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BY ALLISON GANTT

In print | Published April 22, 2010

Approximately 300 students from colleges around the country traveled to Swarthmore this weekend to argue about morality, law and freedom of speech in the American Parliamentary Debate Association’s National Championship. Shelby Coffey III, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, attended the event as a keynote speaker.

The 2010 APDA National Champion team was Vivek Suri and Sean Withall from Johns Hopkins.  The top speaker was Dan Rauch from Princeton.

Swarthmore’s Amos J. Peaslee Debate Society members did not compete in the event because of their obligations as hosts. Instead, they spent the weekend coordinating hotel, transportation, dining and judging arrangements for students from 40 different universities.

Swarthmore’s Debate Society has been working to organize the four-day event since last spring, Lucas Janes ’11, president of Swarthmore’s Peaslee Society said.

“This was certainly one of the best debate tournaments I’ve ever been to, and certainly one of the best APDA Nationals,” Alex Taubes of Boston University said in an e-mail. Taubes is president of Boston University’s Debate Team and the incoming president of APDA. He has attended over 50 tournaments in the past three years.

Coffey’s speech, part of the weekend’s optional entertainment, was “far and above what other schools have done for Nationals,” Janes ’11 said. Kyle Bean, president of Harvard’s debate team, said that, in his experience, no other school has brought a keynote speaker to the event.

Jenny Koch ’13, secretary of the Peaslee Society and social/food coordinator for the Nationals event, invited Coffey to attend. Koch connected with him through a friend of her family’s who, like Coffey, is a trustee of the Newseum in Washington D.C.

In his speech, “The Media World Gone Mad,” Coffey said that journalism is entering the era of the “decline of the gatekeepers.” The advent of the Internet has led to a surplus of both good and bad information that is becoming less regulated by mainstream media sources, he said.

Coffey admitted that freedom of speech can be abused, especially today, but asked students instead to consider the “counterfactual”: what could be proposed in place of the first amendment?

“They have great need in business and in government for unbiased information,” Coffey said.
For Swarthmore Debate Society members, Coffey’s message linked freedom of speech with the importance of solid information and persuasion.

“The method in which you share your message is going to dramatically affect how effectively it’s received,” Debate Society member and former president Cyrus Stoller ’10 said.

Stoller and Chris Sawyer ’10 won first place in a competition at Bryn Mawr this year, and Stoller also made it to the octo-final round of last year’s world competition, where only sixteen teams remained.

“I think you could see by also looking at the questions at the end how much people thought it was really cool to have someone that impressive there,” Janes said.

Bean and Taubes both mentioned Coffey as one of the highlights of this year’s competition.

Bean said that Swarthmore’s high-quality judges and prompt transportation to and from the hotel also made the event memorable compared to previous APDA National Championships.

The past two National events were hosted at Mount Holyoke and MIT.

Other social features of Swarthmore’s weekend included a gathering Friday night and an event during which chess expert Ben Francis ’12 played chess blindfolded against debaters.

Francis won two rounds and lost two rounds. “It’s not nearly as hard as it looks,” Francis said in an e-mail.

Janes said that Julie Baker ’09, a former Swarthmore debate team president, encouraged Swarthmore’s Peaslee Debate Society to host the event this year. The Society had to create a formal proposal, which was submitted and selected by the APDA through a competitive process.

“It is very prestigious to host a national competition at our school — particularly for such a rigorous and intellectual activity,” Julie Baker ’09, former president of the Peaslee Society, said in an e-mail.

American parliamentary debate is only one style of debating that exists, Janes said. While policy-oriented debates are based on fact-gathering and research of practical issues, parliamentary debates are “more rhetoric-focused,” Janes said.

“The idea is … are you able to look at something, take it apart, speak really coherently about it and convince someone that it’s true?” Janes said.

Another aspect that makes parliamentary debate unique is its promptness.

According to the outline of American Parliamentary debate style on Swarthmore’s Debate Society website, the “Government” receives 10 minutes to prepare an argument in favor of a given resolution. The “Opposition” creates a counter-argument on the spot.

“It’s amazing what you can do having never heard a topic before,” Koch said.

The National competition marks the end of Swarthmore’s organized debate season.  The next large-scale events will be the fall international tournaments in Oxford, United Kingdom and Toronto, Canada.  The winter world championship will be held in Botswana.

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