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1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

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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.

JuddiJuddi’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 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.

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.

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.

NDTSome 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.

GeorgeOne 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.

1970 Part 1: January-May: My Last Semester at U-M

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1970 January-May in Ann Arbor, MI Continue reading →

LotteryOn December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery was held. #154 was assigned to my birth date, August 17. In 1970 they started drafting with #1. No one predicted that 154 was a safe number. As it turned out, the lowest safe number was 196. Bill Clinton got 311, and George W. Bush got 327.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first four years at the University of Michigan. I lived in the dorm all four years. It suited me perfectly. No worries about rent or food, clean linen, and a floating bridge game in the lobby, which was right next door to my room. As much as I appreciated this arrangement, by New Year’s Day of 1970 I was very tired of anything to do with actual classes.

Instead, in my last semester I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament. This adventure is described in 1970 Part 2. Compared to debate and research for debate, sitting in the classroom and preparing for classes seemed excruciatingly boring.

Allen Rumsey House was new in 1937. my room 1968-70 was the corner room on the ground floor.

Allen Rumsey House was new in 1937. My room 1968-70 was the corner room on the ground floor.

To give myself more time for debate, I resigned as president of Allen Rumsey House (a dorm of just over 100 guys in West Quad) so that someone who was returning the next year could get some experience. I resumed editing (which meant writing, mimeographing, and distributing) Rumsey Rumors, the newsletter published occasionally for residents.

I had thoroughly researched the school’s catalog for the second semester to construct the easiest schedule that would allow me to graduate in May. I was only three credits short of the required total, and I had met all the requirements except for one, which I planned to fill with an introductory course in social anthropology. I don’t remember exactly why I selected this course, but it met my own main requirement (no papers). Moreover, a sophomore who was a friend of mine was also taking it, and he was a skilled note-taker.

I was pretty sure that ten of my credits would not count for graduation. The catalog said that one could only have forty credits in one’s major. I had fifty in math. So, I calculated that I needed thirteen non-math credits in the last semester. As a four-year debater, I was allowed to take a three-credit individual study in speech communication. That would require little or no work. So, I needed two more classes.

My first choice was a 400-level Russian literature in English. I had read a few Russian novels, and I really liked them. I was worried that papers might be required, but someone who had taken the class assured me that there were no papers.

For my last class I picked introductory linguistics. How hard could it be? I had taken twelve semesters of Latin and Greek in high school and nine semesters of Latin, Greek, and Russian at U-M. I also took a language theory class in the Communication Sciences department, but it was mostly computer-oriented.

At the first linguistics lecture the makeup of the class startled me. It was about 70 percent females, most of whom were packed tightly in the first few rows of the auditorium. Furthermore, most of the guys were in small groups spread around the rest of the room, and they all seemed pretty big. What really struck me was the prominence of their jawbones.

Almost everyone fell into these two categories. No one looked like me. I was probably the oldest and certainly the skinniest (perhaps 140 pounds) of all the male students.

When the lecturer appeared, I understood the female part. He was good-looking and very personable. He began his presentation by explaining how the class would work: students would be allowed to assign their own grades! There would be no tests, and the only homework would be a workbook that we would be required to fill out and submit. That explained all the athletes; I knew for certain that the athletes had a formidable underground network for locating “gut” classes. This one must have been close to the top of the list.

That was the last linguistics lecture that I attended. I could hardly believe how lucky I had been to find this class.

A small fraction of the reading list.

A small fraction of the reading list.

The lecturer at the first Russian lit class distributed the reading list, which consisted of at least six heavyweight tomes, none of which I had already read. I also learned that there would be both lectures and discussion groups led by graduate students. I never attended any of the latter.

I attended the lectures in the anthro and Russian classes for the first five or six weeks whenever I was in town. After that I took the midterm exams, but I never even picked up my results.

Meanwhile I had been attending debate tournaments, which took up a LOT of time. I also spent a lot of time in the library researching for debate. I also played bridge in the dorm, but I was not serious about it. A few of us played in the club game at the Union once or twice. I was quite serious about intramural basketball. I played on our team in the “B” division. I did not contribute much, but we did win the tournament. We also won in B volleyball. I was the captain of that team. Allen Rumsey House, the oldest and smallest of all the dorms, won the overall intramural dorm championship with the highest total score ever recorded.

At some point in February I quit going to classes altogether. I judged that I could pass my two real classes by cramming for the finals. This was undoubtedly hubris. I had no plan B.

