[applause]
- We’ve got four great debaters.
I know they've both been working hard.
This is going to be an awesome debate because we're going to see some clash right now.
- It is one of the most difficult things you can commit yourself to.
It is one of the most intellectually challenging games
that a person can play and the way that you win
feels so immediately rewarding in the moment,
it's tough to find anything else
that has the highs and lows of intercollegiate debate.
- Like you are winning this activity
and people are basically validating your personal intelligence,
and it becomes an addiction in a weird way.
There's something competitive inside of you that always
just wants to prove that you're the best.
- It pushes you to think outside of what you're comfortable with,
but beyond that, it's like a game.
It's the element of surprise, right? What could come next?
[debating]
- Your capacity is self-defined,
and if you find that you can handle more pressure,
and you can handle difficult ideas
and that you can handle lots of information and bring it together in unique ways,
and you can handle overload.
Being able to find out what your capacity is, is huge.
[debating]
- Think about it this way:
A student is talking 400 words a minute,
researching at the level of a master's student would for their Ph.D.,
battling back and forth, and then
doing that over an entire weekend, and then over an entire season.
[music]
- When that student is done with debate,
that student knows how to process arguments.
They know what is persuasive.
And so the rest of the world, and their class, literally operates in slow motion.
[music]
[debating]
- Because I suppose it would be like watching a chess match
without any sense of what's going on,
but it is like a chess match, in that once you know the intricacies
that are going on, it is endlessly fascinating.
- Why are DHRs inevitable?
- No, you said, "Why aren't they inevitable?"
I'm saying currently, they're in place in a lot of places because [crosstalk].
- So why is that system that has it in place inevitable then?
- Because it's a form of help [crosstalk]
- There's not much more of a group
that I have ever encountered that enjoys reading books
and then arguing and thinking about them.
- What about the Black Panthers engaging in community healthcare
was in the service of taking down [crosstalk]. What did they do?
- They're the type of person who fundamentally enjoys a fierce argument.
- How do we know that that operates separate?
- Because that’s history, right? [crosstalk]
- I enjoy the feeling of researching, learning more, competing more.
- All the moving parts, the way different arguments interact,
I guess that that process to me intellectually is pleasing.
- The research you do, the kind of ideas
you can put forward and get away with is just uncomparable.
- They're competitive,
they're genuinely intellectually curious,
and they really enjoy the process and challenge of argumentation.
- We don't tell debaters what argument to make.
We make sure that debaters make arguments effectively
in the areas they believe and they want to talk about.
Some are more interested in philosophy,
some who are more interested in social justice,
some who are military historians and military planners.
- Our model requires the student to be the one to come to us
and say, ”Here's my academic interest."
So we need to find intellectually curious debaters,
the kind of student that's attracted to
a top-30 liberal arts university like Wake Forest University,
where they're going to have an engaged experience in the classroom,
where they're going to have a debate team that supports that curiosity,
and a track record of winning national championships.
As a general rule, we find that if they want that, they'll come.
So debate is the type of activity that lets our undergraduates try out ideas,
fail, go back to the drawing board, and then try them out again.
There's no places that students today are given the chance to fail.
Most of their lives have been about trying to avoid failure at all cost.
But in debate, they have the opportunity to take an intellectual risk.