1977-1978 Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Mike

The resolution for 1977-78, my first year at Wayne State, was: “Resolved: That the United States law enforcement agencies should be given significantly greater freedom in the investigation and/or prosecution of felony crime.”

The three resolutions during the time that I was at Wayne State were much more limited than the previous three that the guys from Michigan debated. This may have been an adverse reaction to the topic for 1976-77, the consumer product safety resolution. It was a nightmare for negative teams.

Wayne State’s debate team was in a rather strong position at the beginning of the school year. George Ziegelmueller and Jack Kay were both experienced coaches. Vince Follert had been a good debater for several years at Loyola of Chicago, and he had attended both regional and national tournaments. Against fairly heavy odds I had coached teams through the district tournament to qualify for the National Debate Tournament (NDT) two years in a row. No coach at Wayne the previous year had comparable credentials.

In 1977 Wayne State had, for the first time in several years, qualified for the NDT. One of the two debaters from that NDT team, Chris Varjabedian, was returning. The other, Bill Hurley, had graduated and was in Law School. The biggest problem, from my perspective, was that no one had much experience on the “national circuit”.

The Novices: George named Jack Kay to continue as “Director of Novice Debate” for the third year in a row. That was a pretty strong indication that George intended to coach the varsity debaters himself. During the first couple of months the rest of us concentrated on getting the new batch of inexperienced novices ready for the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League tournament. Wayne’s novices debated three rounds against novices from other schools. All pairs debated the same side (affirmative or negative) all three rounds.

Working with these inexperienced students was time-consuming and often frustrating. Little time was left for any of the coaches to help the experienced debaters. Each coach saw some of them in a practice round or two, but the emphasis for us was on getting the new people prepared for MISL.

The first step was to get recruits to fill out a form with contact information and a short description of each one’s experience and goals. We then interviewed each person. After all the interviews were completed, the staff met as a group to make pairings. The objective was to try to match up people with approximately the same enthusiasm and potential. We did a horrible job. First impressions in meetings proved worthless as indicators of potential.

At least four freshmen had significant high school experience—Kevin Buchanan, Mike Craig, Nancy Legge, and Teresa Ortez. The boys, who both came from top Michigan high school programs, were assigned to debate together. Nancy’s partner was Teresa. I don’t remember if any of this foursome went to MISL.

In fact, I remember precious little about the whole process. Although I devoted many hours to getting my charges as prepared as possible, I harbored no illusions that many of the inexperienced debaters would stay with the program. If they had to face off against Buchanan and Craig, they would not know what hit them.

Camp Tamarack: George had a clever trick for keeping people on the team after MISL Novice. He scheduled an overnight trip for the entire FU to Camp Tamarack, a woodsy resort in Ortonville, MI. The alleged purpose was to do research, but several recreational activities were built into the schedule. We drove up on Friday afternoon and returned on Saturday evening

I remember a few things about the weekend. First, the food service was kosher. Jack Kay had to explain the rules to everyone.

My most vivid memory of the weekend was Kent Martini’s outstanding performance in the scavenger hunt, as I described here.

I wasn’t very impressed with the research aspect of this exercise. George or Jack checked out some books on the debate topic from the Wayne State library. I missed having access to the outstanding U-M library system. It was so much better than Wayne’s. On the other hand, this approach certainly made everyone feel that they were part of the team.

The Varsity: For the first semester the big question for the varsity debaters was; “Who will debate with Chris?” At the beginning of the year the two main contenders were Debbie McCully and Kent Martini. Debbie was (at least in theory) a senior; Kent was a junior. In addition, the novices from the previous year were pretty good. Four of them had closed out the finals of a novice tournament that year. Of the three that returned to the team as sophomores, it was obvious to all of the coaches that Scott Harris was more than a cut above the others.

Somewhere around the Christmas break Chris Varjabedian quit the team. I have no idea what prompted this, but he returned the next year.

George tried the three combinations of Debbie-Kent, Debbie-Scott, and Kent-Scott. The results were not decisive. George asked me which pairing I thought was the strongest. I voted for Kent-Scott. I assume that George also asked Vince and Jack and maybe even Billy Benoit. I was a little surprised when George named Scott and Debbie as the representatives at district. Scott did first negative and second affirmative.

Not this (although Wayne State did have a highly rated fencing team).

One thing that was never in doubt was the affirmative case that had been developed by George and Chris. They called it “fencing”, but it was really about labeling all goods for sale in the United States and recording all transactions on a mythical computer. “Super computers” existed in 1977, but they were far less powerful than a twenty-first cellphone. Hand scanners did not exist. All transactions would need to be entered by hand. Think about that. Every time that currency was exchanged for goods anywhere in the United States, someone would have to input the transaction into the national database, whether it was a girl scout selling cookies or a container ship bearing goods from foreign countries. Also, of course, there were no networks. Without the Internet, how would they check the database?

I absolutely hated this case. It epitomized what I called a “Class Z case”. The idea was so insane that no one would have bothered to describe what was wrong with it. George and Chris found a few articles that postulated a reduction in thievery if a good record keeping system was implemented.¹ There were no nationwide studies; it was just a thought experiment.

The negative teams were in a tough position. They could attack the evidence proffered by the affirmative, but what else could they do? Little had been written about the subject. What writer or researcher would be inspired to warn of the dangers of relying on a computer that clearly did not exist and a process that still would not be close to feasible after four decades of Moore’s Law²? And who would publish the ravings of such a Cassandra?

I don’t remember the tournament at which this happened, but I have a very clear memory of an elimination round that I watched rather late in the season. It pitted one of Northwestern’s superb teams against Wake Forest’s duo of Ross Smith and John Graham. I was not judging the round; I wasn’t even taking a flow. I remember sitting next to Jim Maniace (pronounced MAN us, but I called him maniac), the only good debater from Notre Dame that I ever heard. He had won a place in my heart when he told a Wilbur Mills joke while debating in a round that I judged. When he saw me chuckle, he promised more such jokes at the end of his speech, and he delivered.

