Competitive debate, also known as forensics or speech and debate, has a history in the United States dating back to colonial times. The practice, an import from British education, began as in-class exercises in which students would present arguments to their classmates about the nature of rhetoric. Over time, the nature of those conversations began to shift towards philosophical questions and current events, with Yale University being the first to allow students to defend any position on a topic they believed in. In the late nineteenth century, student-led literary societies began to compete with each other academically and often engaged in debates against each other. In 1906, the first intercollegiate debate league, Delta Sigma Rho, was formed, followed by several others. Competitive debate expanded to the secondary school level in 1920 with the founding of the National Speech and Debate Association, which grew to over 300,000 members by 1969. Technological advances such as the accessibility of personal computers in the 1990s and 2000s has led to debate cases becoming more complex and to evidence being more accessible.
There are a wide variety of competitive debate formats, including the 2v2 Public forum debate, the 1v1 Lincoln–Douglas format, and the 2v2v2v2 British Parliamentary. Regardless of format, most debate rounds use a set topic and have two sides, with one team supporting the topic and the other team opposing the topic. Teams work through a series of speeches presenting their cases, responding to their opponent's arguments, and defending their case. Participation in competitive debate has been associated with positive outcomes for competitors across a wide variety of metrics, including standardized test scores, civic engagement, and future career outcomes, but has been criticized for forcing participants to defend positions they may not agree with and for its inaccessibility to laypeople at its highest levels. Notable former debaters include U.S. senator Ted Cruz and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
History
Debate as an in-class teaching tool: 1642–1892
Competitive debate in the United States can be traced back to colonial times. As the earliest colleges in America were modeled after British universities, they adopted in-class debates as a pedagogical tool. Initially, these took the form of "syllogistic disputations," highly-structured conversations in Latin which were expected to follow the strict rules of logic. These conversations often focused on the nature of public speaking itself, rather than broader social issues. Students quickly took a dislike to the conversations, with one student at Harvard University describing them as "packs of profound nonsense." Benjamin Wadsworth attempted to continue the practice after becoming president of the University in 1925, but encountered enough difficulty getting students to cooperate with the exercises that within ten years the number of required disputations had been cut in half. The last recorded syllogistic disputation at any university was held at Brown University in 1809.
This early form of debate was replaced by "forensic disputations," which were first introduced at Yale University in 1747. In 1750, Yale's President Clap introduced debates in English alongside the old method of syllogistic disputations in Latin, which earned the approval of Benjamin Franklin. The structure of forensic disputations was looser and allowed for more natural conversations. Students were not assigned sides, rather, they were allowed to contemplate the topic and defend whichever side they believed in. While a student at Harvard, John Quincy Adams regularly participated in forensic disputations, noting in a 1786 letter to his mother that "It comes in course for me to affirm...Whatever the question may be, I must support it." Unlike syllogistic disputations, the topics for forensic disputations often veered towards the hot-button issues of the time: A list of topics debated at Yale in 1832 included questions relating to Native American civil rights, universal suffrage, and capital punishment. Despite their similarity to modern forms of debate, forensic disputations eventually fell out of fashion as well, with student discontent again being a factor. The disputations relied on heavily researched and pre-written cases on each side, but by 1843 most American universities were stressing extemporaneous and oral debate.