Eliyahu Gasson | editor-in-chief

The 12-member Duquesne Speech and Debate Team is facing their first tournament of the year, and junior biology major Paul Horne said he’s excited to get on the podium.

“It’s always a good angst or an eagerness I would say. It’s not anything bad or anything fearful. It’s more just kind of an excitedness to get out there and practice more,” he said.

Duquesne University will play host to a Collegiate Forensics Association tournament, a two-day affair starting Friday afternoon with a debate and ending with an awards ceremony at 6 p.m. on Saturday. They are competing against teams from Wilkes University, Slippery Rock University, Bloomsburg University and Shepherd University.

Anthony Wachs, the team’s coach and adviser, said he started working with the team in 2020 and fully took over in 2021. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, he said there was only one returning member that year — a common problem for college debate teams around that time.

“We were no longer able to have practices here on campus. And COVID decimated speech and debate communities. And that was an easy way for administrations to cut budgets,” he said. “Our administration did not. They had faith that we were going to rebuild, and we have.”

Senior international relations and international security studies major Dominic Failor is the vice president of the Speech and Debate Team. He joined at the beginning of his sophomore year during another transitional period for the team, which saw many of its veteran members graduating.

“At the time, we weren’t exactly recruiting because we weren’t exactly sure about the direction of the organization,” he said. “So, I think the tight-knit community of friends that were like-minded really kept me there.”

At a competition, debaters compete in multiple different categories.

One of them is the Lincoln-Douglas debate, named after a series of seven political debates held in 1858 during that year’s Illinois senate race between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.

Horne said he’s already prepared for about three hours and intended on continuing to work up until the competition.

Competitors will also square off in parliamentary style debates, which see two teams argue a topic with only 15 minutes to prepare.

The speech and debate competitors know what topics they will be debating going in, but they won’t be told which side they are defending until the debate starts. That means they need to prepare for both sides going into the competition.

“Personally, I believe a good debater can debate anything. You don’t necessarily have to agree with what you’re debating,” said Veronica Van Dam, junior marketing major and media chair for the team. “Even a murderer deserves a defense attorney.”

Failor said he also hopes to take the skills from the Speech and Debate Team into a career in international diplomacy.

“I think that trying to find some common ground is the ultimate goal for me, at least — to kind of help relations with other countries,” he said.

Horne said this skill is useful, even if someone isn’t planning on a career that is typically associated with rhetorical debates, like his biology major.

“Over the 20th century, some of the biggest political issues were debates about health-related issues. You could think of COVID just recently. That’s a perfect space where biology and spreading information and debating truth really mix together,” he said.

Van Dam said formal debate is more important than ever.

“I think debate and being able to disagree with someone, but still having respect, is so much more important now because of the recent political events,” she said. “You could agree or disagree and that’s perfectly okay. And that’s something that’s kind of got misconstrued in society.”

Van Dam emphasized the need for the style of debate the team competes with, especially as social media discourse continues to bleed into the real world.

“If someone just sees a TikTok or a Facebook post or something, they immediately believe it without looking into it. Being in debate, it’s more like you’re looking at more than what’s at the surface level,” she said.

Eliyahu Gasson can be reached at gassone@duq.edu