Director’s Update #4

Your constructive and sustained advocacy saved this season for students! The University will provide support for the team this year. We forced a reversal of course for this year, but a major challenge is still ahead. There has, to this point, been no explicit commitment to a robust forensics experience that can only be achieved as a Department overseen by a faculty Director.

It remains to be seen what level of institutional support will continue beyond this year, but our progress demonstrates what can be accomplished through collaboration and persistence. Our next challenge is to ensure Forensics once again finds a permanent home within an academic department—led by a qualified Director of Forensics who can continue this proud legacy for years to come. The pressure applied on administration by your numerous expressions of support for the program’s survival has been enormously helpful, as current competitors continue the campaign on campus.

In announcing their intention to terminate the Department of Forensics last month, the Dean of the Clark Honors College suggested forming a student club, as if a rigorous academic program more than 100 years old was something like the frisbee club. It was evident then, and even more so in the weeks that followed, that they had not considered the implications of their abrupt decision. What they advised was simply impossible, as they would have learned if they’d consulted with knowledgeable parties and those who support forensics.

When you pointed out these facts in your letters and emails, when this was noted in many local media stories, when students themselves made this case, and were supported by their peers in ASUO, the administration came to realize the damage of an abrupt and ill-considered decision and reversed course this year.

As we celebrate this critical victory, we must continue to organize and work towards achieving our long-term goal of sustaining a robust Oregon Forensics program for the next 150 years. Members of the Oregon Forensics Alumni Network are united in this cause, and with the support of students and the student government, we will persist until we achieve success in finding a new, permanent home for a Department of Forensics overseen by a passionate and experienced faculty Director.

It is with considerable sadness tempered only by a sense of great accomplishment that I believe I will not be the Director of Forensics of the Department when we secure our new institutional home. As an alum, I will continue to play my part, but it will likely not be in the role of Director of Forensics.

I experience considerable sadness because, having secured my doctorate in Information Science at Michigan, I was called to change professional paths to help build our beloved program, one that made my professional successes possible. Anyone who has spent even a minute with me understands my love of Oregon Forensics and my passion for helping students benefit from the life-changing opportunities a robust forensics program provides.

My sadness, however, is genuinely tempered by a deep sense of accomplishment. I am not one prone to self-promotion, a weakness in the modern academic environment, but my uncle taught me that leaders give credit and take blame.

Under my leadership, we have expanded the program from approximately 15 students to 120, as recently as two years ago. For many years, as Director of Forensics, we had the largest collegiate forensics program in the country and the only large program with a majority of female-identifying participants.

We increased our annual travel budget by nearly 300%.

I increased our endowed funds several times over. I secured a program-sustaining deferred estate gift of nearly $3 million from the daughter and son-in-law of legendary former Director of Forensics W. Scott Nobles.

These gifts and many more from our dedicated alumni could be realized if the administration secures a stable Department of Forensics in a new, welcoming home, led by an experienced Director of Forensics. They will not be realized by a student club prone to volatility, interpersonal conflicts, and serious potential risks to student welfare and institutional liabilities.

Through active engagement with campus stakeholders, we have produced a culture of respect for each other and have worked continuously to ensure all students feel welcome and find a home in forensics. The cultural challenges that have long plagued forensics have been largely addressed, though they require continual efforts, which is also unlikely under a student club model.

I co-founded and helped lead the new Collegiate Advocacy, Research, and Debate (CARD) format of debate, a rigorous form of evidence-based policy debate designed to meet the current needs of modern students. It is the only form of college debate that is growing. We won many tournaments and speaker awards, and our hundreds of debate alumni have graduated into lives of accomplishment. We won a national championship in parliamentary debate in 2022 – our 6th national championship.

Mock trial has grown from fewer than a dozen students to many dozens and three trips to nationals. We are among the strongest new mock trial programs in the country and, by far, the strongest in the Pacific Northwest.

We have sponsored remarkable campus events, including debates about US policy toward Iran and Syria, a panel of experts discussing wildfire risks and policy, the history of Black student radicalism in the Pacific Northwest, and participated in demonstration debates with champion debaters from Ireland and the United Kingdom. We promoted forensics through the media, the City Club of Eugene, and local Rotary chapters.

I founded and helped to grow the Oregon Forensics Alumni Network, producing contact information shared with the alumni association, and we hosted fabulous and large alumni reunion events.

We accomplished all of this despite a significant shift in the budget model in 2018, which unfortunately eliminated two graduate student positions that had supported the forensics program since the era of Robert Clark, the program’s DOF, following World War II. It’s difficult to imagine that the college he helped build—one that carries his name—now views forensics as only tangentially connected to the university experience, rather than as the deeply enriching component of a liberal arts education that it has long proven to be.

Since 2013, the Department of Forensics has achieved an extraordinary amount under my leadership, and I am confident that these accomplishments will stand as an important and proud chapter in our distinguished history.

As I transition to the next stage of my professional life, I look forward to fewer late-night calls from students in need, long drives home after tournaments, and a reprieve from the procedural demands that accompany academic life.

It has, without question, all been worth it.

And so too is standing alongside you in the continued effort to ensure that Oregon Forensics has a future worthy of its remarkable past.

Trond Jacobsen
Oregon Forensics