1970 was, of course, a very tumultuous year at every college. Young people were fed up with a stupid war in Asia in which they were supposed to do the heavy lifting. At U-M this discontent was joined by a separate issue called the Black Action Movement, which challenged the university to come up with a solution to the extremely low percentage of black people enrolled at U-M. This movement was championed by my debate partner during the first semester of my junior year, Alexa Canady, who quit debate and focused her attention on pre-med studies and editorials for the Michigan Daily. BAM called for everyone to go on strike, which fit in perfectly with my plan.

BAM Rally

BAM Rally

I participated in one of the marches that BAM called for. I marched with them, mostly as a lark. I was accompanied by my outside agitator friend, Dave Bartlebaugh, better known as “The Ball”. He didn’t even go to U-M, and he didn’t care at all about the Black Action Movement, but he was a great agitator. He kept shouting “Free Huey! Free Bobby! Free all political prisoners!” He banged on trashcans as we passed them. I had trouble suppressing my giggles. I did join in the “Open it up or SHUT IT DOWN!” chants. It was a great time.

BalThe Ball was a real character. During my junior year (1968-1969) he started hanging around in the lounge of Allen Rumsey House. He lived in an apartment off-campus, he already knew some of the guys in our dorm, and he liked the fact that some kind of nonsense was always going on. A the end of the 1970 spring semester he had successfully avoided the draft by failing the physical due to high blood pressure. I guess that he had somewhat high blood pressure anyway, but he augmented it during the week leading up to each physical exam through a regimen that included, among other things, a lot of coffee. According to this website he has been in the music business for the last five decades.

The BAM strike actually did some good. The university subsequently worked hard to help students from Detroit public schools to meet the school’s entrance requirements, which even for in-state students were pretty rigorous. When I returned to Ann Arbor in 1974 there were obviously more minority students.

A point system for admission to the college of Literature, Science and the Arts that aided minorities was also implemented. In 2003 it was declared unconstitutional by a 6-3 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I spent the weeks before finals speed-reading difficult Russian novels and memorizing my friend’s notes. I liked most of the novels, but I had zero experience in how to prepare for a test in a college-level literature class. I had not taken even one class in the English department. I was supposed to take the Great Books class in my freshman year, but by the time that I got to Ann Arbor the class was closed. Because I had passed the Advanced Placement test in high school I was excused from the university’s English requirement.

The anthro test went about as expected. I thought that I did OK. The Russian lit class was another story. As I approached the room in which the test was held I was greatly concerned to see a large number of students handing in what appeared to be papers. I never did discover whether these were assigned in contravention of the information at the first class. They might have been extra-credit assignments from the leaders of recitation groups.

The test itself seemed to go pretty well. It required several short essays. I was able to write something reasonably sensible for each one. Keep in mind that my goal was just to pass, and at Michigan a D would suffice.

After the tests I started doing the exercises in my linguistics workbook. It took a couple of days. I went to my teacher’s office in the evening and slid it under his door the day before grades were due. I lacked the audacity to assign myself a grade.

As always, I did not pick up my exams. I could only guess how well I actually did. My grades were mailed to my parents’ house in Kansas City a few weeks later.

Exams were over by the end of April. I stayed in Ann Arbor for a few weeks. Bill Davey and his roommate let me stay in their apartment. I think that I slept on the floor.

I was busy with two things—the actuarial exams and the Junior College National Forensics Tournament, which U-M hosted in 1970. I took part 2 of the former and judged an astounding twenty-four rounds in the latter. I supplemented my income from judging with the proceeds from the sale of all my remaining textbooks to one of the bookstores. This is what I lived on.

UI was in Ann Arbor for the graduation ceremony. Even thought the speaker was U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, I did not go. I was too afraid that they might not read my name.

I had passed part 1 (calculus) of the actuarial exams in my junior year. Part 2 covered probability and statistics. In both of these areas U-M offered courses tailored to the exams. I took both classes in the first semester and received a B in each. I also sat for the part 2 exam in November, but I did not pass, which surprised me a little. I had not studied much, and I was distracted by debate, but I was reasonably familiar with all the material. The grading for these exams was designed to penalize guessing, and I did my share.

In May I devoted not a single minute to studying for the exam. At some point it occurred to me that I should avoid guessing. My strategy was to work carefully on the probability questions and to answer only those statistics question that I was certain of. In the end I skipped 100 percent of the statistics questions. This meant that my best possible score was probably around 50 percent. For one of the few times in my life I was pretty certain that I had failed a test.

I had already decided that I would just go home and wait to get drafted. That’s what I did.

