These students are never at a loss for words.
The University’s Debate and Speech Team not only gained second place in the national championship at Azuza Pacific University in Los Angeles during Spring 2010, but it also beat the team that took first place last school year, University of Colorado, in Berkeley, Calif., over the weekend in a national competition.
The debate team’s head coach, Tom Schally, thinks his team has something special going on.
“It’s magical,” he said, laughing. “We’re a program that doesn’t have academic scholarship and we’re very student-led. I think we get kids with a lot of heart.”
Most universities and colleges have debate teams that are deeply rooted in departments, Schally explained; however, the debate team here at the University is a different story. Although a forensics, or speech and debate, class is taught within the Robert D. Clark Honors College, the program is student-run, with graduate teaching fellows such as Schally and Sarah Hamid helping undergraduate debate members hone their rhetoric and argumentative skills.
“They’re very invested about the health of the program,” Hamid said about University students participating on the debate team. “They’re all excited to be there. They all know a lot about debate and so that culminates to me having a really awesome experience as a coach.”
One debate coach, Benjamin Dodds, is still an undergraduate student, but cannot participate in collegiate-level debate anymore because he has debated for nine years in high school and college.
“The ideas generated by the UO Debate Team are mimicked and repeated by other teams around the nation weeks after we unveil them,” Dodds said on what the University’s team does differently. “By that time, we’re onto something new, often ready … to outsmart people following our wake.”
University seniors Hank Fields and Matt Gander, who made it to the finals in California over the weekend against Colorado and won, see the team as a learning experience.
“I think knowledge is produced through opposition,” Fields said. “Bringing ideas together and competing with them is not only fun but incredibly educational.”
Fields and Gander also see it as a way to effectively communicate ideas.
“I think debate is important because it allows us to talk to a bunch of people from other schools and see what they’re learning and to just have a different perspective on a lot of issues,” Gander said.
Gander and Fields debated against the Boulder team over the U.N. Stockholm Convention, which is a treaty pertaining to organic compounds and their industrial use. The duo argued that nations should regulate organic compounds because of its importance for food and environmental security, adding that the U.S. should increase its good faith involvement in international institutions. They won the debate unanimously.
Ultimately, the students on the debate team are there not just to argue, but to have fun as well.
“We’re all eggheads, but the good kind,” Fields said. “Bet on some serious success this year, not just from me and Matt but also from the whole team.”
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