Director’s Update #1

This is the first of what will become a regular feature: Director’s Update. This series will provide alumni and program supporters information about progress on our multi-faceted effort to sustain a robust Oregon Forensics program. Regular updates will also provide information opportunities for alumni, students and supporters to contribute in a range of ways that may fit their interests and capacity. This update concludes with a brief introduction of a Forensics Strategic Plan that is nearing completion and that will be the tool and the target of the Oregon Forensics Forever mobilization.

If you read one thing from this update let it be this: The story here is not the dissolution of Oregon Forensics. The story here is the rising tide of students, alumni, and supporters organizing and applying pressure until we secure a permanent institutional home led by a dedicated and professional forensics educator. The story here is of the Oregon Forensics Forever movement. You can help write that story.

The report below details an impressive set of well-designed initiatives capable of achieving our goals. But it will not be easy. Most importantly, it will not be immediate. We are well-positioned to achieve our goals, but it is going to take shared efforts by many, wisely applied over at least this year. You can help!

Sustaining that effort requires your help, whether you are a current student, a prospective student, or a program alum. Whether you are most touched by speech or debate or mock trial. Whether you are early in your career or retired, We need your help! 

1. Complete this survey and join an action team (includes a way for us to let you know about giving opportunities; there are modest but immediate financial needs).

2. At least update your alumni information.

3. Communications to avoid.

Student appeal to Dean

Our opening gambit was an appeal to the Dean led by forensics and ASUO students seeking to reverse the abrupt decision to terminate CHC support for forensics, effectively ending the Department structure we enjoyed since about 2010. We are shifting gears from pressuring to reverse the decision to restoring it as a Department led by a professional forensics educator for the 26-27 academic year and beyond. In parallel, students are focused on working with ASUO to set up a student program to support competition this year.

We anticipated this unfortunate outcome. There is an advantage in terms of perception. The Dean made the wrong decision and made it the wrong way. Students asked for a reasonable if short term accommodation that avoided throwing this season into chaos. The contrast between their unreasonableness, both in the original decision and in the reply to our request, and our reasonableness is a form of modest political power in the dynamics moving forward. 

The official university line is “too few students for too much (CHC) money in these austere times”. There is much that is flawed in that statement and our messaging strategy needs to poke at the most important weak points.

2025-26 competition

We are working with the ASUO and forensics students to form a club this year to receive funds required for a (diminished) competition schedule while others focus on the long-term challenge of finding a stable institution home. This raises a few unique challenges alumni are best positioned to help address in the very near term (more below). It poses unique challenges to mock trial, because clubs must complete all travel planning – names, students, lodging, vehicles, food money allocation, etc. – at least 8 weeks before travel under most circumstances. The time between Regionals and ORCS is about three weeks and between ORCS and Nationals a little more. 

There are numerous challenges to the program model even if successful. The key is to frame the transition as temporary and undesirable, even in the near term, but that the Dean’s intransigence requires this as a stop gap. There are large immediate challenges to this transition for this year but they can be mitigated. The student club model is catastrophic over the longer term.

501(c)(3)

UO student clubs often raise money using GoFundMe and other similar platforms. We have created a more secure and reliable and enduring platform to meet that need. The brilliance of the plan is that it will serve as an independent board capable of receiving funds, including grant funds, to promote forensics at every level – middle school, high school, and collegiate, and regardless of activity (speech, debate, mock trial). Individuals and organizations will be able to apply for modest grants to support their activities.

We need appreciable financial support from alumni beginning this week. 

We aim to raise $20,000 by October 3 to support competition in the first half of fall term.

If you wish to contribute please complete this survey and so indicate where prompted. You will receive a link and instructions as soon as possible this week

Alum lawyer Garrett West chartered the Oregon Forensics Foundation with the Oregon Secretary of State last week, IRS non-profit tax status is pending, a bank account linked to the OFF should come online Tuesday, September 23 to receive funds to be allocated by the board. Over the long term the OFF will give money to worthy applicants participating in forensics at any level or program. Small amounts can make a big difference. 