2020 Liz & Me

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Different pods, but somewhat similar peas. Continue reading →

I recently checked out the Wikipedia entry on Senator Elizabeth Warren. Since she looks much younger than I feel, I was shocked to learn that she graduated from high school the same year that I did, 1966. Her birth was ten months after mine. I was never held back in grade school or high school,* and so I deduced that she must have skipped a year at some point.

Liz lived in Oklahoma, and I lived in the next state up, Kansas. We were not exactly neighbors. It is about a five-hour drive from KC to OKC.

I went to Rockhust, a Jesuit high school in KC. She went to Northwest Classen, a public high school in OKC. What we had in common was debate. I debated all four years at Rockhurst, and our squad often attended tournaments in the southwest corner of Missouri, which is about halfway to Oklahoma City. Oklahoma schools sometimes also attended these tournaments. I debated against a few of the students from those schools, but I do not remember her school ever being present.

In her senior year her school won the state championship of Oklahoma, and she was a star. My school also won the state championship of Missouri when I was a senior, but I was no star. The same four guys had won the state championship the year before as juniors. I might have been asked to fill in if one of them had come down with beriberi or severe acne, but that never happened.

Her debate career evidently ended on that high note. She went to George Washington University, not a debate power, and left after two years to get married and move to Houston, where she got a degree from the University of Houston, which definitely was an awesome, even legendary, debate power in those days. She graduated in 1970.

I, on the other hand, went to a meeting of the University of Michigan debate team during orientation week before my freshman year, and I was impressed by how awful they were. I knew no one in Ann Arbor, and so I started spending more and more time on debate (as well as bridge, intramural sports, learning how to juggle and play “Love is a many-splendored thing” on the piano, hallway sockey, Arnold Palmer’s Indoor Golf Game, epic water fights, shower parties, and dorm government) and less and less on schoolwork. Nevertheless, after four years of this folderol I actually graduated on schedule. My collegiate debating career had a few highlights, but nothing Like Liz’s high school career.

Shortly after my graduation I was drafted. I spent eighteen months in the military police. I won a commendation from the base commander for my part in the Battle of Sandia, the decisive event in the New Mexican War. I then spent two years pretending to be an actuarial student at the Hartford Life Insurance Company. While there I really missed the intense competition of the debate circuit. So, I returned to coach debate at U-M and Wayne State while exhausting my veteran’s benefits in grad school over the course of seven years.

During the eleven years in which I protected America from the Red Menace, wrote programs to manage pension funds (and the football pool), and traveled around the country for debate tournaments, Liz moved to New Jersey, had two babies, got divorced, remarried, worked with children with disabilities, got a law degree, passed the bar and offered legal services from her home — not all in that order. As far as I know our paths never crossed.

Now she is debating again, and I just play bridge and manage the homegrown computer system used by the New England Bridge Conference. If I ever met her, I would share one of my million debate stories that non-debaters can never appreciate.

* There were a couple of close calls early in my academic career. One of the kids in my kindergarten class at Prescott School in Kansas City, KS, habitually threw rocks at the other students. One day after class I hid behind a bush, and, when he came by, I jumped him and beat him up. In the end he was held back, and I wasn’t.

The next year my teacher at St. Peter’s school taught us to make sentences by selecting cardboard letters out of little boxes and aligning them on a type of slate. I could never find the letters, and the nun concluded that I had some kind of reading or writing disability. Fortunately my family moved to a different parish later that year. At Queen of the Holy Rosary school the first grade students were being taught to write words and sentences, which I could already do with no difficulty, instead of constructing them from cardboard. So, Sister Mildred happily promoted me to second grade.

Me and Karl Pierson

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Shotguns and debate are a deadly combination. Continue reading →

As details of the backstory of Karl Pierson, the eighteen-year old who brought a shotgun (as well as a machete and some Molotov Cocktails) to Arapahoe High School, are slowly released by the media, memories of my own teenage experiences have flooded my consciousness. Yesterday a television station in Denver reported that the target of his assault was his debate coach, who was also, apparently, the school’s librarian. Today a newspaper in Oregon reported that Karl had evidently just been kicked off of the team. It also said that he had qualified for and participated in the national tournament of the National Forensics League last year in extemporaneous speaking. He must have been pretty good. Only the best in each state make it to the NFL nationals.

I debated for all four years of high school. I have very vivid memories of that period. As a freshman my partner and I won our first debate against two girls from (now defunct) Lillis High School. Actually, he won the debate, or maybe the other team lost. I was so nervous that I could literally hear my knees knocking together; I doubt that I said anything that advanced our cause much. I then proceeded to lose fourteen debates in a row. Two of those debates especially stand out.