In this round Northwestern had pulled out a new case. Wake tried to attack it, but when it came time for the 2NR, Graham decided that their only chance of winning was topicality. He devoted all five minutes to this one argument. He carefully explained each portion of the argument. This was unheard of, but it worked! Wake won on a split decision. The Northwestern debaters in attendance were certain that their colleagues had answered the argument, but the judges disagreed. I have never heard a debater talk so forcefully and persuasively for so many minutes. It was actually quite a moving experience.

In preparation for districts Scott and Debbie began to work intensely with George. I helped them as much as I could on the negative. Debbie’s files were a huge mess, but there was too little time to do anything about them before districts.

Scott and Debbie participated in the tournament that Wayne State hosted just before districts. It was highly unusual, but not illegal or unethical, for a school to enter its best team in its own tournament. Scott and Debbie won first place. So, going into districts they had a lot of confidence.

I helped them prepare for district in at least one instance. Ohio University was running a case about arson. Their main source of evidence was a privately published an study (without peer review) about fire departments. I don’t remember OU’s plan was, but the study cited correlations between whatever it was (give me a break; it was over forty years ago) and fires determined to be arson. The study showed a graph of the relationship with the proposed solution on the Y axis and the arson fires on the X axis. If there was high correlation, the plot should approach a straight line that decreased. Instead it looked like a tightly clustered square of dots that neither increased nor decreased.

Publishing correlations on non-parametric data should definitely be a felony crime.

I discovered that the authors did not use the absolute numbers on either axis. Instead they had rank-ordered each and calculated correlations based on those numbers. This is a big no-no in statistics. I found a quote in a statistics text that indicated that correlations were only applicable on normally distributed groups like the raw numbers and not on so-called non-parametric data like the ranks. Scott used this against Ohio U. at districts. Two judges voted on this issue alone. One said that the affirmative got destroyed and never even realized it.

Several weeks before districts I met with George. I requested to go to the NDT in Denver. I told him that Scott and Debbie did not need me at districts. Eventually he agreed. George and Jack judged at districts. I was, in fact, right; Scott and Debbie cruised through districts and qualified for the NDT.

Scott and Debbie in *Speaker and Gavel*.

George elected to send them to DSR-TKA nationals, which was held at the University of Illinois March 22-25. They won the tournament, and Scott was the fourth-ranked speaker. The competition was pretty good, too. It included Kansas, Kentucky, and Utah.

In the interval between districts and NDT Vince and I worked with Scott and Debbie on their approaches on the negative. I organized a “Debbie Defilement Party” for all day on one Saturday. A few people dropped in to help us or make fun of us.

Debbie wrote out a new outline for her evidence. We then used my method of writing the outline levels on the dividers.

I took all the cards out of her file boxes, and the two of us, with some help from her friends, refiled each one. Occasionally we had to change the outline slightly or add more dividers. Before we inserted a card, we recorded the outline level on it. So each card in each section was labeled with the same level,e.g., II A 3 b 2).

This was, of course, time-consuming, but it more than made up for it by the time that it saved in refiling later. We got it all done in one day. This exercise had the additional advantage of fording her to become familiar with evidence that had been forgotten over the course of the year.

Vince helped with this, and at some point he mentioned something about writing some blocks³. Debbie uttered the immortal words, “Block me, Vince; block me up the wazoo.”

George scheduled several practice rounds before NDT. Only one was on their affirmative (the fencing case). I was the negative. I made plan attacks that they hadn’t heard yet. I had to admit that they did a pretty good job of defending the case.

Three coaches and two debaters boarded the plane for Denver. Jack, who smoked, had to sit in the back. In those days as soon as the “No smoking” signs went out, a blue-grey cloud immediately formed in the back of the plane. The most dreaded words when buying a ticket were, “All we have available are seats in the smoking section.” Waiting in line for the rear toilet was not a pleasant experience regardless of the location of one’s seat..

I have three rather clear memories of this trip. The first was a very favorable impression of downtown Denver. Free buses were always available throughout the center of the city. It was very easy to go to restaurants and to commute to the tournament site without a car.

My second strong memory is of the first round. I watched Scott and Debbie on the negative against two guys from Loyola of Los Angeles. I don’t remember the details of the debate, but Scott and Debbie were awful. At the end all four debaters were rightly convinced that Loyola had won all three ballots. Worse still was the fact that Scott and Debbie were screaming at each other. At one point one of them walked off in a huff. I have seen many debaters get upset with their partners, but never anything like this.

I talked with Scott and Debbie individually. I listened sympathetically to the complaints. Eventually they both calmed down and were willing to soldier on. There were only fifty-two teams in attendance. The goal was to be in the top sixteen. Losing one debate, no matter how badly, was definitely not a disaster. Losing trust of one’s partner was much worse.

I asked them if they wanted me not to listen to any more debates. They both thought that was best. In all honesty, I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the tournament. I might have had some judging assignments.

Scott and Debbie won four of the next six rounds. My other clear memory is of their eighth round assignment. It was recounted here.

Oh, please. They left out at least forty races.

I had my own great idea for a case, but no one on the team appreciated it. My idea was to increase the powers of law enforcement by creating a new agency to investigate felonies committed by aliens. I was not referring to the kind that cross the borders in the southwestern U.S. I meant the Greys, the Reptilians, and the other fifty-one well-documented unearthly races who had abducted countless American citizens.

I was half-serious about it. I was always attracted to cases with no evident disadvantages. The negative evidence on this case would be even scarcer than on the fencing case. The affirmative obviously could not employ the need-plan format, but surely the data gathered in the process of investigating sightings would be very useful if mankind ever needed to negotiate with the mother ship. At the very least the agency could publish a list of the people who were complete wackos.

