Competitive debate, also known as 'forensics' or 'speech and debate', is an activity in which two or more people take positions on an issue and are judged on how well they defend those positions. The activity has been present in academic spaces in the United States since the colonial period. The practice, an import from British education, began as in-class exercises in which students would present arguments to their classmates about the nature of rhetoric. Over time, the nature of those conversations began to shift towards philosophical questions and current events, with Yale University being the first to allow students to defend any position on a topic they believed in. In the late nineteenth century, student-led literary societies began to compete with each other academically and often engaged in debates against each other. In 1906, the first intercollegiate debate league, Delta Sigma Rho, was formed, followed by several others. Competitive debate expanded to the secondary school level in 1925 with the founding of the National Speech and Debate Association, which grew to over 300,000 members by 1969. Technological advances such as the accessibility of personal computers in the 1990s and 2000s has led to debate cases becoming more complex and to evidence being more accessible. Competitors and coaches have made efforts to reduce discrimination in the debate community by introducing new arguments and recruiting debaters from underprivileged communities.
There are a wide variety of competitive debate formats, including the 2v2 Public forum debate, the 1v1 Lincoln–Douglas format, and the 2v2v2v2 British Parliamentary. Regardless of format, most debate rounds use a set topic and have two sides, with one team supporting the topic and the other team opposing the topic. Teams work through a series of speeches presenting their cases, responding to their opponent's arguments, and defending their case. Participation in competitive debate has been associated with positive outcomes for competitors across a wide variety of metrics, including standardized test scores, civic engagement, and future career outcomes, but has been criticized for forcing participants to defend positions they may not agree with and for its inaccessibility to laypeople at its highest levels. Notable former debaters include U.S. senator Ted Cruz and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
History
Debate as an intramural activity Competitive debate in the United States can be traced back to colonial times. As the earliest colleges in America were modeled after British universities, they adopted in-class debates as a pedagogical tool. Initially, these took the form of "syllogistic disputations," highly-structured conversations in Latin which were expected to follow the strict rules of logic. These conversations often focused on the nature of public speaking itself, rather than broader social issues. Students quickly took a dislike to the conversations, with one student at Harvard University describing them as "packs of profound nonsense." Benjamin Wadsworth attempted to continue the practice after becoming the university's president in 1725, but encountered such difficulty getting students cooperation in the exercises that within ten years the number of required disputations was halved. The last recorded syllogistic disputation at any university was held at Brown University in 1809.
This early form of debate was replaced by "forensic disputations," which were first introduced at Yale University in 1747. In 1750, Yale's President Clap introduced debates in English alongside the old method of syllogistic disputations in Latin, which earned the approval of Benjamin Franklin. The structure of forensic disputations was informal and allowed for more natural conversations. Students were not assigned sides, rather, they were allowed to contemplate the topic and defend whichever side they believed in. While a student at Harvard, John Quincy Adams regularly participated in forensic disputations, noting in a 1786 letter to his mother that "It comes in course for me to affirm...Whatever the question may be, I must support it." Unlike syllogistic disputations, the topics for forensic disputations often veered towards the hot-button issues of the time: A list of topics debated at Yale in 1832 included questions relating to Native American civil rights, universal suffrage, and capital punishment. Despite their similarity to modern forms of debate, forensic disputations eventually fell out of fashion as well, with student discontent again being a factor. The disputations relied on heavily researched and pre-written cases on each side, but by 1843 most American universities were stressing extemporaneous and oral debate.
Around the time of the forensic disputation's decline, university literary societies began gaining prominence. Institutions would often have multiple student-led societies, each of which would compete with the other academically. Students preferred debating within the societies instead of classrooms as it gave them more control over topic selection and the structure of the round. The first of these societies to admit women was the Oberlin Young Ladies Association, which was founded at Oberlin College in 1835. Meetings of the association typically involved the discussion of a controversial question followed by a debate between two members on the question. Literary societies saw substantial decline during the American Civil War, with the few remaining becoming full-fledged debating societies, teams, and clubs. By the 1890s, literary societies had created standardized structures for debate rounds consisting of prepared cases and extemporaneous rebuttals in a close approximation of modern-day practices.
