Foreword
My involvement in debate began on an otherwise uneventful Sunday September evening at the beginning of my junior year in high school. As I was walking out of church, I met my new American history teacher, who suggested that I look into the public speaking program. Eager to impress her, I went to a meeting a few days later and signed up to do extemporaneous speaking. Later that year, I inquired about starting a debate team. High school debate in South Jersey–and much of the US–revolved around one broad topic that permitted a wide variety of more specific cases calling for reform in a particular area. Students researched the broad topic area, prepared thousands of evidence cards, and debated both sides of the resolution at tournaments held in suburban high schools. I convinced a few other students to help me start a debate team at the beginning of the next academic year.
I imagined that competitive debate would give me an opportunity to develop my public speaking skills, but at my first tournament I learned that I was mistaken. What mattered most to judges seemed to be how many arguments you could make in an 8-minute speech, not how good the arguments were. This led debaters to engage in spreading, or rapid-fire speaking, in order to maximize the number of words they could utter in their limited speaking time. Gestures, fluency, eye contact, appearance didn’t win any speaker points. Debates were won by overwhelming opponents with so many arguments that they couldn’t keep up, and then claiming victory on the grounds that they had forfeited (or dropped) the arguments they didn’t oppose. Spreading was highly rewarded in national topic debating, as I saw when I competed in a debate tournament, but as far as I was concerned it was a skill only useful to hockey announcers and auctioneers. Having no interest in either profession, I looked for colleges that offered alternative forms of debate.
This search convinced me not to apply to several top universities (among them Harvard, Georgetown and Dartmouth) because they only offered national topic debate. I learned that other universities such as Yale and Princeton offered debate programs that featured student debates before audiences in auditoriums. These rewarded research and public speaking skills and often led to interesting discussions during the debate, but they had a downside: it was unrealistic for any one debater to do more than two a semester. This was partly because of the time required to prepare for each debate, but also because few universities were willing to travel away from campus just to engage in an hour-long debate. There were about 35 people on my debate team at Yale, many of whom only debated once a year.
During my sophomore year, I learned about a very different form of debate, dubbed parliamentary. Canadian universities had adapted British parliamentary debate to a tournament format, which allowed students to debate multiple times in a single weekend. Instead of using a single topic throughout the tournament, they used a different topic each round, which was announced ten minutes before the round began. The focus was on quick thinking, the clash of arguments, and humor, although not necessarily in that order. The Yale team travelled to tournaments at McGill and the University of Toronto, where I got my first exposure to parliamentary debate.
The topics used at parliamentary tournaments often involved common aphorisms like “There is a light at the end of the tunnel” or “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” I vividly remember a debate against future CBC news broadcaster Ian Hanomansing of Mount Allison College. He and his partner drew the topic “Everything that is important in life is represented in the nightingale’s song.” During the ten-minute prep time Hanomansing wrote a short poem about beauty, creativity and music and argued called it “The Nightingale’s Song.” I remember being flustered as I began my negative speech; how do you argue against a poem? Luckily it hit me that the song consisted of platitudes, and I quickly took the approach that life required pragmatism, something that wasn’t part of Ian’s Song. This led to a debate about the importance of pragmatism in life and my team ended up winning.
Another time I drew the topic “Evil is the root of all money.” Parliamentary debating did not have rigid rules about how topics had to be interpreted, so I defined “evil” as an acronym for energy, vision, intelligence and luck. I then argued that at least one of these was responsible for all money-making enterprises and invited the negative to prove me wrong. The negative defended with a series of examples that purported to show money being made in the absence of these factors, but my partner and I were able to identify at least one of the four “evil” qualities in each example, so we won the debate.
During my senior year at Yale, I served as team manager, and we began participating in the parliamentary tournaments that had recently been established in the northeast United States. I also organized the first-ever Yale parliamentary tournament in March, an event that has continued until this day. The next year, I enrolled at Harvard Graduate School, and with fellow graduate student Neil Buchanan founded the first parliamentary debate team at Harvard. Having no money for expenses, Neil and I organized a tournament before any Harvard students had participated in parliamentary debate. It was a success, and over forty years later it continues to be held in the same October slot we chose in 1981.
That same year, debaters from several colleges and universities in the northeast formed the American Parliamentary Debate Association (www.apda.online) to organize the rapidly growing circuit of parliamentary tournaments. This gained national press attention and Neil and I were invited to debate on the David Susskind show. We qualified for the first APDA national tournament and made the final round. We drew the topic “We should reject the revolution” and argued that Ronald Reagan’s attempt to downsize government represented a revolutionary movement that would be harmful to the country. There were three judges and the audience vote counted for two. We won the judges 2-1 but unfortunately lost the audience vote and the first APDA national tournament to Princeton.
That was my last competitive debate, but my training in debate helped me in many ways in my career. I practiced law as a litigator in New York City, and later served as general counsel and agency commissioner in New York City government. Later, I taught legal writing at the University of Michigan Law School before moving to Touro University, where I have been a professor of political science for two decades.
In my early years at Touro I grappled with the question of how to integrate debate into my political theory classes, and in 2012 I first offered the course that is the subject of this book. I searched extensively for a text on LD debate that could be used for college students, but found nothing acceptable. Finally I realized that my experience teaching LD debate for over a decade gave me the basis for putting together what I believe to be the first text on LD debate at the college level.
Thinking back to my first debate experience a half century ago, I am gratefuI for the many benefits that debating has brought me. I hope that students who use this book will reap some of the many intellectual rewards that I obtained during my years of collegiate debate.
I wish to thank Dr. Robin Brooks Ishler, my political science colleague at Touro, for invaluable assistance in editing drafts of this book. His thoughtful comments and insights into the theorists I discuss in Unit 3 have improved this book immeasurably.
I also wish to thank Nate Ram, David Weissman, Rose Eisenberg and Yakira Colish, students who took my debate course and provided some of the material that I used in my two sample debates. David and Nate are depicted on the cover in that order. I am also thankful to Dean Henry Abramson of Lander College for Men for his encouragement and assistance in this project. And it does not go without saying that I am forever grateful for my wife Susan’s continual support in producing what is my fourth book.
Tom Rozinski
Brooklyn, New York
October 2025
