Photo Courtesy of SC Debate Team
THE BEST, NO DEBATE—Southwestern College’s debate season was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. The Jaguars finished the year as the top-ranked community college in the country
By Colin Grylls
When travel bans and stay-at-home orders cancelled concerts, plays and athletic events, academic competitions also came to a standstill.
At least Southwestern College’s debate team was already on top.
SWC finished its pandemic-shortened season as the top-ranked community college in the country. Overall, SWC ranked 18th out of the 101 two-year and four-year colleges and universities in Cross Examination Debate Association—one spot behind Harvard.
Co-director Eric Maag said competing directly against university students helps Southwestern’s inexperienced debaters realize their abilities.
“Community college students sometimes suffer, kind of like they think they’re a lower class or there’s a reason why they’re not at a four-year university,” Maag said. “So when they get to go into a debate round against someone from a four-year university and they beat them in a debate round, or they lose but it was so close they realize that there’s no difference between them and the type of student that exists at the four-year, I think that’s a huge confidence boost.”
Southwestern was the second-ranked team in District I, finishing behind UC Berkeley—which finished second-ranked nationally—and ahead of no. 20 CSU-Long Beach, USC, Fresno State, Arizona State, UNLV, UCSD and San Diego State. Communications major Marnon Navarro said it is motivating as a community college student to keep pace with—and beat—students from well-resourced four-year programs.
“Usually most of these four-year schools have an incredible amount of funding, incredible coaches,” Navarro said. “We also have incredible coaches, but usually the resources afforded to four-year universities make them more prepared.”
Tournament setup helps level the playing field as debaters are separated into three divisions (novice, junior varsity and varsity) based on their competitive experience. At its last tournament, SWC debaters took three of the top four spots in the novice division. Maag said they did not even have to finish the final round as the Jaguars would have just been competing against each other.
Teams develop a mutual respect, said co-director Tony Johnson. Students converge from across the country for tournaments, he said, all of whom struggled researching the same contentious topics.
“We get to have a network of folks who become friends through sharing conflict and dialogue, and modeling the best practices of deliberation and engagement with civil respect for one another,” Johnson said. “But not only do we get to be in the same room, we are competing in very real ways with many four-year schools.”
Communications major Michael Berry said he had doubts when he joined the team. He did not know much about debate and what he did know had little to do with making rational arguments.
“I had joined debate very shortly after the 2016 election and all the bullshit that happened in the months leading up to it,” Berry said. “So I was like ‘wow, debate is stupid.’ Because if this is really going to be like that Hilary-Trump debate, I am really—what have I gotten myself into?”
Staying on topic
Berry’s initial misconceptions about debate are common, Maag said. Newcomers often picture viral Twitter clips of political shouting matches and expect competitions to be about going “back and forth until the loudest person in the room wins.”
Instead, debate tournaments are highly structured. A single judge listens to arguments presented by a pair of two-person teams from competing colleges in six preliminary rounds. A panel of three judges determines the winner in the playoff rounds. Maag said judges base their decisions on depth of research and the intellectual quality of arguments rather than charm
“And so people who are generally persuasive might not do very good in policy debate because they’ve always relied on their charisma, or they’ve always relied on speaking louder or with more force,” Maag said. “And I think that one of the things that happens in debate is the people who are usually not into arguing become much better because they’re more thoughtful. They’re better listeners. They’re better at doing the research and looking objectively at a subject instead of just wanting to force through an argument.”
Southwestern competes in policy debate, where teams spend all year researching a single topic and are expected to argue both the affirmative and negative at tournaments. This year, students debated whether or not the United States should increase cooperation with China and Russia in exploring and governing space. Johnson said topics usually rotate between domestic and international issues annually and are broad enough to cover an array of specific policies.
“We had everything from ‘have a cooperative space policy’ to ‘agree not to put weapons into space,’ and we also would have people talk about the Moon Treaty, which is a way to kind of remove private property from space,” Johnson said. “Our students talked about, more of like, the historical and critical theory behind settler-colonialism and the idea of expanding into space.”
To develop nuanced arguments, Berry said, debaters must learn the vocabulary required to read graduate-level academic journals and to master sophisticated philosophical concepts.
“It’s almost like learning a new language,” he said. “There’s a lot of words you need to learn, there’s a lot of things that you need to read to be able to compete at a minimum level.”
As an example, Berry mentioned the panopticon—an 18th century conceptual prison with a single, central observation tower from which a lone guard could peer into every cell. The possibility of being observed at any moment was supposed to encourage prisoners to act as if they were always being watched. Literal interpretations of the design occasionally show up on the big screen (picture the “Guardians of the Galaxy” prison break scene), and the philosophical implications of how people act under the threat of constant surveillance can be applied to modern debates about streetlight cameras and data collected by social media sites.
Berry admitted he may never again need to talk about that particular subject in great detail, though learning about it helped him develop “fundamental” academic skills.
“So even if I may not be talking about like, I don’t know, the panopticon every day, the reading comprehension and communication skills I learned from explaining it will be really helpful,” he said.
To understand the sometimes-dense material, the debate team puts in serious hours on top of its practices from 1 – 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Johnson said varsity debaters sometimes work 30 hours per week.
Navarro said some team members even meet when classes are not in session.
“We were meeting every other day during summer, when none of us had classes, to actually go and train ourselves and refine our team and get better,” Navarro said. “All of us together.”
It is a lot of effort, Navarro said, but worth it because debating gives him a “surge of energy” he did not get while playing sports in high school. Debate held his interest when track, cross-country and swimming could not.
“But with debate, you go all in,” he said. “You do as much research as possible and you try your best debating with your boys, with facts, with all of the knowledge that you’ve learned, and if you win, or you get a couple wins and you make it to the semifinal or final, you get a really, really amazing rush of adrenaline. The fact that you choose to go out there and put yourself through all the pain of reading that, all the pain of practicing, all the pain of giving your speeches in public at the end makes this a really, really big reward personally.”
The Debate community
Strong performances also have tangible rewards for SWC debaters. Going up against four-year students means competing in front of university professors and higher-ups in communications departments. Maag said university academics often come away impressed.
“Several of our students are transferring to colleges this year where they debated in front of a judge from another college and they were like ‘oh, I think this is a talented student,’ and they recruit them,” Maag said.
The debate team’s travel schedule helped convince Navarro to join. He said visiting university campuses and meeting students from other schools at tournaments influenced his transfer decision.
“You get to meet a lot of other students that are already in the four-year program,” Navarro said. “They can kind of give you an insight to what life over there is like, what life in the debating position alongside with them would be like. It gives you a perspective of other schools and how things are there that you normally just wouldn’t get from a virtual tour.”
National competitions also give Jaguar debaters first-hand experience of how people from other parts of the country respond to different types of arguments. Maag said each region has its own “flavor of debate.”
Berry said he noticed the differences in his year-and-a-half on the team.
“Where we are in California, our style of debate is much more tailored around arguments about identity and arguments about sort of these very critical topics like race and gender theory,” Berry said. “That’s our style of debate, but let’s say you go to Alabama or Kentucky. There, it’s very much a conversation about government, and how government works and policy. So they take the name of our activity—policy debate—very literally.”
Style differences can influence transfer decisions, Maag said. Some university coaches specialize in certain types of argument, which attracts competitors looking to learn from that particular style.
Southwestern takes a more varied approach. Maag said he prefers adjusting to the style of the student so he can focus more on the basics. He said many members of the team had no debate experience prior to taking COMM 160, “Argumentation and Debate.” Maag recommended that students interested in joining the team enroll in that class first to get a feel for debate, though it is not a prerequisite.
“I think that this year we really tried to incorporate a kind of diverse approach,” he said. “In other words, we’re really about having our students decide what kind of thing they like to do, and then we try to coach them the best we can with that style.”
Johnson said the best compliments he receives from other coaches are about how well the Jaguars interact with each other.
“I like when coaches and students from other teams comment on how connected our squad is,” Johnson said. “Like we got together two, three weeks ago and had a Zoom board game night, and there were students from other schools saying ‘I’ve been trying to get this on my team for weeks,’ and a few of our students replied saying this happened impromptu, overnight.”
Along with cancelling the season, stay-at-home orders prevented the team from hosting its awards ceremony. Berry said the team improvised and presented awards in a Zoom call.
“There was a team MVP, most improved, some awards poking fun at each other,” Berry said. “Also sort of recognizing the different ways that we’ve grown and the individual ways that we bring personality and character to the team.”
Johnson said he gets excited when SWC debaters export their tight-knit culture to other programs. Some former Jaguars now coach high school and college debate teams.
“It’s just really neat to have them join the colleague status where we get to interact with them as equals,” Johnson said. “So it’s really kind of the whole process and journey from sitting in Eric, Jordan (Mills) or my class all the way to them going to meetings with us and coaching against one another.”
Berry said the effort he put into debate has paid dividends. He started off as an inexperienced student taking a class and now he is hooked. He credited Maag, Johnson and Mills with his transformation and success
“The journey from where I started to where I am now is immense, and I don’t think it would be possible without our wonderful teachers,” Berry said. “And I could kiss their ass, alright, but I’m pretty serious about it. We do have professors that legitimately care about us.”
