Director’s Update #3: Take Action

This update is more to the point than the previous Update #1 and Update #2:

We need alumni – you – to take action this week – before Sunday, October 12, 2025.

Please take 5 minutes to write a personal email in support of Oregon Forensics.

1. Please send a personalized email this week. CRITICAL IMMEDIATE NEED.

I meet with the Provost next week to explore ways to stabilize Oregon Forensics. We want that meeting to occur on the heels of their receiving many personalized emails from alumni this week. Use this link for information about creating a personalized email emphasizing how forensics helped you and calling for the administration to find a new institutional home for the program and a Director of Forensics to help sustain it over the generations. The two core messages, in your voice and reflecting your experience, are:

1. 1. Forensics meant a lot to me
   2. Future students deserve a similarly robust forensics experience.

2. Contribute whatever you can this week to the Oregon Forensics Foundation.

THIS IS A CRITICAL IMMEDIATE NEED. We have students ready and eager to compete at Puget Sound, Gonzaga, Washington, and Berkeley this month and next, but we are still working on accessing previously allocated funds. Please contribute what you can today! Without your contributions, it is unlikely students will be able to compete at these tournaments in the next few weeks. Please also consider a monthly contribution.

3. Participate in an action team. If you can, follow the link, share some contact information and join an Action Team. You indicated you are interested in helping as part of the Alumni Action Team. We need your help! Even 30 minutes a week for the next month or two could help your cause. The effort is a complex and challenging one, and will be difficult to sustain without more people helping the cause.

Updates

We continue to make progress in our efforts to widen the scope of leaders on campus exploring ways to support a robust forensics program capable of serving all interested students and providing the kind of quality educational experience they deserve.

We continue to make our case successfully in the media and in letters of support from individuals across the country. The Faculty Senate is concerned about the decision to close the forensics department, especially the way the decision was made — essentially in secret, late in the summer, by a single person. They are examining the issue.

We are hearing signs that, as campus leaders become more aware of what would be lost to our students and the university in terms of prestige and public perception, they may choose a better course.

It is true that the university faces budget challenges but cutting forensics is essentially eating the seed corn. It denies some of our brightest and hardest-working students, future leaders all, a life-changing experience that benefits all our communities.

Forensics experiences have truly never been more central to the mission of the universities – ours and others – than today.

As well as any other experiences – many of us would say more than any other experience – forensics helps this university achieve the vision articulated in the Oregon Rising vision for the university.

This Oregon Rising vision foregrounds four core goals:

1. timely graduation and greater academic achievement – success in the classroom and all academic and intellectual experiences;
2. career and professional development – acquiring the enduring individual and social skills needed to succeed after graduation;
3. individual flourishing – the sense of self-efficacy, personal growth, and social networking that makes an Oregon education fulfilling; and
4. enlarging the societal impact of the work of Oregon students and faculty

As alumni of Oregon Forensics we know how a strong forensics program supercharged our ability to articulate our ideas, test them, unpack the characteristics of strong and weak arguments, organize and make sense of complex scholarship and research, critically analyze information to assess quality and relevance, and identify and understand how to address the great challenge of our age.

Forensics serves each of the goals of the Oregon Rising campaign. We know how forensics improved our academic performance, how we use the enduring skills we acquired through in our academic and professional lives after graduating from Oregon. We can fully and effectively participate in social and political discussions shaping our collective future. Our experiences are repeatedly validated in educational outcomes research, which finds, in essence, no experience in or out of the classroom is more strongly associated with positive educational and life outcomes goals than participation in an intellectually rigorous and robust forensics experience.