For some reason the coach sent my partner and me to a six-round varsity tournament at Smith-Cotton High in Sedalia, MO. We dropped the first five rounds. The sadists who were running the tournament then pitted us against a pair from William Chrisman High in Independence, MO. These guys were not only 5-0, but they were also the defending state champions. I vividly remember being cross-examined by one of our opponents. He tied me in knots so badly that I punted and said that my partner would explain any apparent contradictions. I may have also admitted to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Needless to say, this performance did not enhance my partner’s assessment of my abilities.

In the other memorable round I thought that I had single-handedly defeated and, in fact, humiliated the other team. One of the members of the opposition had quoted Hugh Hefner without giving his qualifications. As the most mature member of our team, I was the one who based his entire attack on the opponent’s case on the fact that Mr. Hefner was the publisher of a naughty magazine. Frankly, I was quite certain that the offending speaker would certainly have forfeited any claim to the debate. I was not positive that he would be banned from participating in the rest of the tournament, but I assumed that some form of severe punishment was definitely in order. It never occurred to me that ignoring his other arguments might not be a wise tactic. I mean, Hugh Hefner!

I got better eventually, but I never made it to the national tournament. In fact, the only time that I was ever even on one of the top two teams at my high school was during football season of my senior year. Unfortunately for me, you see, four guys from my class (including one football player!) won the state debate tournament as juniors. I was the fifth man during both of my last two years, but I had no chance of attending the state debate tournament.

I also competed in extemp, Pierson’s specialty. In my senior year I did fairly well in that event, and I made it to the finals of the state tournament. Even then, however, I did not come close to qualifying for the nationals.

I remember having an epiphany in the preparation (they gave you a half hour or so to research and write your speech after you were given the topic) for that event at a lesser tournament. A guy from Parkview High School in Springfield, MO, confided that he usually started his speeches with a bogus quote: “Was it Coleridge who said … ?” He filled in the ellipsis with something poetic, pertinent, and British-sounding. He claimed that this was OK because he never said that Coleridge actually said anything; he just posed the question.

I was much too scrupulous to resort to this tactic. However he did inspire me to make up a pope’s name once when I had to give a speech on the effect of the papal decree of some year on modern Latin American politics. I asserted that Pope Urban had split Latin America between Spain and Portugal. I half-expected to be struck down by lightning as I was speaking or to be challenged by the judge or timekeeper, but I actually scored pretty well. (I later learned that the author of the Line of Demarcation was Pope Alexander VI, the head of the Borgia clan at the end of the fifteenth century.) I never had the chutzpah to make anything up again.

I was in debate for fifteen years. I never heard of anyone getting kicked off of my team or any other. The closest that I ever came was when Mr. Rothermick, S.J., gave me a detention for shooting imaginary baskets with my rolled-up stocking cap. If I had been kicked off of the team, I doubt that I would have walked home (I certainly had no car) and taken up my shotgun in order to exact vengeance. I would have reasoned that even if this offense did not merit the punishment, my guilt-ridden life of sin surely justified the sentence.

Yes, I owned a shotgun! It was a .410, and it hung on the wall in my bedroom as a testament to my masculinity. I remember firing it twice. Once my uncle took me out to shoot at tin cans. The other time my dad, a neighbor, and I drove out to western Kansas to hunt pheasants with some locals. I remember firing at one bird. Somebody else claimed to have hit it, but my dad for some reason always thought that my so had brought it down.

Pierson, in contrast, wielded a 12-gauge. How he managed to injure only one person with five blasts from that monster has yet to be explained. Maybe he was so embarrassed by his poor marksmanship that he turned it on himself.

The Gun Control Debate

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Ban assault weapons or put armed guards in every school? Continue reading →

When I started competing in debate in 1966 I learned that there was only one way to make a prima facie case for a significant change in policy. Every affirmative case began by portraying a compelling need that inhered in the present system. Inherency in this instance meant that the problem could not be addressed by tinkering with the system. The solution required a structural change. The second step was to provide a plan that solved the problem. This approach was based on a concept of burden of proof widely attributed to Richard Whately, an early nineteenth century Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland.

