Editor’s Note: Skip Rutledge has taught communication courses and directed the PLNU Speech and Debate Team to multiple national championships for over 35 years. He has served as the Communication Department chair and has multiple published works. He has also taught at institutes in Italy, Mexico, England, Japan and China. Under his leadership, PLNU has won the year-long sweepstakes national championship more than six times against universities around the nation.
I was honored when The Point asked me to share some thoughts on James Jackson, who has been a colleague, a friend and a mentor to me since I first arrived on campus as a visiting instructor and debate coach nearly 40 years ago.
Bud York, the former head of the Department of Communication who has since died from Alzheimer’s disease, introduced us as I began my career at Point Loma Nazarene College, teaching public speaking and debate classes and assisting York with the debate team at PLNC in the late ‘80s.
Jackson was truly a gentleman and a scholar, epitomizing everything that phrase represents. When I met him, he was finishing up his academic career at PLNC, where he had been not only a wonderful professor but also a very good director of speech and debate. He had competed in forensics years earlier when PLNC was in Pasadena, and he wanted to share that life-empowering world with our students.
I will let others expand on the many other roles he fulfilled and the many hats he wore at PLNU, but I understand that he also excelled administratively, filling in wherever the college had a need.
My earliest memory of Jackson was when he gave me his office behind the Solomon Theatre with a spectacular view overlooking the tennis courts and the Pacific Ocean, even though I was just a part-time visiting adjunct instructor. To do so, he used his van with the van doors wide open for his office needs like class prep, grading and student advising. That tricked-out van might have dated back to the ‘70s when they customized them with swivel captain’s chairs, a working desk and whatever else was needed.
He also offered me his amazing collection of academic books on rhetoric, speech, debate and other communication topics, mentioning that his lovely wife, Alyce, cautioned him that he better not take those books back home with him.
Jackson also inspired me to earn my graduate degrees, in addition to coaching and directing speech and debate. He shared his lifelong love of learning in our academic discipline. He also shared wonderful stories about past debate accomplishments, like the time the PLNC Crusaders (now the Sea Lions) had home and away debate matches with the Whittier Poets when a certain Richard Milhouse Nixon debated for Whittier College. Later, as president of the United States, Nixon sent Jackson a nice letter commemorating those debates.
Jackson was quite the historian as well, recounting how several past forensics directors from our college went on to become presidents of colleges and universities and how one had authored a major standard text on rhetoric.
I was honored to call Jackson a friend and kept in touch with him through the years, inviting him to communication department events, which he always enjoyed. He also graciously allowed us to begin a scholarship in his and his wife’s name to help speech and debate students afford to study at PLNU.
Eddie Potter, a former speech team member under Jackson who we lost several years ago, challenged the class of 1960 to raise $60,000 for that endowment, then later exceeded that amount to over $100,000. Undaunted by the economic woes of 2008 that wiped out a third of that total, Potter and the class of 1960, along with other supporters, brought that total back up above $100,000 again. What a wonderful tribute from one PLNU legend to another. And I guess I can reveal this now, but there was no more faithful giver to that Jackson Speech Scholarship that has helped so many of our students through the years than Jackson himself.
He will be missed but never forgotten.
Olivia Roberts