Sent on behalf of Dr. Rowland.
Colleagues: On behalf of the Tenure and Promotion Working Group that is preparing materials for the upcoming Third Developmental Conference on Debate to be hosted by Wake Forest next June, I am writing to solicit information and input related to the professional status of the debate coach at your university. Other members of the working group include Jarrod Atchison of Trinity University, Matt Gerber of Baylor, Kelly McDonald of Arizona State, and Jeff Jarman of Wichita State. For those of you who don't know me, I was the Director of Forensics at Baylor for five years in the 1980s and then for three more at KU and am currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the NDT. Our working group has the assignment of looking at the professional status of debate coaches and exploring whether a successor document to the Quail Roost Statement on the web site of the AFA might be created that could be used by debate coaches in various types of positions to explain to the administration of their particular school the appropriate professional standards for evaluating their work. One problem that coaches face again and again is that university administrations don't understand the demands of competitive debate and traditional standards for tenure and promotion are often inappropriate. This has caused many universities, including my own, to move to some kind of appointment for the debate coach other than that of a tenure-track faculty member. As a first step in carrying out our assignment, we want to gather information about the nature of your appointment and the standards by which it is evaluated. Of course, this information will be kept confidential and we will report only data within categories. Jarrod Atchison has graciously agreed to analyze this data. We hope you will take a moment and email him information about your appointment and the way it is evaluated. His email is [email protected]. Please copy me on that message as well. My email is [email protected]. We also would value any insights that you might have on the document that the working group eventually will draft. It is our hope that we can describe appropriate evaluative standards for a number of different types of appointments for debate coaches. As someone who has both been an active coach and a department chair for a decade, I know that the demands on coaches are enormous and very different from those of other faculty members. We want to create a document that will provide context for the role of coach and specify standards for evaluation that both reflect the pedagogical goals of debate and fairly account for the enormous workload required by contemporary debate. Debate has been the most important influence in my academic life. And my debate coach, Dr. Donn Parson, has been (and remains) an enormously influential mentor. For the future health of the activity, it is important that we identify reasonable standards for evaluating the professional accomplishment of debate coaches. We very much would value your participation in that effort. Robin Robert C. Rowland Professor and Chair Communication Studies 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd. KU Lawrence, KS 66045-7574 Phone: 785-864-3633 Fax: 785-864-5203 Jarrod Atchison, Ph.D. Director of Debate and Assistant Professor Department of Speech and Drama Trinity University 1 Trinity Place San Antonio, TX 78212 210-999-8582 (phone) 210-999-8512 (fax)
_______________________________________________ CEDA-L mailing list [email protected] http://www.ndtceda.com/mailman/listinfo/ceda-l