Development of intercollegiate debate In 1873, a group of public speaking enthusiasts at Knox College organized the first intercollegiate public speaking organization, known as the Interstate Oratorical Association, which held a yearly competition. The group quickly grew to include chapters in fourteen states and was followed by several other leagues in other regions of the country. While many sources cite the first intercollegiate debate as occurring between Harvard and Yale in 1892, the first recorded intercollegiate debate at the University of Oregon took place in 1891, when Oregon debated Willamette University on labor issues, marking the program’s entry into the regional intercollegiate stage.
From 1904 to 1911, a flurry of intercollegiate debate activity led to the establishment of four different honor societies, or leagues, for debate. Those organizations were Delta Sigma Rho, Tau Kappa Alpha, Phi Alpha Tau, and Pi Kappa Delta. Delta Sigma Rho was founded by a conglomerate of state universities in Chicago in 1906 and quickly became known as the honor society for large universities and Ivy League institutions. Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were all members.Tau Kappa Alpha, founded in 1908 by a committee of students from various Indiana institutions, established a system where each state could only have one chapter. Because of this, it became highly selective with its membership. Phi Alpha Tau, founded in 1904 at Emerson College, allowed debaters and non-debaters alike to join, provided they could show an interest in rhetoric. Delta Sigma Rho and Tau Kappa Alpha would eventually merge in 1963, while Phi Alpha Tau is now a communicative arts fraternity at Emerson College.
In 1911, Pi Kappa Delta was founded at Ottawa University by John A. Shields and Edgar A. Vaughn. Shields, an undergraduate at the university, had been corresponding with Egbert R. Nichols, a former professor at Ottawa who had recently moved to Ripon College. Upon learning that there was not a nationwide debate league that recognized competitors from smaller colleges, Nichols suggested that students from both institutions form their own league. Shields collaborated with Vaughn, a student at Kansas Agricultural College, to lobby other Kansan debate teams to join their newfound institution. Concurrently, Nichols promoted the organization to fellow professors in Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. Students at Ripon College wrote a charter for the organization, which was signed in January 1913 after several rounds of revisions. In the first two years of the organization, it granted 14 institutional memberships and hundreds of individual memberships across seven states.
Women were generally not allowed to participate in intercollegiate debate until the 1920s. In 1897, the University of Wisconsin refused to allow female debaters from the University of Iowa to participate in a competition, saying that "ladies in that capacity do no credit either to themselves or to co-education in general." The first female debaters were from the University of Indiana and participated in their first intercollegiate debate on May 12, 1921. Carly Woods, an American professor of communications, writes that female debaters faced opposition because men assumed that they would "only be interested in frivolous topics." By 1927, the number of women participating in intercollegiate debate had grown to such an extent that 90% of debate teams had female competitors.
Advent of high school debate
Competitive debating stayed a primarily intercollegiate activity until Bruno E. Jacob founded the National Forensic League (NFL)—since renamed as the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA)—in 1925. A professor at Ripon College, Jacob was inspired by a letter he received asking if a debate league for high school students existed. Upon learning that there was no nationwide league, Jacob established the NFL on March 28, 1925, and within a year the league had 100 member schools around the country. While some high school organizations like North Carolina's High School Debating Union and the Montana State High-School Debate League existed, they only allowed students to compete up to the state level. In 1937, the NFL established a "National Student Congress," a debate event in which students roleplay as members of the United States Congress. During World War II the NFL suspended all operations except for Congressional debate, receiving a letter of commendation from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1950 Jacob resigned from his teaching post to devote himself to the NFL on a full-time basis. By the time of his resignation in 1969, the league had grown to over 300,000 student members.
In 1963, U.S. Senator B. Everett Jordan introduced a bill to require the Librarian of Congress to prepare a report on the Policy debate topics at the high school and intercollegiate level each year. This bill was eventually adopted into law, with annual reports published to this day.
Rise of "progressive" debate The activity of debate continued to grow, eventually becoming large enough to not require invited judges, such as policy experts or professors of rhetoric. By the mid-1970s, tournaments were often judged by former or current competitors. In 1972, the Tournament of Champions was founded by J.W. Patterson, director of debate at the University of Kentucky. The tournament was specifically designed as a tournament without inexperienced judges. With these developments, team strategy began to move away from a "public model" geared at a general audience and towards a "policy-making" model. Allan Louden, tracing these developments at the National Debate Tournament, noted that "as speed rapidly increased...debate became more analytical, geared to expert audiences."