National Communication Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL.

NCA is a huge convention that brings together communications Professors from across America. It mostly takes the form of panel discussions where experts in a variety of communications fields present papers, but it also involves forums for debate coaches on all the major US circuits and acts as an important recruitment window where schools recruit graduate students. NCA started early for us as we met Sam at the Hilton hotel and walked to the main convention centre where we briefly with met the member of the committee who had helped organise our tour. We left them to work on the selections for the reciprocal tour to the UK that will be happening in the spring. While we waited for Geoff form DePauw (so Alex could be reunited with the jacket he had left in Indiana) we read through the titles of the hundreds of presentations and symposiums that were held over the four days of NCA and in the process learned some exciting new words such as ‘hetero-normative’. The professional nature of debate coaching and the difference from the UK was once again acute; one seminar was all about ‘The Role of the Ballot in Debating’. In fact some papers were so well named we were inspired to submit our own titles for next year. Look out at NCA 2008 for: “Re-Imagining the Anglo-Normative Dichotomy: A Post-Colonial Journey through the spectrum of a fractured Americana”

Unfortunately the legendary Northwestern coach ‘Duck’ (Scott Deatherage) was in hospital so there was some confusion as to what to do with us. After a Bond-esque rendezvous with a Northwestern graduate student we solved the problem by going to a very nice restaurant with Sam for lunch – and a few nice traditional gin and tonics. During lunch duck phoned and we were soon checking ourselves into the very nice ‘W’ Lakeshore – while Sam was off to Slovenia to teach at the IDEA academy.

That evening thanks to Gordon Mitchell we were taken for dinner with lots of University of Pittsburgh Alumni and faculty to honour Robert Newman and celebrate his 85th birthday. Newman studied at Corpus Christi College in Oxford after a chance encounter in a dinner line during World War II and is one of the most respected communications academics in the US. He wrote seminal books on Evidence and how it was used to justify the attacks on Hiroshima. The dinner conversation was truly fascinating and the after dinner speeches were incredibly moving. Robert ended the evening by reminding us of the manner in which evidence was abused during the infamous McCarthy witch-hunts and the ongoing need for vigilance in holding our governments accountable.