Harvard's Prestigious Debate Team Loses to New York Prison Inmates

The Guardian ^ | Wednesday 7 October 2015 | Lauren Gambino

[kaehurowing]

What’s this then, prisoners beating Ivy League students??? What’s the world coming to???? I hope the injuries were not serious.

Sincerely,
Emily Litella

[bgill]

The boy king’s alma mater.

[Chickensoup]

no evidently the prison/bard team regularly debates and wins at a number of schools including West POINT

[TigerClaws]

A couple years ago the standards for debate judging went out of the window.

Take a look at our nation’s ‘top debaters’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

[freefdny]

“Russ Cargill: There’s a couple of things they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School, one is how to cope with defeat, the other is how to handle a shotgun, I’m going to do both right now.”
Russ Cargill is the head of the EPA in the Simpson’s movie.

[rmlew]

"One of the judges, Mary Nugent, told the Wall Street Journal that the Bard team effectively made the case that the schools which serve undocumented children often underperformed. The debaters proposed that if these so-called dropout factories refuse to enroll the children, then nonprofits and wealthier schools might intercede, offering the students better educations. She told the paper that Harvard’s debaters did not respond to all aspects of the argument."

I believe that the Harvard team chose to lose the debate for one of two reasons. The first is that they wanted the prison team to win. The second is that having been insulated from conservative ideas most of their lives, the Harvard students had not idea how to debate this without sounding racists and therefor chose to lose rather than sound

[BBell]

I remember this. It seems that being coherent is not required to debate anymore.