How Not to Waste Time in Extracurricular Activities That Won't Pay Big Dividends After Graduation
This long article was published in The New York Times on March 19, 2006. It tells the story of the debate teams of Liberty University, Jerry Fallwell's "not Ivy League" college. The school gives fampus universities a run for their money in debate competition.
Debate hones your verbal skills. It teaches you how to research. It forces you to think on your feet. These skills pay off all through life.
Does the college you have selected have a debate team?
Are you a good debater?
Consider this when you go looking for a college.
. . . This season Liberty is closing in on an unprecedented sweep -- first place in the rankings in all three national college debate groups: the American Debate Association, the Cross Examination Debate Association and the National Debate Tournament.
Two men are responsible for this improbable success. One is Liberty's founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has spared no effort to make his school into a national debate power. The other is the team's head coach, Brett O'Donnell.
O'Donnell, who is 41, is an intensely competitive man -- he works 80-hour weeks and spends half of every year away from his wife and two children on the road coaching, scouting and recruiting. He is a political junkie with autographed photos of Karl Rove, Oliver North and Newt Gingrich on display in his small office. His heroes are Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan -- closely followed by the 79-year-old Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, whom he admires for his work ethic. In 2004, Karl Rove brought O'Donnell in to help the Bush presidential debate team, and O'Donnell expects to be working with Republican candidates again this year. But politics is a sideline for O'Donnell. His day job is teaching nice Christian cheek-turners how to cut their opponents' throats. . . .
"Our football program can't change the culture," Falwell said. "Our debate program can, by producing advocates who know how to argue for Judeo-Christian ethics and the American Constitution. We have 32 kids on our team this year, and they'll all be lawyers or leaders of some sort. Our goal is to create an army of people who know how to make our case. These are brilliant, articulate students. I couldn't have made the Liberty debate team when I was that age. I couldn't talk that fast." . . .
Liberty's program has five full-time coaches and a budget of half a million dollars. And in college debate, money talks. Since its inception in 1980, the Liberty program has won 15 national-rankings championships, two more than its closest competitor, Northwestern. Most of this success has come under O'Donnell. Born to working-class parents in northern Virginia (his father and mother both worked for the telephone company), he first came to Liberty as a freshman student in 1982. He chose the school over the Air Force Academy because he wanted to be a minister.
The Liberty debate team was a minor activity in those days. Even so, O'Donnell never made varsity. After graduation he received a master's degree in communications from Penn State, coached debate there for two years and then returned to Liberty for good in 1993.
"I convinced Doc that, with the right kind of approach, we could be a national power," he recalls. Falwell liked the sound of that, and O'Donnell came through on his promise. Since 1994, Liberty has always been in the Top 5 of the National Debate Tournament rankings.
"Brett's done amazing things," says Warren Decker, the head debate coach of George Mason University, one of Liberty's chief rivals. "As an overall program, Liberty is very close to the top."
"Overall program" is a term of art. Debate ranking points are awarded for total wins at the novice, junior varsity and varsity levels. Unlike many universities, Liberty emphasizes all three. Its elite varsity debaters may not be as good as the best in the country, but top to bottom, Liberty racks up the most points. This success amazes many of O'Donnell's colleagues.
"We get kids who may have been debating since the sixth grade," says Ed Panetta, head coach of the University of Georgia. "They come to us with seven years' experience, and they attend debate camps in the summer. Brett's kids have limited debate experience."
Partly this is because of Liberty's egalitarian entrance criteria, which Falwell summarizes as "first come, first served." Many Liberty students are more notable for their piety than for their intellectual sophistication. O'Donnell has a budget for scholarships, but his recruiting is severely circumscribed by the school's requirement that students be professing Christians. . . .
A lot of students are home-schooled; some have even taken part in special home-school debate leagues. But according to O'Donnell, they lack the starch for serious debate. "These kids pray with each other before the matches," he says. "They put a big emphasis on good manners. I've got nothing against manners or praying, but we want to win. I've never met a home-schooled debater who was aggressive enough for college competition."
The paucity of experienced high-school debaters has forced O'Donnell to start mostly from scratch. Each year he sends a mailing to incoming Liberty students who have a combined SAT score of 1,200 or above -- roughly 40 percent of the freshman class. Around 60 students reply. They go through a rigorous debate boot camp at the start of their first semester. Seven or eight make it through the freshman season. By senior year, only three or four are left, competing at the varsity level.
The survivors see themselves as an intellectual elite. "Reverend Falwell says, 'We're No. 1, and Harvard is like No. 4 or something,' " Lauren Zawistowski, a first-year debater from Jacksonville, N.C., told me. "The kids on campus are proud of our success, what little they understand about it." . . .
The rules of college debate require teams to argue at each tournament both sides of an annual, nationally chosen topic. This year's is "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the People's Republic of China in one or more of the following areas: trade, human rights, weapons nonproliferation, Taiwan." . . .
O'Donnell supplements the Liberty Way with requirements of his own. His debaters devote about 35 hours a week to the team. For tournaments, O'Donnell maintains a strict dress code: men must wear neckties, women must wear dresses or skirts with stockings, or slacks. All debaters are required to keep up a 3.0 grade average -- a standard that has cost him at least one good prospect this season.
And, of course, no dairy products are allowed on game days. "Milk loosens the mucus in the throat, and that makes it harder to speak quickly," he explains.
Debaters research their own arguments, practicing once or twice a week by scrimmaging under the supervision of an assistant coach, who tapes the sessions and then reviews and critiques them to point out mistakes. