first negative and second affirmative. Bill and Ann were the other varsity team.

Here is what I remember of the first semester.

I enjoyed debating with Alexa. I had never had a female partner before. She was a talented debater and a good partner, but the thing that really impressed me was that she carried her own evidence boxes.
A small percentage of varsity debaters were female. Black debaters were very rare. Alexa was the only Black female debater whom I ever saw at a varsity tournament in my four years as an undergraduate debater. This could not have been easy for her.

In one round we faced a good team that presented a a plan to use American food to feed starving people around the world. I had heard of this and done a little research, but I had never discussed it with Alexa. I decided to argue topicality and to present a counterplan that included all aspects of the affirmative plan, but no reduction in executive control. Alexa did not know what to argue in the second negative, but she soldiered on and did not complain, even when we ended up losing the round.
Our best tournament was Ohio State. We made it to the semifinals, which qualified us for the Tournament of Champions. We might have been the first U-M team ever to accomplish this.
For some reason Juddi drove us to Oshkosh, WI, to a second-rate six-round tournament at the state university there. In the first round we debated a really obnoxious team from Ripon College on our affirmative. The second round was allegedly power-matched, but we were scheduled to meet the same team on the same side! I immediately complained to the staff. I was told that we should just switch sides. I really did not want to debate that team again, but we had no choice. The teams that we faced after that were a little better, but I was depressed after the last round. Then they announced the results. I was astounded when they announced that Alexa was the second-place speaker. I never had lower points than she did, and, sure enough, I won the award for top speaker, which, as I recall was a hearty handclasp. Alexa and I had won all six debates and qualified for the quarterfinals, where we were quickly eliminated on a 2-1 decision that no one in the audience could believe.
Juddi smoked. She expected one of the males to light her cigarettes for her.
We stopped for gas once when Juddi was driving her own car. She purchased $.50 worth of regular.
Juddi wore a LOT of makeup. Alexa, who roomed with her on trips, said that it was frightening to see her when she first got out of bed. One of the other grad students said that Juddi always looked like a million dollars, but you had to suspect that at least half of it was counterfeit.
Before final exams both Ann and Alexa quit the team. So, Bill and I were the only varsity debaters left.

We could not take the shortcut through Ontario because of the stop in Oberlin.

Spring 1969: The first tournaments that Bill and I attended together were at Harvard and Dartmouth in January. Juddi made the arrangements. We drove to Oberlin College in Ohio to pick up their team, Roger Conner² and Mark Arnold, and their coach, Dan Rohrer. We then proceeded to Buffalo to pick up a team from Canisius College. I never heard of teams car-pooling to debate tournaments, and this was uncomfortable, at least for me. Mark Arnold disliked me intensely. Also, the Oberlin and Canisius teams had much better records than we did.

We definitely attended the tournament at Northwestern. I think that we were 4-4, which continued my trend of improvement over the previous year with three different partners.

The only other tournament that semester that I clearly recall was the very long drive to Minneapolis to attend a tournament at St. Thomas College, now known as St. Thomas University. I think that this was the first time that Jimmie Trent, a famous debate coach and a professor in the speech department at Wayne State, accompanied us. We attended a peculiar set of tournaments for the next year and a half. It was not until considerably later that I began to suspect that Juddi tried to schedule tournaments that she was reasonably certain that she and Jimmie would not run into anyone from Wayne State.

Jimmie definitely was very knowledgeable about debate, and he was also great fun to be with on tournaments. He specialized in my favorite kind of humor, the shaggy dog story, which was ideal for a long drive. His presence almost counterbalanced having to deal with Juddi. At some point they got married, but, as far as I could tell, that did not change the political implications of a Wayne State speech professor helping U-M debaters.

The tournament at St. Tom’s was at best second-rate. It did not even supply standard ballots for the judges. They had to fill in these yellow cards that rated speakers on a twenty-point scale instead of the thirty point version. There was also very little space for the judge to express the reasoning, if any, behind the decision.

When we were on the St. Tom's campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow. — When we were on the St. Tom’s campus, all this was covered with several feet of snow.

The three feet of snow on the ground made traipsing between buildings carrying our evidence a real pain and led everyone to question the motivation for the trip.

Bill and I went 7-1 in the prelims. That made us the top seed in the elimination rounds, which, as I recall, began with quarterfinals. Almost all tournaments used seeded brackets for the elimination rounds, but not this one. Instead, for some reason, they drew the pairings at random. In the quarterfinals we ended up debating against a team from Augustana College in Illinois that we had already defeated on our negative. We were “locked in” on the affirmative because tournaments generally guarantee that no team will debate another team twice on the same side.

This was the worst possible draw for us. I had a much better record on the negative throughout my career, especially with Bill. It was a tough round. I will always think that I won this round with a joke. I started my last affirmative rebuttal with this remark: “I have been wondering why Mr. ______ (the second negative) wore galoshes to the debate. Now that I see all the snow that they tried to bury the plan under, I understand. Let’s start digging.”

Everybody in the audience laughed. We won the room and two of the three judges.

In the semifinals we faced the team that gave us our only loss in the prelims. However, this time we were locked in on the negative and won easily.

In the finals we faced two guys from Iowa whom I had debated several times over the years. We were locked in on the affirmative. As it turned out, in the elimination rounds we faced the second, third, and fourth seeds, in that order. All were teams that we had already debated.

At this point in the year we had a pretty strong non-intervention case, but we also had a food case that we had pulled out (successfully) a few times that year. The northern plains was a very conservative part of the debate world, and so we decided to stick with the non-intervention case.

Just before the debate started, they introduced the five judges. Two were debate coaches with whom both teams knew pretty well. Three of them were local luminaries. Of course, we did not get to interview them, and so we had no way of know how familiar they were with debates at this level.

Debate coaches have a lot of practice at following arguments. The best tactics for dealing with inexperienced judges are not at all as clear as they are for dealing with debate coaches. The thought occurred to me that we should perhaps run the food case. Any yokel can relate to starving millions. However, it was only a flickering thought; we went with our original plan.

The trip back to Ann Arbor seemed longer.

We won both debate coaches, but lost the three civilians. I will always think that if we had used the food case, we would have won the outsiders and maybe lost the coaches. I had plenty of time to think about this on the long drive home. Winning this (or any) tournament would have been a feather in our cap. Finishing second in such a sorry gathering made us just an “also ran”.

Bill and I went 4-4 at the district qualifier in March. We only won eleven ballots. So, I appeared to be regressing a little.

During the summer I worked in a the actuarial department of Kansas City Life, not my dad’s employer. Two other guys, Todd and Tom worked there. One day someone asked if they had gone to lunch, and I was able to use a line I had been saving for weeks: “Tom and Todd wait for no man.”

Man also landed on the moon.

Fall 1969: I learned that two strong additions had been made to the debate staff, Roger Conner1, who had an exemplary record debating at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, a very good debater from another strong debate school, Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them.

Since Bill and I were the only debaters on the team with experience at the varsity level, I had assumed that we would be paired up from day 1. Partner-switching is uncommon at most schools.

I was therefore unpleasantly surprised and disgruntled to find myself paired with Dean Mellor at the beginning of the year. Bill and Mike must have also been debating together.

Cheryn did not work with us much. Still, the most memorable event of the semester occurred when she was driving us in a car from the university’s motor pool westbound on I-94. There were three other debaters in the car. One was certainly Bill. The other two must have been Dean and Mike.

The car was proceeding at the speed limit when all of a sudden the front hood came unlatched and was flung backwards by air pressure into the windshield. It also made a dent of at least six inches in the roof of the passenger compartment, but it remained attached to the hinges. The glass on the windshield shattered, but it stayed together. This video is what it felt like from the inside. However, we were going much faster, and both the windshield and hood were obviously beyond repair.

Cheryn screamed in terror, but she quickly regained composure. We were very fortunate to be quite close to an exit. Bill and I rolled down windows and gave Cheryn driving instructions to get the car onto the exit ramp and then into a service station.

Cheryn called the university and reported the problem. The people at the motor pool insisted that one of us had opened the hood for some reason and failed to latch it. We all insisted that no such event had occurred. After a few hours someone brought us a different car to use, and we continued on to the tournament without further incident.

The resolution for 1969-70 was that the federal government should grant annually a specific percentage of its income tax revenue to the state governments. I think that we ran the same case all year. It called for granting 50 percent of the income tax revenue to the states through existing grant-in-aid programs. We claimed that Congress would never finance the programs to that extent because of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex.

I do not remember details from too many tournament. I remember attending the Ohio State with Dean. We had been doing pretty well for the first seven rounds. In the eighth round, however, Dean got all flustered in the 1AR, and totally made a mess of things. His speech was so bad that there was no chance of winning after that. It was too bad, because we would have qualified for the elimination rounds if we had won.

I am not sure where we were, but at one tournament Juddi arranged for us to eat supper with the debaters from Emory University in Atlanta. She liked their southern charm. At dinner she ordered a steak well done. The waiter brought it. Juddi cut it and sent it back for more cooking. She judged that the substitute was sufficiently dead. She smothered it in red sauce. Before she could take a bite one of the Emory debaters asked her very politely why she didn’t just order a piece of bread and cover it with ketchup.

By the middle of November Juddi had changed the pairings so that I was again with Bill. On Thursday November 22 we drove to Chicago for a tournament at UICC. It was a fairly important tournament for us, but it meant that we would miss the last game of the football season.

Students at U-M were allotted one reduced-price season ticket on the south and west sides of Michigan stadium. I had a superb ticket on the 50-yard line. How I managed to get such a good seat is described here. On this occasion I gave my seat away to someone. I don’t remember who received it.

We missed the best game in the storied history of Michigan football. Ohio State was rated #1 in both polls. Michigan was 7-2. OSU had never been behind at any point in any of their previous games. Nevertheless, Michigan prevailed 24-12 that Saturday and won a ticket to the Rose Bowl for the only time in my undergraduate career.

Meanwhile, Bill and I had our worst tournament ever. For me the worst aspect was our loss to my old friend and high school debate partner, John Williams, who represented UMKC. I was more depressed about this than about any previous result. Still, I only had one semester left, and I resolved to make the most of it.

Where are my U-M debate partners in 2020?

On Twitter I follow Bill Black, who is rather famous for finding fraudulent activity in corporate and political America. He currently teaches law and economics at UMKC. His Wikipedia page is here.

I have not been in touch with Gary Black. I was quite surprised to find this web page on the Internet. I am not positive that this is the Gary Black that I knew, but the age and colleges match. I wonder what Charlie Delos would think of Gary’s new career.

Alexa Canady is a famous neurosurgeon who is now retired and living in Pensacola, FL. I emailed her because I noticed that she was a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). She responded to the email, but we have not had any further correspondence. Her Wikipedia page is here.

I have seen Bill Davey twice since I graduated in 1970. When I came to Ann Arbor after being discharged from the army, he let me crash in his apartment for a week or so. I also saw him at a debate tournament at Georgetown in the mid-seventies. He was then clerking for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Later Bill was a big player in the development of the World Trade Organization. He is now retired from his teaching position at the University of Illinois. His biographical information is here.

Mike Hartmann is an attorney at the international law firm, Miller-Canfield. He was the CEO from 2007 to 2013. His bio page is here. I have been in touch with him by email.

Lee Hess is the Chairman of Cairngorm Capital and lives in Columbus, OH. I have communicated with him by email a few times. His bio page at his company is here.

Bob Hirshon is a professor at the U-M Law School.

I have not been in touch with Dean Mellor. Apparently he is doing something in sales in the L.A. area. His LinkedIn profile is here.

I have not been in touch with Larry Rogers.

1. Bill was a Presidential Scholar in his senior year of high school (1967), which indicates that he had one of the two highest scores in the state of Michigan on the National Merit exams.

2. I asked Roger why Mark Arnold hated me. He told me that I was right about that, but he did not know why. Roger was an interesting guy. He sold bibles in his youth. He tried to teach us to yodel, which he insisted was the best way to prepare for debates. He spent thirty years as lobbyist, mostly on immigration issues. I almost went to see him when he was leading a seminar in Hartford. In 2020 he is an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt.

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Mike

1970’s debate tournaments. Continue reading →

In my last undergraduate semester at U-M I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament, and I intended to make the most of it. This post has details about a few debates. If you need a primer on intercollegiate debate in 1966-1970, you can find it here.

I must describe our coaching staff in 1969-70. Bill Colburn was the Director of Forensics, but he no longer worked with the debaters or took trips. The Debate Director was Juddi (pronounced like Judy) Tappan, who was finishing her PhD. We had two excellent graduate assistants, Roger Conner, Mark Arnold’s partner in 1968-69 at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, who had been a very good debater at Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them. Cheryn did not work with us much.

Juddi’s major contribution was to insist that I reserve the last thirty seconds of my 2AR to summarize the case. She was big on style and polish. No one else did this in 1970; time was too precious. So, on the affirmative we always had less time to present and answer arguments than our opponents did.

We received valuable help from an extremely unexpected source. In my senior year Jimmie Trent was a professor in the speech department at Wayne State University. He had been a legendary debate coach at (of all places) Emporia, KS, and was universally credited with introducing the Plan-Advantages form of affirmative case, which by my time had almost completely replaced the traditional Need-Plan format.

Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.

Jimmie had a big impact on my thinking about the negative. I was almost always 1N, which meant that I attacked “the case,” the reasons for adopting the plan. One of my principal weapons was “inherency,” which challenged the affirmative team to prove that the “present system” was incapable of producing an equally desirable result. Jimmie argued that this was an unreasonable standard. In his (and eventually my) way of thinking, both teams must defend an approach. The negative’s approach could, of course, merely allow things to continue unchanged, but it could not keep changing its mind about what that entailed, i.e., “we could just …” I did not immediately change my tactics on the negative, but on the affirmative I always tried to pin down the other team.

On the negative Jimmie recommended that we try the Emory switch when we thought that we could get away with it. Previously I was 1N, and I attacked the case. The 2N attacked the plan, arguing that it would not achieve what the affirmative claimed and that it would cause severe problems. With the Emory switch the roles stayed the same, but my partner became 1N, and I became 2N. We attacked the plan first and then the case.

This had many advantages. More of the plan attacks were “canned,” which is to say that they were the same for many different plans and therefore written out in some detail. Having the extra time to prepare for attacking the case was more valuable than for attacking the plan. 2N got more time when he needed it most‐to rebuild his plan attacks after the affirmative had answered them.

Also, of course, it messed up the opponents’ strategy. Each of them was doing an unfamiliar task, and our approach also gave the 1AR only five minutes to rebuild their case and to deal with the defenses of the plan attacks. Finally, it let me give our last speech, and I was a little better at selling.

There is an obvious counter to the switch. The affirmative team can delay presenting its plan until the 2AC. One of Dartmouth’s teams tried this against us. However, the 1AC made no sense without the plan, and two or three minutes were still available when he finished. I had no trouble adapting. I just reverted to my old role as 1N, and the 2A, who had to present the plan in his constructive for the first time ever, had too little time to defend the case well.

A better approach, which we would have used if anyone had tried the switch against us, would be for the 2AC to present additional advantages of the plan after (or before) dealing with the plan attacks. Then, the 2AR can then drop some advantages and defend others.

We only lost one round all year when we switched. We met a pretty good team from Loyola of Baltimore at a tournament in Miami. They did not even try to defend their case in rebuttals. They only argued that our approach was unethical because it emphasized the “spread,” i.e., taking advantage of time limitations to present more arguments than the opponents could possibly answer. We had a very good set of answers to these arguments, but the judge voted against us on the ethics issue. The lesson we learned was to avoid the switch if the judge seemed too conservative. Loyola evidently knew the judge better than we did.

Our first trip in January of 1970 was the “East Coast Swing,” where we used the switch in every round except the one in which Dartmouth delayed presenting the plan. My partner, Bill Davey, and I were allowed to fly to Boston to participate in the tournaments at Boston College and Harvard. At BC we went 5-3 and narrowly missed qualifying for the elimination rounds. Because we did not have a long drive ahead of us, we decided to watch the octafinals. I watched Brown on the affirmative v. Southern Cal. Bill watched a different debate. One of the Brown debaters was visibly startled when he saw me enter the classroom and sit down. He nudged his partner and whispered something to him.

A few minutes later I found out why. Brown’s first affirmative constructive speech was word-for-word the same as ours! Evidently they had tape-recorded one of our rounds at some previous tournament and transcribed it. I have never heard of anyone—in the previous seven and a half years of debating or the subsequent six and a half years that I coached—doing anything like this. In disgust I stopped taking notes a few minutes into the speech.

Brown’s was a bad strategy. USC, which ran a similar case when they were on the affirmative, annihilated them. I was totally embarrassed that a team incompetently running our exact case qualified for the elims at this tournament, and we did not. I told Bill about it, but no one else.

In contrast, Harvard, which was the biggest tournament of the year, with over 100 teams in attendance, was our best tournament ever. In the prelims we were 7-1, losing only to Canisius on our affirmative. By the way we had an astoundingly good record on our negative all year. If we got to face Canisius in the elimination rounds, we would be “locked in” on our negative.

In the octafinals we faced an overmatched team from Boston College. We lost the coin flip (as usual; we only won one coin flip all year), and so we had to debate affirmative. It didn’t matter. All three judges voted for us.

The quarterfinal match against Oberlin was somewhat controversial. The Oberlin pair was Mark Arnold, whom I knew from our days in Kansas City, and freshman Paul Zarefsky, whose brother had been a champion debater at Northwestern, and he now coached there. We were affirmative again. The timekeeper was a debater on Canisius’s second team. We barely knew him, but he was friendly with our opponents.

The first two speeches delivered by Davey and Zarefsky were fairly routine. I was somewhere in the middle of my constructive when someone, I think it was Arnold, yelled out “Time.” The timekeeper was busy taking notes and had neglected to time my speech. He put up the 5 card, followed quickly by the 4. Arnold was sure that he gave me extra time. I thought that he cost me at least a little, and he certainly flustered me a little when 5 turned into 4 so fast.

Anyway, we won three of the five ballots. Oberlin had had a very good first semester, they had done well at BC, and Arnold was considered one of the best debaters in the country. He later coached at Harvard.

Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.

Our opponent in the semifinals was Georgetown, a perennial national powerhouse, represented by Dallas Perkins (who also later coached at Harvard) and Howard Beales. Once again we lost the coin flip. I thought that we debated pretty well, but all five judges, including Laurence Tribe, voted for Georgetown. I will always think that if we had won that coin flip, we would have won the tournament, but who knows?

Still, it was our best tournament ever, and I was the #5 speaker out of the 200+ who attended. Dartmouth also had a tournament, but we did not attend.

When I called Bill Colburn to pick us up at Metro Airport, I told him that we had dropped eight ballots at Harvard. He just said “Really?”, and I replied, “Yes, but the good news is that seven of them were in the quarters and semifinals.”

Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.

I remember riding home from a bitterly cold tournament on January 11. I was sitting shotgun and therefore had control of the radio. I found a CBS station, and we listened to the surprisingly calm voices of Bob Reynolds and Tom Hedrick. It was near the end of Super Bowl IV, and the Chiefs seemed to be running out the clock. The Vikings were thirteen-point favoritess, and so we all assumed that the Chiefs had just given up. Au contraire, mon frère! KC had pounded Minnesota 23-7. I knew that my dad and all my friends in KC would be ecstatic.

Juddi made all of the decisions about pairing and scheduling. Two of her decisions puzzled me. The first was to have me debate with sophomore Mike Hartmann at the most important tournament in the district at Northwestern. Mike was a really good debater, and Juddi must have wanted to give him some incentive for the next year. That’s fine, but we had never debated together, and he did not know our case. I would not have minded too much if it was another tournament, but Northwestern was perhaps the most important tournament of the year.

Mike and I won all of our negative rounds and two of the four affirmatives. One of the losses was to a good team. The other was to the worst team in the tournament from Northeastern Illinois University, which I had never heard of. Their record in the tournament was 1-7. The judge, whom I had never before seen, gave both Mike and me higher speaker points than either of the NEIU debaters (although considerably less than we received in any other round). However, he gave NEIU their only victory of the tournament. The text on the ballot was short and bitter: “I just can’t vote for this case.”

Sixteen teams qualified for the elims. We were seventeenth. You know what they say about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I think that 1970 was also the year that Bill and I flew to the tournament at the University of Miami. I remember that it was 70° warmer when we exited the plane than when we boarde. I also remember that right in the center of the campus was a huge swimming pool. The diving team was practicing when we were there. The centerpiece of the Michigan campus is the graduate library.

It was not a great tournament. My recollection is that the elimination rounds started at the quarterfinals, and we missed on speaker points. This was very annoying for a number of reasons. The first was that we lost a negative round on ethics, the only time that we lost when we switched and one of only a handful of negative losses all year.

The other annoying thing occurred against a weak team. The judge was a Miami debater who had graduated the year before. He came up to me before the round and told me that he knew the debate was a mismatch. He demonstrated a little sideways wave with his hand as he said something like “If I do this, cut it short. There’s no reason to prolong the agony.” I ended up cutting at least a minute or two off of my constructive, and I jettisoned the thirty-second summary in my rebuttal. We did win, but he gave us speaker points that were well below our average.

The third annoyance was that we had wasted time and money on this second-rate tournament. I don’t remember any more details about where we went and how we did.

Districts:I need to mention that Juddi and Jimmie tried for a while to keep their torrid relationship secret, but nearly everyone surely knew about it. At some point during the year they got married, and Jimmie tendered his resignation at Wayne State to become chairman of the speech department at Miami of Ohio. Juddi decided that she might be a political liability for us. She decided not to go to districts.

We had to supply two judges. Roger and Cheryn were chosen. This was fine with us, but it did not erase the last few months.

1970 was the first year that I seriously prepared for the district tournament. Roger worked with us quite a bit. We prepared by sprucing up our affirmative case to appeal to a more conservative audience and by working on how our arguments would work without the switch. We were too afraid of political consequences to pull the switch at districts. The only round that we had lost with the switch we had lost on ethics. We could certainly expect arguments like those in every round. Some judges might vote against us on general principles even if the negative did not make the arguments.

Some words of explanation about the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT are in order. The district was composed of four states‐Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The national committee also invited seven additional pairs that did not qualify.

Northwestern was always a national power. Its coach, David Zarefsky, left his top team, Gunderson and Strange, at home because he was confident that they would receive an invitation to the NDT, and he was right. Northwestern sent its second team, Sitzma and Welch, to the district tournament. This was a break for us. We had beaten Sitzma and Welch all three times that we had met them during the year.

The district committee evaluated all the twenty-four teams in attendance. Six were rated A, six B, six C, and six D. Everyone debated two from each group.

Maybe we were not mentally in gear. Roger had tried to teach us to yodel, which he claimed was the best way to warm up. At any rate we lost the first round on our affirmative to a C team from Indiana State. Both Bill and I were just off. I thought that we had won, but I can understand why a judge could vote against us.

Then we met two pretty good teams—Hample and Sproule from Ohio State on our affirmative and Sitzma and Welch on our negative. We mopped the floor with both of them, and they knew it. It turned out that they were our two A teams. This kind of surprised me.

The next three rounds seemed uneventful. The seventh round was on Saturday evening. We faced an obnoxious guy named Greg Rigo from Ohio University on our negative. I don’t remember his partner’s name. They were a mediocre team with a very standard case. We debated fairly well and pretty much pounded them.