During the summer of 1978 the other coaches and I worked with high school kids in Wayne State’s debate institute. The team that I worked with the most closely ended up winning the tournament at the end. I took no great pride in this achievement, but they were certainly better at the end of the week than they were at the beginning.

1. The principle was probably correct. When TSI implemented such a system for the inventory used in photo shoots by Macy’s in the nineties, the amount of pilferage experienced by the advertising department decreased dramatically.

2. Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would every year. In 1975 he revised it down to doubling every two years, which proved to be a good approximation of the improvement in the speed of the processors.

3. A “block” is an argument that is written out in detail with sub-points and evidence.

1977-1980 Part 3A: Debate at Wayne State: The Program

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Mike

George’s way. Continue reading →

Having spent seven years debating against or coaching against the people from Wayne State University, I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the debate program there on 1977. I knew that George Ziegelmueller had run the show for many years. In the mid-sixties the school produced some top debaters, but I had not been favorably impressed with them in more recent times. I did not realize until very recently that Dr. James Klumpp had directed the program during part of that time.

I met with George in late spring or early summer of 1977. His office was in Manoogian Hall on the fifth floor. The accommodations were MUCH nicer than at Michigan. The offices of the professors in the speech department surrounded a large open area. Across the hall was an even larger open area that served as the lounge for the Forensics Union, the official term for the competitors in debate and individual events (IE). It was at least ten times as large as the U-M debate office. It contained at least one lunch table, a sink, a refrigerator, several couches, and a few work areas.

George explained that all of the students at WSU commuted. They needed a place where they could hang around between classes to study or work on debate.

The Forensics Union, which everyone except George called the FU, also had its own bulletin board and trophy cases just outside of the lounge. At Michigan the trophies were piled up in a corner of the debate office. No one kept track of them.

George was aghast to learn that I had carted the U-M debaters around the country in Greenie to save money. The motor pool at Wayne State lent the FU cars. We were, however, required to wash them before we turned them in. This was a good deal for the team, of course, but we often returned from tournaments very late at night, and usually we delivered people to their homes, which were scattered throughout Detroit and its suburbs. I considered it a real pain to wash the car, especially in the winter.

The chicken always looked good at George’s favorite restaurant.

The debaters were not given a per diem for food. Instead, the coach chose the restaurant, and we all ate together. The coach was supposed to use subtlety to indicate what the monetary limit was. George always said something like, “The grilled chicken looks good.” Students could buy snacks with their own money, but no one was allowed to go over the limit to buy a more expensive meal.

The staff in my first year (1977-78) consisted of Jack Kay¹ (George’s right-hand man), Pam and Billy Benoit (my office-mates), and the residents of the other office for George’s graduate assistants—Vince Follert, John Pfeiffer, and Steve D’Agostino. Pam, John, and Steve worked with the IE team. The rest of us coached debaters.

The staff for 1978-79 was almost the same. Steve had departed, and Sheri Brimm had been hired.

My last year of coaching was 1979-80. Vince had finished his masters and gone to Western Illinois. Jack Kay departed for Nebraska. I don’t remember if John Pfeiffer was still there. Tuna Snider became George’s right-hand man. Gerry Cox and Ron Lee joined the staff. Ron’s wife Karen may have also helped out. Ken Haught may have worked with the IE people.

George explained his philosophy to me. In order to justify such nice facilities and such a large staff, it was important that the team keep up “the numbers”. So, it was necessary to undertake a massive recruitment effort in September. The people recruited had little or no experience with debate. We held staff meetings in order to assign reasonable pairings. The objective was to get as many people as possible to compete at the three-round novice tournament in October sponsored by the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League (MISL). This was the tournament in which I had made my collegiate debating debut in 1966. As a coach I had shunned it as a waste of time. However, I would have taken novices who lacked high school experience if I had had any.

For much of September and October the coaches were busy with these new recruits. When the tournament arrived, we loaded up several vans with novices and drove to the site. Our most fervent hope was that every pair won at least one debate. Usually at least one team did not meet that standard. There were some tears.

After that tournament quite a few of the novices dropped out of the program, but at least they had one experience of real debates. George always found at least one more tournament for those who continued with the program.

The rest of the tournament schedule mostly consisted of tournaments fairly close to Detroit. George tried to find places in which everyone could compete. He especially liked tournaments that had a varsity division and a novice division or ones with both IE and debate. I even was called on to judge a few IE rounds, not my most enjoyable experience.

The top varsity teams went to slightly higher-level tournaments, but Wayne State did not attend the swings on either coast and did not go to Georgetown and some of the other top tournaments. This attitude changed a little in the second and third year when our records improved.

The blank schedule looked something like this.

One of my assignments in 1977-78 was to schedule practice rounds, which served as the primary venue for coaching at Wayne. At the beginning of the semester all the coaches and debaters turned in cards with their schedules. They marked off the periods in which they had classes or were otherwise unavailable. Some, for example, had part-time jobs.

I found working with the cards to be clumsy. I photocopied a blank schedule onto a group of overlays used for an overhead projector. I then copied the data from cards onto the overlays with an erasable marker. To find the free periods for each foursome I just had to stack their overlays. In an hour I could easily generate the schedule for the week, and it always met George’s specifications . Previously people had labored over this task for an enormous amount of time and made mistakes.

Vince was assigned this task in 1978-79. He asked me how I did it. I showed him. I don’t remember who was responsible in 1979-80.

Before leaving for the first tournament in which I was in charge I asked for a short meeting with George. I inquired about a few of the team’s policies, including what to do if we were involved in a traffic accident. He said that no one had ever asked him about this. He thought for a moment and then said that he supposed that I should call him.

I could hardly believe that no previous coach had worried about this. Maybe it was understood that George was ultimately responsible for everything in this program. I just hoped that I had not jinxed the program by bringing up the subject.

George was understandably much more interested in public relations than I was. He sent debaters and/or IE people to give speeches or put on debates for various organizations fairly often. I was involved in a few of these, including moderating short debates for a local television station. I even made a commercial for our program.

