The Tufts Debate Society can argue against pretty much anything, except this: it is having an unprecedented amount of success this year.
Juniors Aram Boghosian and Rob Silverblatt beat a Princeton University debate team in the final round of a tournament at Brown University last weekend, securing the first Tufts victory in recent history.
The tournament fielded 57 two-person teams from about 15 schools. Each team competed in five initial rounds, and the eight teams with the best records advanced to the quarterfinals.
Silverblatt, who is the executive news editor for the Daily, and Boghosian defeated teams from Yale, Columbia, MIT, Amherst and the University of Chicago in the initial rounds. In the finals, they beat teams from Boston University, Dartmouth and Princeton to win the tournament with an 8-0 record.
According to Boghosian, who is the club's president, the win was a major step for Tufts' reputation on the national debate scene.
"It was extremely exciting and I think it will greatly increase the prominence of the Tufts team," he said. "It's by far the biggest victory that the Debate Society has had and it's by far one of the biggest tournaments of the year."
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Tufts Debate Society has evolved over the past few years from nonexistence to a moderately successful force on the national circuit.
"We had a team back in the 1990s, but it dissolved after people graduated. The current team was founded a few years ago, and we've been establishing our core of experienced debaters and started to do well again," Boghosian said.
Tufts senior Josh Wolf, the group's vice president, explained that the team's victory at the Brown tournament not only qualified the team for the national tournament, but also cemented Tufts' place as a competitive force in the college debate world.
"Aram and Rob had really taken a huge step up in their debating this year, showing how fast the team is growing," he said. "We've grown in so many ways and this has shown that we've started to succeed."
The win was something of a coming-out party for the group, but it was not a singular event. Over the past several years, the Debate Society has worked to establish itself as a legitimate entity in the college debate circuit. It hosted its first annual tournament at Tufts last November and plans to continue the budding tradition this fall.
"Pretty much every school on the circuit hosts a tournament, so hosting goes a long way to establishing name recognition," Silverblatt said. "Harvard, Yale and Brandeis are all well-known on the circuit, but Tufts had never been one of those teams. It's been our goal to increase our presence, and winning a tournament will go a long way towards that."
Wolf credited the team's greater success this year to their recent hiring of a team coach, Matt Wansley. Wansley, who graduated from Yale last year and now attends law school at Harvard, is a two-time North American champion and "one of the best people on the circuit," according to Wolf. Last year, as a Yale senior, he and his partner won the Team of the Year award as the most successful twosome in the country.
"He's been especially useful with the novices," Wolf said. "We've been having training sessions at every meeting where Matt will be teaching strategies for different situations. Surprisingly enough, debate does have strategy to it."
The Tufts squad competes specifically in parliamentary debate, a style of debate that consists of two two-person teams - the government and the opposition. The government picks a topic and prepares arguments, while the opposition must argue against the case without any prior knowledge of the topic.
Generally, a team does not know whether it will be the government or the opposition until shortly before each round begins, so both teams must have subjects in mind in case they are on the government side.
According to Silverblatt, though, parliamentary debate is less about preparation than performance.
"It's about logic and rhetoric and who can persuade the judge more," Silverblatt said. "It is more about who can be persuasive, and who can turn arguments in the right direction."
In the final round, a team from Princeton argued from the government side that college students should be allowed to room with members of the opposite sex. Tufts argued the opposing side.
The round was decided by a panel of 16 judges and a poll of the audience that counted for one vote. The Tufts team received 9 votes from the judges and took the audience vote by an overwhelming majority, winning the round with a final score of 10-7.
According to Wolf, the team's confidence and presentation during the round helped sway the opinions of the judges.
"It's not a battle of factual knowledge, but of logic and wit," he said. "One of the interesting things to see was when Aram and Rob won, they didn't just win because of having the better argument. They made a lot of jokes. When you have the whole crowd laughing and cheering you on, it makes a difference in the judge's minds. The fact that they were being witty helped a lot."
Other topics in the tournament covered a wide range of subjects, from journalism shield laws to political assassinations. One topic that Silverblatt and Boghosian found especially interesting was presented by the Dartmouth team, which argued that that sex offenders should be given the choice to be castrated instead of serving jail time.
"[Debate] promotes a lot of discourse and you learn a lot of stuff from it," Boghosian said. "Very interesting stuff comes up about political theory and constitutional law."
Because teams arguing opposition do not get to choose their position on a topic, the parliamentary debate style forces members to be creative in their arguments.
"You always have to be able to imagine two sides of every issue," Wolf said. "If you're on opposition, you have to improvise. You see the other side of any argument, even those that seem pretty absurd."
Silverblatt also felt that debate has altered the way he thinks about certain topics.
"It forces you to leave behind personal beliefs and think about issues more analytically," he said.