We aim to raise $20,000 by October 3 to help pay for early season coaching, hiring judges, and to help with  travel expenses for UPS (debate, Oct 17-19), Gonzaga (debate, Nov 1-3), and UC Berkeley (mock trial, Nov 8-9). These tournaments are all within the 8-week minimum window for travel planning required as a student club.

Board of Trustees presentations

Supporters of Oregon Forensics, both alumni and from the community, were strongly represented at the Board of Trustees meeting earlier this month and they were featured in news coverage of the event. An unknown number contributed written comments.

Alumni letter to senior leadership

Many alumni helped prepare a letter to the President, Provost, VP of Financial Affairs, and VP of Student Engagement and Enrollment Services calling the university to collaborate with alumni to find a permanent institutional home for a robust forensics program overseen by a dedicated forensics professional educator. That letter received signatures from more than 150 alumni and was sent last Wednesday. Enormous thanks to Liz and Kehl Van Winkle, Michael Sugar, and Rick Peacor. I did help but was very sick for most of these efforts. It is a powerful letter and putting it together so rapidly must have impressed those in Johnson Hall.

Audience: Key campus leaders and decision makers.

Purpose: To inform campus senior leaders that alumni are aware and alarmed and seeking to work with the university to find an enduring solution, including a willingness to help financially. The message to them is: We will help you find the offramp for this wrong decision, decided the wrong way.

• Letter to President and Provost – Please sign if you have not and forward to any alumni you may know and for whom you have reliable contact information.
• Petition – Please forward to your friends and associates that are not UO alumni who you believe would be inclined to add their name to a growing list of supporters calling on the administration to support a strong forensics program

Mobilizing HS programs

Closing the forensics department and hoping for the best with a student club moving forward is highly problematic for forensics students. It is catastrophic for hundreds of high school students and their teachers and parents. Only a stable forensics program overseen by a professional educator can manage a high school tournament that meets the needs of these high school students.

Oregon: A long letter describing the importance of a robust forensics program was created by Michael Sugar with input from a small army and distributed late last week to all high schools with speech and debate and mock trial in the state. It is gathering signatures and at last count had signatures from more than 70 individuals from dozens of schools.

Audience: Enrollment Management, CHC, Financial Affairs

Purpose: PR Pressure. Show the united sentiment of influential educational mentors at nearly all Oregon high schools. Speaks directly to the pipeline argument, highlights some amazing students. The university cares deeply about its profile in the minds of parents of Oregon’s brightest students.

National: Long time program friend Jim Hanson worked with Michael Sugar and me to create a short letter form sent to more thousands of high schools and middle speech and debate coaches seeking their signatures and those of their students and parents.

Audience: Enrollment Management, Financial Affairs

Purpose: PR pressure. Highlight the negative perceptions created by the decision among students and their parents and mentors from outside Oregon. These students are disproportionately concentrated among the top students at their schools and more likely than their peers to go out of state for college. Oregon’s revenue model relies utterly on two sources: Out of state tuition dollars and donor gifts.

Action Teams

Media

Lead: Tisha Oehmen

This action team has been very active but needs more input, especially students working with social media and generating content. If you can please volunteer to help in media efforts at various levels.

Tisha published a website overnight (OregonForensics.com) that captures alumni data and testimonials, pushes historic and current program information, gathers media links, etc. It will prove a very useful hub, especially because on September 12 the CHC brought down the Oregon Forensics website.

A press release was sent to more than 100 Oregon media and so far we are working on or have completed the following:

• Students have been invited to produce a digital editorial for the first issue of the year on September 29. We are working to impact letters to the editor and secure ongoing coverage by the ODE.
• KEZI aired a short piece in Eugene-Springfield and the Medford market.
• Newsweek is considering an editorial.
• The KLCCs Michael Dunne, host of the Oregon on the Record talk show, will interview me and two students on Monday about the value of forensics.

We need to generate outside pressure that induces the specific media listed below to carry a story. If you know anybody at these venues, reach out and encourage them to contact me at trond@uoregon.edu. Even if you do not know anyone, contact them to ask about their coverage of the rising effort to preserve Oregon Forensics. 

• Register Guard (especially Miranda Cyr, Education Reporter)
• KLCC
• Oregonian (esp. Politics & Education Eds Betsy Hammond or Jamie Goldberg.
• Portland Business Journal
• Portland Public Radio

Alumni

We have made heavy use of our alumni database in reaching out and made considerable progress in updating contact information. Many alumni have participated in planning sessions, and some have joined Action Teams. 

We need more help!

We need more alumni to help with the various processes of tracking down alumni and capturing their contact information, testimonials, etc.

We need to grow our fledgling social media accounts so that we can use them to share our message. No matter your preferred platform, please take a moment to like, follow, and share. If you have a particular passion around a platform we are in need of moderators for each platform. Surely someone in our broader alumni and student networks is a social networking expert!

Student

Students are focused on the challenging task of working with the ASUO and its PFC unit – the students allocating student fees to forensics – to set up a program that can receive incidental fee money for travel and related competition purposes. 

Forensics was awarded a 40% increase for this year but the decision to close the department has put that into question. We have developed great relations with the ASUO and the DFC and they are determined to help make that money available to a club this year. The decision to cancel the department makes that slow, challenging, and potentially less than the entire amount of money they wish to allocate to forensics. Students should work with the ASUO and always lead with some version of this in conversations: “We appreciate your strong support and promise to work to make our DFC allocation available in full for students competing this year.”

Forensics students are working on bylaws for a new organization and figuring out how to stand up a club in an accelerated timeframe given a window that closes September 28. Even then, special rules apply that make forensics travel planning extremely difficult as a program and at best the first half of the fall part of the season will be sacrificed. 

When the club is running, current students should build out this team and recruit broader student support. We need to always be growing the movement.

Students should consider productive actions coincident with the Week of Welcome.

Legal engagement

A group of experienced lawyer alumni articulated a legal strategy that is unfolding. More updates as they become available.

Strategic Plan

Working with a small group I am finishing a plan toward which all these efforts are directed: Oregon Forensics Forever. 

Phase one was an effort to reverse the decision. It seems that effort has failed. 

Phase two focused on setting up teams and doing the initial work to make it possible to implement a strategic plan.

We are on the cusp of the third phase of distributing a focused plan to leverage that infrastructure to mobilize support and implement coordinated actions designed to achieve our plan. More to come in the next few days. 

The essence of the plan is to secure a quasi-permanent and stable home institutional home for Oregon Forensics as the Forensics Department. That includes adequate staffing support (ideally one 1.0 FTE in a single person) and a Department overseen by a Director of Forensics who is a dedicated and experienced and passionate forensics educator. 

For reasons we will be sharing soon that ideal permanent home is one of the two options discussed below, each with significant advantages and some disadvantages. Both are superior to the student club model and, frankly, both are superior to incorporation within the CHC, at least under current circumstances

1. ASUO Department. A Department of Forensics exists within the ASUO, served by existing EMU staffing services, and overseen by a professional academic – the Director of Forensics. The clear model is the Mills International Center in the EMU, which is ASUO funded, professionally administered, and serving all interested students. This is the scenario that most insulates the program from outside pressure and affords the most flexibility within a framework of robust oversight, including direct report to the Director of Student Government Engagement and Success within the Office of the Dean of Students. This model requires the political and financial support of the ASUO and approval of Provost Long. 
2. Wayne Morse Center affiliated program. The Department of Forensics is an “affiliated program” within the Wayne Morse Center based in the Oregon Law School. This trades some independence for more academic pedigree and a closer association with the law school. This will not be possible unless sufficient funding sources exist to make incorporation within the WDC a zero-cost proposition to them in terms of funding and labor. This approach requires the approval of both WDC Directors and Provost Long.

Both will require a lot of work. Both are achievable for the academic year 2026-27. Both have considerable virtues and relatively few drawbacks. Both would require the approval of a limited number of entities and, crucially, given campus and climate realities, do not require the approval of any Dean or faculty.

As Master Lee says to my twins and their friends in taekwondo: “WE CAN DO THIS!”