In one way the Wayne State team was somewhat backward. George probably had a pretty good idea of the way that many judges evaluated debates, but the team lacked a systematic way of keeping the ballots. I showed George how I had stored all of U-M’s ballots sorted by judge in an accordion file. I asked if I could have the ballots when he was finished with them. He agreed.

Wayne State belonged to a national debate fraternity, Delta Sigma Rho-Tau Kappa Alpha (DSR-TKA). U-M had also belonged, but as far as I could tell, the school never really participated. George took the organization quite seriously. Wayne always attended the DSR-TKA nationals in March, and every spring there was a banquet in Manoogian. New members (like myself in 1978) were inducted and expected to provide entertainment.

The Forensics Union sponsored several extracurricular activities while I was there. Every year there was a Christmas party, the DSR-TKA banquet, a week-long summer institute for high school debaters, a trip to Camp Tamarack, a research trip, a fund-raising event of some sort, and, one year, a pinochle tournament. At U-M we had nothing similar to any of these.

1. My recollections of each of the other coaches are in a separate blog.

1976-1977 U-M: Debate?

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Mike

My last year coaching at U-M. Continue reading →

I did not learn of the demise of Michigan’s debate program in time to take steps to finding somewhere else to coach during the 1975-76 school year. Also, I seem to remember that I still needed at least one class to complete the requirements for my leisurely masters degree. I had not yet decided what to do. At some point during the fall I wrote a letter to George Ziegelmueller about coaching at Wayne State University in Detroit beginning in the 1977-78 school year. This was somewhat difficult to do. I had very little respect for George as a coach and none as a judge. However, Wayne State had by far the largest debate program in the state and had a PhD program in speech. I frankly doubt that I could have gotten hired anywhere else.

Early in the school year I had a long talk with Don Huprich. He told me that U-M’s debate team was a hopeless mess. The new coach, Jack Nightingale (I think that was his name, but I never met him), was a new graduate student in speech who knew less about competitive debate than the previous year’s novices, Dean Relkin and Bob Jones. Don wanted to debate with Stewart Mandel on the national circuit. He said that he would fund the expenses for the whole year himself. He asked me to coach and accompany them on trips. He owned a car that we could use. It was newer and nicer than mine, and because it had automatic transmission, anyone could drive it. He may have even offered to pay me a little money to help.

This little door financed U-M debate in 1976-77.

I was astounded by this offer. Don explained that his father held the patent on “fruit doors”, the little devices on the back of refrigerated trucks. He had reportedly made a LOT of money on this invention. Don evidently had access to enough of it to finance a two-person one-coach debate team. He also had figured out how to represent the Michigan debate team without going through the speech department. I am not sure how he managed it, but he was able to choose the tournaments that he wanted to attend, and he mailed in the registration forms himself. Neither I nor Jack Nightingale had anything to do with it.

I had no reason to reject Don’s proposition. I had nothing planned for either semester, and I was definitely not yet ready to abandon the quest on which I had set out two years earlier.

The debate topic for 1976-77 was “Resolved: That the federal government should significantly strengthen the guarantee of consumer product safety required of manufacturers.” A few cases were very popular that year: cigarettes, air bags for automobiles, and gun control. What was left of the U-M debate team had many disadvantages vis-à-vis the other schools, but we had one huge advantage—the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and its enormous library. Don and Stewart spent a great deal of time there.

I don’t remember too many details about the season, but I do remember watching an octafinal round at an early tournament, maybe Western Illinois. Stewart and Don must have been debating in another room. If they had been eliminated and I had not been scheduled to judge, we would certainly have gone home. I don’t remember which teams participated in this debate. The affirmative ran a case that banned automation. Really. All automation.

Occasionally the best arguments are simple.

Both affirmative and negative debaters were always expected to justify their claims with evidence. Some ideas, however, are so ridiculous that no one has bothered to research or write about them. This was clearly one of those ideas. It is difficult to attack such a case using any usual approach. The other team doubtless has a few documented examples where automating a process was a bad idea, but what researcher would bother to document the myriad cases in which machines improved life? Does anyone want to return to the days when fields were plowed by horses and oxen? Does anyone want to eliminate machines that allow people to survive life-threatening injuries or illnesses?

I don’t remember many of the negative’s arguments, but the second negative won the debate (and probably removed the case from the circuit) when he pulled out a dictionary and read the definition of “automation”. He then just spoke frankly for a few minutes and outlined a strong case for a civilized country with a modern military and health system and an economy that took advantage of science.

The judges all voted negative, and I never heard of this case again. What surprised me was that the affirmative must have prevailed in a few previous rounds. Maybe the used a different case.

On the whole this was definitely an affirmative-biased topic. It was relatively easy to find a manufactured product that was apparently causing problems. It was much more challenging for the negative to show that the proposed regulation of that product would make things worse. Furthermore, there were thousands of consumer products, and the affirmative chose which ones were the subject of the debate. The negative had to be prepared for almost anything.

The three most important debates of the year— the semifinals and finals of NDT—were all won by the affirmative teams. Of the fifteen ballots cast in these debates, twelve were for the affirmative. Southern Cal won its semifinal on the affirmative 5-0 but lost the final round on the negative 4-1.

Those debates completed a pattern that was established much earlier in the year. If a team had a choice between debating affirmative or negative, it almost always chose affirmative. In contrast, in my senior year seven years earlier the team that won the coin flip in every elimination rounds in which I participated chose negative.

In 1976-77 many negative teams depended on the writings and research of Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago. His books and articles claimed that in many cases when people’s devices were made apparently safer by a governmental requirement, the people using the devices adopted riskier strategies because they feel more comfortable doing so. For example, people wearing seat belts might drive faster or more recklessly. He had documented some cases in which adding safety devices apparently resulted in the increase in deaths or injuries.

Another approach used by many negative teams was to label harmful effects documented by their opponents as “self-imposed”. Plenty of philosophers have argued that in a free society individuals should be allowed to judge their own costs and benefits. This approach could be used, for example, against a law mandating helmets for those riding motorcycles. A person who is not wearing one may be putting his own life in danger, but his lack of a helmet is extremely unlikely to harm others. Any harm that he might suffer is self-induced.

I really liked the case that Don developed based on speed governors for automobiles and trucks. Because of the energy crisis it was already illegal to drive over fifty-five miles per hour almost everywhere in the United States. Why then were many cars built to go ninety miles per hour or more? It was easy to show that decreasing the maximum speed saves lots of lives every year. In fact, speed governors had been tried in some jurisdictions. The harm was not self-imposed, at least not entirely, because most serious accidents involve more than one vehicle, and passengers seldom were allowed to vote about how hard the driver pressed the accelerator pedal. The “Peltzman effect” does not apply either. What can drivers do to offset the limitation on speed? Take a nap? Drive on two wheels like Joey Chitwood?

Many teams in 1976-77 had nearly unbeatable cases. Negatives had to be very clever. Sometimes the best approach was to argue topicality¹. However, most debaters and their coaches were averse to these arguments. They were more comfortable arguing about facts and analysis than about semantics.

I don’t remember if Don and Stewart wen to the tournaments in California. I definitely did not.

For me the most memorable event of the year was the “east coast swing”. As I recall, Don’s original plan was to attend all three tournaments—Boston College, Harvard, and Dartmouth. So, the three of us set out early in the morning on Friday, January 28, 1977. As always, we drove through southern Ontario. The roads were perfectly clear all the way through Canada, but as we approached the U.S. border we noticed that the snow was piled up pretty high on the sides of the road. We were not aware that Lake Erie, which is south of Ontario and west of Buffalo, had at that point been frozen over for forty-five days! Several feet of powdery snow had been accumulating on the surface.

We drove on Route 405 to the border crossing between Lewiston, NY, and Niagara Falls (red arrow in upper left corner). At this point we were right on schedule. The roads were clear, and the visibility was good as we headed southeast on U.S. 62 skirting the northeast suburbs of Buffalo. On each side of us the snow was piled at least ten feet high. We could see no buildings. We knew that we were in a populous area, but the only evidence of civilization were a few road signs peaking out over the snowpack. It was an awesome experience, but we had no reason to feel threatened. The change in conditions only began when we reached the New York Thruway (I-90) near Williamsville (second arrow from left).

All these photos (except the toll booth) are from the Buffalo or Batavia area during the Blizzard of 1977.

Quite suddenly the wind, which blew from the west, picked up dramatically, and the snow began to fall. The wind whipped the snow around the front of our car from both sides. Visibility dropped to near zero. At times we could not see to the end of our car’s hood. Soon it became impossible even to tell where the lanes were. It was cold, but Stewart and I rolled down our windows and helped Don, who was driving, keep the vehicle on the road by continually reporting to him him how far it wase from the snowbank. He slowed down to 10 miles per hour or less.

This was the famous Blizzard of 1977 that killed twenty-three people, many of them on the stretch of road that we needed to travel. We were quite familiar with this stretch of the NY Thruway. There were no cities of much consequence near the highway until we reached Syracuse, which was most of the way across the state. Something bad would probably happen to us if we tried to go that far.

While we were inching along the highway, semis occasionally passed us. Perhaps the drivers thought they could outrun the storm. However, the wind, which gusted up to sixty-nine miles per hour, was a bigger problem than the snow. It was picking up powdered snow from Lake Erie and from Buffalo, which had already received more than ten feet of snow that year, and dumping it on the Thruway. We caught glimpses of several jackknifed eighteen-wheelers on both sides of the eastbound portion of the highway.

We quickly determined that we needed to leave the highway at the first exit that we came to. We looked and looked, but we never saw an exit. We could not see any of the road signs well enough to read them. In fact, for a long time we could see nothing in front of or behind us and only the snowbanks to the left and right. We continued moving slowly eastward for almost three hours.

At last I spotted a sign for a Rodeway Inn peeking over the snowbank on the right. It was perhaps fifty yards away. I figured that in all likelihood there must be an exit nearby. I was so concerned about missing the exit that I actually considered recommending that we abandon the car and try to make our way toward that sign by crawling over the snowpack, which was at least ten feet deep. Instead Don slowed down the car even more to avoid missing the exit.

We never did see any signs for the exit, but by maintaining a constant distance between the car and the snowbank on the right we accidentally departed the highway at the exit for Batavia, NY (arrow on the right in the above map). Our first indication that we were no longer on the Thruway was the array of toll booths ahead of us, and we could not see them until we were almost upon them.

It was a great relief to see a live human being in the toll booth. We paid our toll and told him that the Thruway should definitely be closed. He replied that it had been closed for more than an hour. We asked him if there was a hotel nearby. He advised us that there was a Holiday Inn² near the end of the ramp.

Don guided the vehicle into the hotel’s snow-covered parking lot. At the reception desk they told us that only a few rooms were still available. Needless to say, we took one. We then asked if the hotel had a restaurant. It did, but the desk clerk said it had been closed when the food ran out. He assured us that there would be a breakfast buffet in the morning. We would have greatly preferred to have a breakfast buffet that evening, but it wasn’t in the cards, and we did not even discuss taking the car out to search for a restaurant or market. Instead we each purchased several candy bars from the machines. An hour or so later those machines were empty.

We called Tuna Snider, the coach at Boston College, and told him that we were stuck in Batavia. He was surprised to hear how bad the conditions were. I am not aware of any other teams that got stuck in this morass. I told the BC people that I did not know when we would arrive, but I would be happy to judge when we got there. Tuna said that that would be greatly appreciated. He said that he would pay me $10 per round, which was the usual rate.

We also called home and told everyone that we were alive and safe.

