Competitive debate in the United States

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.

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.

As the earliest colleges in America were modeled after British universities, they adopted in-class debates as a pedagogical tool.

[1]: 28  Initially, these took the form of "syllogistic disputations," highly-structured conversations in Latin which were expected to follow the strict rules of logic.

"[2]: 24  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.

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.

[1]: 29  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.

[2]: 51  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.

[2]: 91–93  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.

[5] The first, informal, intercollegiate debate was held between Harvard and Yale in 1892 and was followed by similar contests on the West Coast and in the Midwest.

[7]: 30–31 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.

[7]: 31–32  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.

Shields collaborated with Vaughn, a student at Kansas Agricultural College, to lobby other Kansan debate teams to join their newfound institution.

[14]: 270  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.

A professor at Ripon College, Jacob was inspired by a letter he received asking if a debate league for high school students existed.

During World War II the NFL suspended all operations except for Congressional debate, receiving a letter of commendation from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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.

[21] The activity of debate continued to grow, eventually becoming large enough to not require invited judges, such as policy experts or professors of rhetoric.

Jack Howe, the first president of CEDA, described the association as being "a reaction against a prevailing style of debate that both participants and their directors found increasingly difficult to support.

[23]: 4  These "caselist wikis" have been described by G. Thomas Goodnight and Gordon Mitchell as creating "intricate and detailed map[s]" of various controversies falling under debate topics and as being a valuable resource for a slate of non-debate professions as well, including legislators, journalists, and policy analysts.

"[57] A study of Colorado students found a small yet statistically significant relationship between debate participation and higher standardized test scores.

A two-decade cohort study by Rogers, Freeman, and Rennels recorded competitors' civic engagement, career trajectory, and continued education.

Under his leadership, the team heavily criticized the use of expert evidence in rounds and argued that arguments from personal experience offered a unique lens through which the topic could be examined.

[27]: 5  The response to the Louisville Project has been characterized by Shanara Reid-Brinkley as being "defined by anger," with coaches who disagreed with Warner forming competing leagues that barred race-centered argumentation and releasing out-of-context footage of Black debaters in attempts to encourage colleges to shut down their debate teams.

In 1954, amid the Cold War, a group of colleges refused to debate the topic "The United States should diplomatically recognize the People's Republic of China" because doing so would require them to argue against the current U.S. policy.

In the wake of this controversy, Richard Murphy, a professor of speech at the University of Illinois, published a series of articles criticizing the practice of debating both sides of a topic.

Senator Ted Cruz described it as "a pernicious disease that has undermined the very essence of high school and college debate.