Subject to Debate
Resolved: Competitive argument is a most worthy Eastern activity.
Competitive, formal debate remains one of the places where young people learn to do something genuinely difficult: listening to an opposing argument and responding with evidence. The payoff, education researchers say, is a lifelong edge in reasoning, persuasion and the capacity to think clearly while holding two ideas in tension.
Sadly, debate programs have been disappearing from college campuses for decades, casualties of budget pressures and shifting institutional priorities. EWU’s team, for example, had gone dormant. And then Tony Penders arrived.
“People think speech and debate is all about speaking,” Tony Penders says, “I always tell people it’s really more of a listening event.”
Penders, an adjunct instructor, joined Eastern’s history faculty four years ago. He had previously directed the debate program at the University of Indianapolis and, because he’s convinced that debate helps students succeed in college and beyond, he was keen on reviving Eastern’s. Soon after his arrival in Cheney he did just that, and today the seven-member Eagle Speech & Debate Club team competes in events across the nation. “People think speech and debate is all about speaking,” Penders says, “I always tell people it’s really more of a listening event.” One can’t, in other words, rebut what one hasn’t absorbed. Or find weakness in a claim you weren’t attentive enough to understand.
Penders’ roots in debate traced back to his own undergraduate years at Gonzaga, a Jesuit university where formal argumentation is ingrained in its DNA. Now with students of his own, Penders remains convinced that verbal jousting doesn’t just provide tools for arguing more effectively, it also serves as a “foot in the door” for leadership and career opportunities.
Another benefit, he says, is the thrill of competing against students from other universities. At the end of January, for example, Penders and the Eagle team participated virtually in a tournament based in New York City, where Seamus Mahoney, the Speech & Debate Club president, placed second overall. A junior majoring in environmental policy and planning, Mahoney transferred to EWU from Lower Columbia College, a two-year community college in Longview, Washington. He says he arrived at Eastern already convinced that debate was for him.
“It’s not because I like going to other colleges to argue — though I do enjoy that,” Mahoney says with a laugh, “but because of the community that it fosters within the institution and the connections that I can make beyond.”