I am pretty sure that we had missed lunch, and we definitely had nothing but candy bars for supper. Don, Stewart, and I were therefore hungry and disappointed. However, we all appreciated how much worse it could have been. We set our alarms and asked for a wake-up call in time for us to be at the breakfast buffet as soon as the doors were open. That night we slept the sleep of the just.

By daybreak the snow had stopped. The wind was still blowing, however. So, snow that was pushed to the side of the road by the plows was often quickly replaced by snow blown off of the snowpack. The Thruway was still closed in both directions.

On the way to breakfast we saw that dozens of people had set up camp in the hotel’s lobby. Many were still sleeping. We were near the beginning of the buffet line and piled on the food. The restaurant usually allowed unlimited trips to the buffet, but on this occasion the management sensibly limited everyone to one trip. Nevertheless, they ran out of food while we were finishing our plentiful meal.

Many of the people stranded in the hotel were truckers. They were able to obtain up-to-the-minute information about the road conditions. We learned from one of them that from Syracuse to the east the Thruway was open, but that it was doubtful that the area near Batavia would reopen until the following day.

I don’t think that I-490 and I-390 existed in 1977.

A more promising development was reported later in the morning. Evidently Route 33, a two-lane road that connected Rochester with Batavia had just opened. From Rochester we could allegedly take another two-lane road, Route 31, toward Victor, NY. The Thruway was allegedly open from there to New England.

We allowed a few intrepid truckers to blaze the trail before we decided to try it. Maps were still plentiful in 1977, and I think that Don had one. Having made sure that we had good directions for making the proper connections on these side roads, we cleared a few feet of snow off of Don’s car and set off for Rochester. Initially we had to drive a mile or so south to reach Route 33 in the middle of Batavia. The roads were surprisingly passable in Batavia. The residents had never seen this kind of storm, but they had considerable experience at dealing with snow.³

The interstate shown on this map from Rochester to Victor did not exist. We took Route 31.

Route 33 was a little precarious. Snow that was continually blowing onto the highway made conditions a little slippery, but at least we could see. In a few places the width that had been cleared was not sufficient for two cars, but we encountered almost no vehicles headed for Batavia. By the time that we reached Rochester the conditions were much better. The drive on Route 31 was even easier. In fact we faced no more significant delays all the way to Boston.

I am pretty sure that I judged quite a few rounds at the Boston College tournament. They paid me, and I gave the money to Don. Don and Stewart rested up and then watched at least one elimination round. I also have a dim recollection of all three of us going to a party thrown by the tournament staff and the BC coach, Tuna Snider.

I don’t actually remember anything else about the part of the trip involving the debating. Don and Stewart surely debated at Harvard, but I don’t remember how they did. I have a vague recollection of being on the Dartmouth campus. I seem to remember that the guys did well there. I might be wrong

I have one strong memory of the drive home. Since there were three potential drivers, we elected to drive straight through with only minimal stops. We did not run into any snow. It was, however, dark and very cold when we crossed the border into Canada. Don was exhausted. He handed the keys to me.

I was alert for the first hour or so, but then I also became very sleepy. There was almost no traffic. Don and Stewart were both dead to the world. I unilaterally adopted a policy of pulling the car over to the breakdown lane every twenty or thirty minutes. I then exited from the car and stood for a second in the bitterly cold air before I walked completely around the car. I then got back in and drove on.

By the time that we reached Windsor, I had my second wind. I drove straight through from there to Plymouth, where I gave the keys back to Don.

When I arrived home Sue told us that she had been praying that we would find an Eskimo lady to take us in.

My only recollection of the remainder of the debate season before districts was an elimination round that I, along with two other debate coaches, judged between Harvard and Georgetown. They were two of the very best teams in the country. Georgetown was on the affirmative, arguing in favor of mandatory air bags.

At the conclusion of the debate the other two judges quickly signed and turned in their ballots. I, however, was not a bit certain who had won. I spent at least fifteen minutes asking to read various pieces of evidence from both teams. In the end I voted for Harvard. One of the other judges had voted affirmative and one negative, but neither thought that it was close.

I was not too worried about Don and Stewart’s prospects at districts. Northwestern’s top team had received a first round bid. I did not think that anyone else could touch the case on speed governors, and I was pretty sure that Don and Stewart, who had done well in some prestigious national tournaments, could win at least two rounds on the negative.

I was right. We all got to go to NDT at Southwest Missouri State University⁴ in Springfield.

The drive to SMS was long, but we were accustomed to long road trips. We had plenty to discuss on the way. For once we knew exactly the set of teams from which our opponents would be drawn.

We did not stay at the hotel recommended by the tournament. Don found one a couple of miles from the SMS campus that featured much lower rates.

The black & white episodes are much better than the ones in color.

I should mention that the people in southern Missouri talk with a much more pronounced drawl than the residents of KC, St. Louis, and points north. Springfield is near the Ozarks, the home of Jed Clampett and his kin. It resembles Arkansas much more than it resembles northern Missouri

The SMS campus was very nice. I have a pretty clear recollection of one debate round that I judgied. Two guys from UMass were on the affirmative. Their case had two distinct parts. One part advocated gun control; the other mandated speed governors. That part was similar to Don and Stewart’s case.

The room in which the debate took place was in a building facing the quadrangle in the middle of campus. It was a beautiful spring day, and someone had opened a window or two in the room. The first affirmative had completed his presentation of the case. Prep time for one of the subsequent speeches was in progress when a fair amount of commotion could be heard through the window. Some SMS students were evidently being overly boisterous.

Someone in the room, perhaps a judge, asked, “What was that?” Because I took judging very seriously, I kept my peace. However, I thought of an extremely appropriate answer: “They probably heard that some Yankees had come down here talkin’ about takin’ their guns away and slowin’ down their cars.”

For NDT every judge was asked to explicate his judging philosophy in a paragraph or two. These were accumulated, duplicated, and included in the tournament welcome packets. We also had brought the accordion file of U-M ballots from previous tournaments (and years). Before the tournament started every team was allowed to name three judges that they wished to exclude from judging them. This process was called “striking”. I don’t remember which judges we struck, but the emphasis was definitely on competence rather than who associated with whom. I did not generally go to coaches’ parties and so I was not really aware of those relationships.

