Trained to spit words at a rapid-fire rate and perform verbal contortions, the pair put their skills on hold as they joined two first-time debaters and two professors in the second installment of the Great Debate Program.
Backed by Provost Lawrence Dumas and organized by Speech Prof. Scott Deatherage, the program pits faculty, undergraduates and experienced debaters against each other in public forums. The stated goal is to vitalize the intellectual life of the university, but Deatherage said he hopes the public debates also will give exposure to one of NU’s hidden gems: the competitive debate team.
“I don’t know that we do as good a job as we should at bringing it to people’s attention,” said Deatherage, who directs the policy debate program based out of an office on Chicago Avenue.
NU’s debate squad has a rich tradition, having won a record 10 national championships. But it flies under the radar of most NU students, Deatherage said.
“It’s not a spectator sport,” said Sociology Prof. Gary Fine, who has studied debate extensively. “It’s information processing now.”
Fine, who debated in the 1960s, has watched debate evolve from persuasive oratory to rapid-fire argumentation. Debate today is a highly specialized and technical activity with its own subculture and virtually indecipherable vernacular.
“In the end, this is not about show, not about theater,” Deatherage said. “It’s about quality argumentation. It’s a way of putting some discipline and organization to argument.”
Under the guidance of Deatherage, whom team members call “The Duck,” and a handful of assistant coaches, NU debaters spend 30 to 40 hours a week researching, constructing and deconstructing complicated arguments for frequent intercollegiate tournaments.
“Debate’s an intellectual game,” said debater Paul Flaig, a Weinberg sophomore. “It’s extremely competitive and very technical. People speak quickly – as fast as humanly possible.”
The fast speeches – at an average rate of hundreds of words each minute – are the hallmark of modern debate.
“The faster you talk, the more arguments you can get out in the allotted time,” Flaig said.
According to Fine, debaters realized in the 1970s that if they piled more and more arguments on their opponents, they could force them to ignore some of the arguments – omissions that could then be exploited to great effect.
But Deatherage said the point of the speed speeches “is to push kids to think faster.”
He said he views the educational mission of debate as threefold: to teach teamwork, critical thinking skills and the importance of supporting arguments with evidence rather than opinion. Deatherage pointed to the success former debaters have experienced in law and politics as evidence of its educational value.
Besides public events like the Great Debate Program, NU debaters have attempted to reach out to Chicago-area high schools.
“I’m a great believer in debate at the high school level,” Fine said. “If we could get debate in every inner-city high school, we would have done so much – at least for the best students. But everyone’s going to use the skills they learn in speech and debate.”
Toward that end, two former NU debaters – Les Lynn, Speech ’87 and former state Supreme Court Justice Seymour SiMonday, Law ’38 – founded the Chicago Debate Commission in 1997. With the cooperation of the Chicago Board of Education and NU, the organization has spread to 20 schools and has hopes of expanding to all Chicago schools by 2003.
This weekend, NU hosted the fourth-annual CDC championship tournament. About 300 high school students, 70 percent of whom were minorities, participated. It was the culminating event of the season for the CDC debaters, many of them mentored and taught by NU students.
Besides the benefits to the young debaters, Deatherage said the outreach programs help “give Northwestern exposure to some high-caliber, under-represented minorities.”
And the effects, in the way of increased diversity, are starting to be apparent on campus and in the debate world, Deatherage said.
“I think Northwestern provides a good background for debate,” said James Holley, a sophomore at Morgan Park High School on Chicago’s South Side.
Holley, who has debated with the CDC for two years, is a prot
