CaMPUS - University of Arkansas at Monticello

Through The Years . . .
FIRST DEBATE TEAM
The 1970 Arkansas A&M debate
team (obove, from left) David
Ray, Ron Turchi, Bob Casteel,
Leodis Strong, Bobby Pennington,
David McLemore, and Steve
Moss. (At right) A young David
Ray in 1973. (Below) With Coach
Bill Groce at a track meet at Cotton
Boll Stadium in the 1970s.
Ray’s legacy extends beyond
the classroom and debate to all
areas of the UAM campus.
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UAM MAGAZINE
of the Department of Speech Communication
at Tech told him his faculty
had recommended Ray for a teaching
position within the department. Ray
mulled the offer and accepted.
“I got to thinking about it and I really
liked speech,” he says. “I had more
undergraduate hours in speech than I
did in psychology even though I only
had speech as a minor. I kept taking
every elective I could possibly take.
I even took theatre. I decided that
maybe the faculty sees some potential
in what I can do or they wouldn’t have
asked me to teach, so I think I’ll give
it a shot.”
Ray earned a master’s degree in
speech communication in 1968 while
teaching at Texas Tech. Two years
later, he began receiving letters from
colleagues around the country telling
him about a little school called
Arkansas A&M that was looking for
someone to build a debate program
from scratch. Ray drove to Monticello
on January 1, 1970, interviewed
the next day and accepted the job on
January 3. He had less than two weeks
to move to Arkansas before teaching
his first class.
It took a while before Ray’s debate
program began to develop a reputation
for excellence at the national
level. “We were pretty lean those first
few years,” Ray recalls. “I’m not sure
the institution knew what to expect
or how to plan and develop a debate
team. There was a growth process by
the administration to really know
what it took.”
Ray’s first travel budget was cut
from $300 to $175, which precluded
travel to debate competitions out
of state. Ray improvised, arranging
home-and-home debates with Arkansas
schools. In two to three years, he
started receiving enough funds to take
his team to competitions in Texas,
Oklahoma and Louisiana and from
there, the debate program took off.
It was about this time that Ray and
his wife, Loyce, decided to put down
roots in Monticello. “It was probably
five years or so before I realized that
I really did like this a whole lot,” says
Ray. “That was about the time Loyce
decided to pack the china because we
were staying.”
For the next 37 years, Ray won
more awards than he can keep track
of, including UAM’s teacher of the
year and administrator of the year. In
1989, the Arkansas State Communication
Association named him Arkansas
Speech Teacher of the Year. He served
as president of Pi Kappa Delta, the
nation’s largest honor society in debate
and forensics. In 1998, he received the
E.R. Nichols Award as the outstanding
national forensics educator, and in
2005 was elected to the Pi Kappa Delta
Debate and Forensics Hall of Fame.
But for Ray, success was never
about winning awards, it was about
his students.
Ray hadn’t been in Monticello long
before he was summoned to the office
of President Claude Babin. He asked
Ray what he thought of Arkansas
A&M’s students. “I said I thought
they were really outstanding,” Ray
recalls. “He asked me why I thought
that. I said they’re like any other
students. They have the potential for
success and I think we can take them
where they need to be to be able to
achieve. I’ve always felt that way. One
of my real motivators was to be able to
take the students from the piney bayou
country and put them up against any
other student in the country. I always
felt a great deal of pride in that.”