This line of reasoning has commonly been heard since the massacre of the children at Sandy Hook school. No one publicly denies that the need is compelling; after all, everyone cringes at the sight of blood-spattered youngsters. Those arguing in favor of gun control have asserted that the widespread availability of certain types of weapons systems make this kind of crime possible, and they should therefore be banned. The other side has argued that the only way to prevent these assaults is to increase security in all schools by hiring guards who, presumably, will be able to match the assailant in accuracy and firepower. “It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.”

In the fifteen years in which I was involved in debate I heard many cases concerning gun control, but I never heard anyone propose either of the above plans. In the first place, of course, frustrated young (wait — the latest guy holed up in a survivalist bunker in Alabama is older than I am!) men in those days were not in the habit of taking semi-automatic weapons into public gatherings for the purpose of blowing people away. So, the compelling need was not at all evident.

The gun control plan that several debate teams did propose was the banning of handguns, which were generally defined as firearms with barrels of a limited length, less than a foot or so. These weapons were then and are now used in the vast majority of murders. No one would claim that eliminating them (if that were possible) would prevent all of those murders; some murderers would doubtless choose a different weapon. On the other hand the murder rates in countries that are otherwise comparable to the U.S. are so much lower that it is difficult to argue that there would not be a significant reduction in the total number of homicides. The psychology behind firing a gun, which is a rather obvious phallic symbol, is quite different from the psychology of stabbing or poisoning.

In all of those debates I only heard two cogent argument against the banning of handguns. The first was the claim that widespread gun ownership deters crime. The studies that support this notion are controversial, to say the least. Furthermore, even if the concept is plausible, the guns evidently do a very poor job of deterring murders, which have a permanence not associated with property crimes.

The second argument, which is much more prevalent now than it was at that time, was that we need an armed populace as an assurance against the government getting out of control. This argument is easier to ridicule than it is to refute. It clearly is the reason that the second amendment is in the constitution in the first place, and even if a fascistic or “Mad Max” scenario seems outlandish now, neither is inconceivable. Those supporting a ban on handguns, however, had little difficulty with this argument since a person armed only with a handgun would not pose much of a threat to heavily armed storm troopers or to Mel Gibson.

In a majority of the cases there is a common goal to which everyone is accountable and that policies, practices, and resources are aligned with the goal. Archbishop Whately’s approach began to lose favor in the world of competitive debate in the seventies. Instead, the concepts of systems theory began to be applied to policy considerations. The reasoning was this: “If one system were clearly superior to another, why not adopt it even if the new system does not solve a compelling and inherent problem?”

A ban on handguns (once again assuming that such a notion were practicable) would almost certainly lead to the advantage of fewer murders and suicides, and it is very difficult to imagine disadvantages that would come close to outweighing this benefit. Therefore, an attractive debate case can easily be made.

The same cannot be said of either of the current proposals. The assault weapons ban might prevent an incident like Sandy Hook, but the number of people killed by these weapons in the U.S. is still quite low by any standard. Some of those murderers might well be able to obtain an equally lethal way to accomplish their nefarious purpose. It could also be argued that assault weapons might be useful if the government runs amok. The difficulty of proving the likelihood of such an event could be offset by the importance of maintaining a free and civil society.

The best argument against the placing of armed guards in the schools is the cost. There are over 140,000 schools in the United States, and many of those have more than one building that would need guarding. Furthermore, there is not a scintilla of evidence that deployment of these guards would reduce the number of dead children. Introducing so many guns in schools would inevitably lead to their accidental or purposeful firing. Even if they did deter an assailant from shooting up a school, there are many other places where children congregate. Are we going to station armed guards at every soccer field, movie theater, and amusement park ride? Uh oh, I may have just given Wayne LaPierre an idea.

This last proposal reminds me of the government’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. A handful of jihadists figured out that airport security was incredibly lax in the U.S. and that onboard security was essentially nonexistent. They had no difficulty hijacking four planes and used them to kill 3,000 people. The federal government responded by creating the gigantic Transportation Security Administration, which was apparently mandated to serve as such a visible annoyance that people would not be worried about another hijacking. Surely no one could argue that all of these labor-intensive airport security procedures are worth the money and effort. The agency’s budget is over $8 billion per year! If each passenger wastes fifteen minutes being screened, and their time is valued at $10 per hour, that is another $2 billion lost. If you think that this much spending might be necessary to prevent another terrorist event, then why have there been no attacks on the poorly screened methods of transportation — trains, subways, and ships? No sensible debate team would have ever proposed such a stupid approach to an easily soluble (by locking the cockpit doors on airlines) problem.

In my opinion we would be a lot better off if political decision-makers and pundits thought like debaters, but I am not naive enough to think that it will ever happen.