In the eighth round Don and Stewart faced a very good team, Fabiani⁵ and McNamara from Redlands. They had received one of the coveted first-round bids. I do not recall which team was on the affirmative. I also do not remember the other two judges, but one was Brad Ziff from Georgetown. Everyone in the tournament knew that this was an important round. A few people from District 5 approached me to tell me that I should have put Brad Ziff on our strike list. They said that he never voted against Redlands.

At any rate Redlands won the debate 3-0 and advanced to the elimination rounds. In fact, they made it as far as the semifinals. Don was convinced that Redlands had won on reputation, not arguments. He was so upset that he refused to attend the final assembly in which the qualifiers were announced, and speaker awards were presented. I had no real jurisdiction over him, but I was six years older. I said that we were all going to swallow our feelings and go to the assembly with our heads held high.

Don protested that I had made an angry display at Harvard once. I admitted that I did, and it was wrong. I insisted that we all attend the assembly, and we did. If anyone knew how he felt, it was I. Still, attending was the right thing to do.

The drive back was not a lot of fun. Don really wanted to debate in the elimination rounds at NDT. He deserved it, too. I suspect that he had worked harder that year than anyone in the entire history of U-M debate.

Georgetown won the NDT that year.

At some point during the year I drove to Wayne State in downtown Detroit and met with George Z. He said that he had talked with Dr. Colburn, who had informed him of an incident involving expense reports. I explained that I had turned a large number of them at once, and the secretary got upset. He just laughed at that. He offered me a job as a teaching assistant. I seem to remember that they also waived the tuition.

1. “Topicality” refers to arguments about whether the affirmative’s plan is a legitimate interpretation of the resolution. For the 1976-77 resolution some might argue that the federal government was not the actor, that the action was not significant, that manufacturers were not required to do anything, etc.

2. My recollection is that it was a Holiday Inn, but the hotels that in 2021 are located near the exit that we stumbled upon do not include a Holiday Inn. There are also no Rodeway Inns nearby either.

3. A first-hand blog of the event in Batavia can be read here.

4. The university is now called Missouri State. The “Southwest” part was dropped in 2005.

5. Mark Fabiani was only a sophomore in 1977. He was the top speaker at the 1979 NDT. He later became a very prominent political figure both in Los Angeles and nationwide. His Wikipedia page is here.

6. Brad Ziff’s LinkedIn page is here.

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Mike

Orals and dissertation Continue reading →

By May of 1980 I had enough hours in speech and related subjects to qualify for a PhD. My oral exams and my dissertation remained.

I needed to form a committee. I think that Steve Alderton¹ was assigned as the head of my committee. I doubt that I chose him. I did choose George Ziegelmueller, the Director of Forensics and also my boss, and Ray Ross, the author of the Speech 100 textbook. Other graduate students assured me that Ross was a soft touch.

I was not worried about the orals. I reviewed a few notes for maybe an hour just before the test began. A psych professor had told us that the average performance on oral exams is horrendous because most students get flustered. The best performance he had seen was by a mediocre student who also hosted a program on the university’s radio station. I figured that my 14+ years of debate experience was more valuable than that. I knew that the trick was to admit it quickly when you didn’t know something. Don’t try to invent an answer. That is, maximize the time spent on what you know by minimizing the time spent on what you don’t know.

There was one difficult question that I knew that I had to answer. Steve asked me whether validity or reliability was more important in a statistical study. I mulled over the question for a few seconds and then chose validity. I hedged my bet by saying that reliability was important, but if your study lacked validity, you did not have anything. I am pretty sure that I gave the right answer.

Anyway, the committee only kept me waiting for about five minutes before they told me that I passed.

The topic of my dissertation was communication in groups. I was most interested in the power of arguments. Before I describe what I proposed to do, I need to talk about a group-communication study on which I worked with Steve earlier in the year.

The data for Steve’s study was collected before I became involved. Forty or fifty people were presented with two different problems that were each described in two or three paragraphs. They were asked to choose between two alternatives in both cases. Their responses were recorded.

Then they discussed both problems as a group. My recollection is that there were fewer than ten groups. Each group turned in a recommendation for each problem. The discussions were recorded on tape. Someone transcribed these onto paper.

Steve and I then categorized some of the utterances in the discussions as arguments. The idea was to use statistical tools on the arguments to determine how powerful they were in producing the results.

For some reason Steve was only interested in one of the two problems. We spent a long time reading the transcripts and marking them up. He had somehow established a minimum level of agreement about what constituted an argument, and he claimed that our two evaluations had met this standard.

The final step was to find the correlation between the arguments and the conclusion. The statistical tools required that the items being counted are independent of one another. Well, most people in the social sciences would consider the groups independent of one another. If not, there would be almost no studies of groups. The individuals could also be considered independent, at least when they were filling out their original forms heard from other participants.

Steve, however, wanted to use a method called “conversational analysis” that someone at his Alma Mater, Indiana University, had advocated. In this method the arguments themselves were used to determine the sample size (always designated by the letter n). If you counted the groups, you would probably need at least one hundred of them to have any chance of getting a statistically significant result. Even if you counted individuals instead of groups, the sample size of this experiment was not very large.

However, if you set n based on the count of the arguments, and dozens of arguments could be identified in each discussion, it would be much easier. To me it seemed clear that the people in the groups were not independent of one another. It is even clearer that the arguments should not be considered independent of one another.

Steve had offered to add my name to the paper in which he summarized the findings. When I told him that I did not want him to do this, he asked me why. I told him that I thought that he was calculating his sample size wrong, and this decision made it much easier to get positive results. He responded that quite a few studies that used conversational analysis had already been published.

