As you will recall, the dis­cus­sion over the NFL’s prac­tice of accept­ing money to spon­sor (i.e. select) Pub­lic Forum Debate topic areas orig­i­nated with a post by Jonathan Peele and was extended by a response from NFL Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Scott Wunn. Com­ments con­tinue to be added to those blog posts.

Dis­cus­sion also con­tin­ues beyond this blog. On his own blog, Jonathan Peele responded to Mr. Wunn. Mr. Peele has also posted that he has been removed from the topic selec­tion com­mit­tee and he believes it is because of his dis­sent. Ste­fan Bauschard has weighed in at Planet Debate with some solu­tions for gen­er­at­ing bet­ter top­ics. Scott Phillips over at The 3NR is okay with the NFL accept­ing topic spon­sor­ship money – for Pub­lic Forum Debate.

Not much has been said about pre­vi­ous Pub­lic Forum Debate topic spon­sor­ships and no one has said how much money was received for those spon­sor­ships. It is clear that the NFL accepted a $150,000 spon­sor­ship from the Arthur N. Rupe Foun­da­tion and the foun­da­tion was allowed to select the topic areas for Feb­ru­ary, March, and April.

Despite a request from the NFL to remove ref­er­ence to the Rupe Foun­da­tion in Peele’s orig­i­nal blog post (which we hon­ored), the NFL is now tout­ing its rela­tion­ship with the foun­da­tion. Each Pub­lic Forum Debate qual­i­fier to the NFL National Tour­na­ment is des­ig­nated as a Rupe Scholar and receives a plaque. The NFL has also setup a spe­cial Web site to pro­vide topic resources for Feb­ru­ary, March, and April and rec­og­nize the Rupe Scholars.

It is not easy to find much infor­ma­tion about the Arthur N. Rupe Foun­da­tion. Art Rupe appears to have made his money in the record­ing and oil & gas indus­tries. It should also be noted that in addi­tion to select­ing the the pub­lic unions topic for April, they also pro­vided a grant to the Cato Insti­tute for a spe­cial issue of the Cato Jour­nal:

Dorn in 2010,
James A. Dorn. [Vice Pres­i­dent for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs, Cato Insti­tute. Edi­tor of the Cato Jour­nal]. “Editor’s Note.” Cato Jour­nal. 30(1). Win­ter 2010. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj30n1/ed_note.pdf. Accessed March 12, 2010.

This spe­cial issue of the Cato Jour­nal was made pos­si­ble by a gen­er­ous grant from the Arthur N. Rupe Foun­da­tion. The ques­tion posed in this issue — Are Unions Good for America? — has both nor­ma­tive and pos­i­tive aspects.

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