NIU director of forensics Jack Parker joined the ranks of various NIU professors forging relations between the United States and the Soviet Union when he recently returned from a two-week tour as an escort to a delegation of Soviet debaters.

The tour, which covered eight American universities, was part of an agreement between the U.S. and Soviet Union through the Speech Communication Association’s committee on international debate and discussion. Parker currently serves as the committee’s chairman. Similar exchanges have been conducted with other countries, including Great Britain, Japan, Poland and New Zealand.

Parker also served as an escort to three American debaters, fulfilling the exchange agreement’s tour of eight universities in four Soviet cities last April—Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk and Kishinev.

The debates centered around the question of determining the “proper relationship between the media and the modern state,” and stemmed partly from the recent implementation of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Parker said.

“The Soviet Union is experiencing something akin to our freedom of the press. The American view is that there are no built-in guarantees of that freedom and it could, therefore, be lost,” Parker said.

Parker said he believed both the U.S. and Soviet tours provided a much-needed and meaningful exchange of ideas, and added that he would like to return to the Soviet Union “as soon as I can.”

The Speech Communication Association has been conducting its international debate and discussion tour program since 1972.