Believe me; I thought of a lot of sarcastic ways to explain my reluctance to be involved. I did not let any of them past my teeth, but my face may have betrayed how worthless I thought that this approach was. To say Steve was insulted would be a gross understatement.

What did interest me was the problem that he discarded. I don’t remember all of the details, but it involved a student who was challenging his final grade in a class. The grade was based on four tests. The letter grades for the tests, one of which was an F, were provided, as was the final grade assigned by the teacher. In the text it said that the teacher had not erred in his calculations. I think that the four test grades were B, B, C, and F, and the final grade assigned was a D.

In several groups, one enterprising member calculated the final grade the way that one would calculate a GPA: (4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for D, and 0 for F). By this method, the student had four grades with a total of eight points. The group member argued that the student should have received a C because 8 (3+3+2+0) divided by 4 is 2. In every group in which the argument was made, the group’s decision went in favor of the student. When it was not, the decision went the other way.

It was a perfect argument!

Well, like Pope Urban II’s famous speech that launched the first crusade, it was effective, but I would hardly deem it “perfect”. In the first place, the text of the problem explicitly stated that the instructor had not made this kind of a mistake. Furthermore, the 4-3-2-1 method is never used in grading individual tests because the range for an F is too great. What if the F on one test was, for whatever reason, a 0? If the B’s are 85’s and the C is a 75, the average grade is 61.25, a low D.

I thought that it might be interesting to explore why people in the groups capitulated to what seemed to me a poor argument. However, it was Steve’s data, and I did not have the gall to ask him for it to write a competing paper. As it was, he was very irritated with me already.

For the dissertation committee I also needed to recruit someone from outside the department. I planned to ask the professor who taught the psych class that I had aced and who explained about the orals. However, when I finally got around to asking him, I learned that he was on sabbatical. I really had no choice but to ask the psych department to provide a substitute. I sent the assigned professor a copy of my prospectus, but I had never actually talked to him!

For my study I wanted to use the “shift to risk” studies to which I had been introduced by Prof. Cartwright in the psych department at U-M. At that time at least forty papers had been published that used exactly the same set of twelve problems². The original study had concluded that groups made riskier decisions than individuals. Some later studies found that this shift only occurred on nine of the twelve problems. One problem showed negligible change, and in the other two the group decisions were actually more conservative.

In these studies the answers were always given in terms of a probability of success at which the riskier choice would be desirable. That is, people were asked to assign a number between one in ten and and ten in ten that represented the lowest chance for success for which they would recommend the riskier alternative. My hypothesis was (1) that each of the twelve problems had a natural set of arguments; (2) not all people are accustomed to making risk-reward decisions based on Bayesian probabilities; (3) these people can be swayed by arguments that they had not considered.

Steve asked the committee to determine whether this study was (1) important enough for a dissertation, and (2) really about speech communication. The psych professor immediately spoke up. He said that he could not address the second issue. However, he said that mine was a very clever approach to an important topic. Despite the fact that there had been a large number of studies to analyze these shifts, no one had ever proposed this mechanism. I was dumbfounded by this unrequested assistance, and all the committee members were very impressed.

Steve insisted that I add conversational analysis to my methodology in order to bring it under the rubric of speech communication. I agreed to do so, but as I was telling the committee this, I said to myself that I would never spend a minute on this study. It now seemed to me like a potential nightmare that might drag on for years.

I also realized that I really did not want to be a professor of speech communication. I loved debate, and, at least at that time, the only way to coach debate was to be on the speech faculty of a school with a debate program. I probably would need to fight for funding for the program, a task that I would not enjoy. Furthermore, because of my background in math and statistics, I felt certain that I would be asked to sit on every committee that evaluated a statistical study. I had heard about and even participated in a few of these, and I had yet to encounter one with which I would want to be associated. Here are a few examples.

My first postgraduate class at U-M had been an introduction to graduate studies. In it one of the students asserted that he wanted to go to an Arab country to study their television shows to determine how much they widespread and influential American shows were. He wanted someone to finance him to go to Arab countries, watch television for a few months, and take notes. For a PhD!No, he did not speak Arabic. When I asked if they had something like a TV Guide that he could analyze, he said that that would not be sufficient. He said that he needed to see how many camels there were and stuff like that. I am not joking.
At Wayne State I participated in a study in which the experimenter obviously lied about what was happening in other aspects of the experiment. The fact that I figured this out should invalidate his approach. It is absolutely not allowed. If I were on his committee, I would have made him start over with a new design.
I also read Juddi Trent’s dissertation. She found that the speeches in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign differed significantly in style and content from the speeches in 1968. It was a well-known fact (and one that she acknowledged in the first paragraph of her dissertation) that Nixon wrote the first set, and he employed a team of speech-writers for the second set. Her null hypothesis was that the techniques were the same. She then used statistics to prove that the two sets were not likely to be identical, something she knew for a fact before she started.

Faculty members have three main responsibilities: teaching, publishing, and serving on committees. I had little interest in the subjects I would need to teach and publish, and I would be considered an ogre by all of the graduate students. I decided to do something else with my life.

What I decided to do was to try to help Sue’s fledgling computer software company become more viable. Since Michigan was in the throes of one of its increasingly frequent “auto depressions”, we decided to move back to Connecticut.

1. While writing this I discovered that only a few years later 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.

2. This is called the “Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire” (CDQ) published by Kogan and Wallach in 1964. Here is an example: “Mr B, who has developed a severe heart ailment, has the choice of changing many of his strongest life habits or undergoing a delicate medical operation which may succeed or prove fatal.” Participants are asked to read the statement and then imagine they are advising the main character. They are then asked to indicate the probability of success (from 1 in 10 to 10 in 10) sufficient for them to choose the risky alternative.

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.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Ziegelmueller, George

1977-1978 Wayne State Debate Tournaments, etc.

1977-1980 Part 3A: Debate at Wayne State: The Program

1976-1977 U-M: Debate?

1980 Why I Am Not a PhD

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate