Austin J. Freeley

OH. Educator and author. Freeley was a former communications professor at John Carroll University who was credited with helping to establish the practice of televised U.S. presidential debates. His bachelor's and master's degrees were from Boston University in 1944 and 1946, respectively. He then attended Harvard University for a time before completing his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1955. He taught at Boston University before joining the John Carroll faculty in 1957, and remained there as a professor of communications and director of forensics until his retirement. In the late 1950s, with the increasing popularity of television, Freeley founded the Committee on Presidential Campaign Debate. The organization's urging that political debates be broadcast on television eventually led to the first such broadcast between then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. Freeley was also the author of the popular textbook Argumentation and Debate: Rational Decision Making (1961; tenth edition, 2000).