Two of the judges had familiar faces. The third one, who voted against us, was someone whom I had never seen. He came from one of the very weak schools. This sometimes happens, as it did to Mike and me at Northwestern.

One of the familiar judges voted for us and wrote that it was not close. The other judge, George Ziegelmueller, was the long-time Director of Forensics at Wayne State in Detroit. In my four years at U-M he had NEVER voted for any of our teams. His ballot in this debate was incomprehensible.

When I started debating in 1966, Wayne State was a highly ranked national power. The team of Kathy McDonald and Don Ritzenheim had narrowly lost in the final round of the NDT two years in a row. By 1970 they were just another mid-level team. I am not sure what happened to them, but it must have frustrated George.

Needless to say the Jimmie-Juddi business probably did not sit well with George. A faculty member at his school, who had probably never helped coach any of his debaters, was giving valuable tactical advice to a rival school! This just was not done.

I worked for George for three and a half years in the late seventies. I never brought this up, and neither did he. In those years I confirmed my impression that George was not considered a good judge. His note-taking was weak, and he tended to get fixated on one aspect of the debate, even if the debaters did not emphasize it.

The eighth and final round was on Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to us Juddi had shown up for the coaches’ cocktail party on Saturday night. I am sure that she pumped everyone with whom she was on speaking terms for information. Outside the room of our last debate she showed up with a huge grin on her face. She told us that we were doing very well, but we shouldn’t be too overconfident We had also heard a lot of buzz in the hallways that we had blasted everyone on our schedule.

At any rate in the last round we were on the affirmative against a so-so team from Illinois State. Both Bill and I were superb. We obliterated them. I had absolutely no doubt that we picked up all three ballots. In fact, one of the judges, David Angell from Albion College awarded me a perfect score of 30 and wrote on the ballot that it was the best performance that he had ever seen.

All the debaters, coaches, and hangers-on assembled for the announcement of the five qualifying pairs. Juddi was all excited when we told her that the last debate was by far our best.

Next came the assembly. Five teams would qualify for NDT. It took them at least half an hour to process the ballots. The district chairman finally came out and began, “There was one team that was 6-2 but …”

I swear the following is true: I screamed out “Oh no!” and buried my head in my arms on the desk in front of me. Everyone looked at me as he continued, “unfortunately had too few ballots to qualify. So, let’s have a hand for the University of Michigan, 6-2 with fourteen ballots.”

We lost ten ballots, five of them on the negative. We had only lost one negative ballot in the second semester, and that was on ethics. We lost that first affirmative debate 3-0. OK, I can live with that. We beat both of our A teams and our B teams. We kept both Ohio State and Northwestern from qualifying. The critical round, though, was clearly the seventh. There was no way that we lost that debate. However, we also somehow lost three other ballots on our negative. This just never happened that year.

In retrospect I think that we should have somehow made it clear to the other schools that we would definitely not be using the Emory switch at districts. The other 23 teams that were going to districts probably wasted many hours trying to figure out how to adapt to our tactic. This could have irritated a lot of people.

We submitted an application for a post-bid, but I knew we wouldn’t get it. The district recommended the two Northwestern teams and Ohio State in a tie for first. They recommended us, but as their fourth choice. They thought we were only the ninth best team in the district! NDT only gave seven post-district bids altogether. The other three from our district all got bids. Once again we got the shaft.

Our performance at Harvard earned us an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Juddi encouraged us to go, but I could see no point to it.

Thus ended my debate career. Was I bitter? Yes. I only had one goal, and I would never get another chance to achieve it.

Bill Davey made it to the quarterfinals of NDT in 1971. He is a professor at the University of Illinois. His very impressive biography page is here.

In 1972 Mike Hartmann also made it to the quarterfinals of NDT. He is a lawyer. His webpage at the firm of Miller Canfield is here.

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Tag Archives: Trent, Jimmie

1997-1980 Part 4: Academics at Wayne State

1975-1976 U-M: Debate

1967-1969 Part 2: U-M Debate

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate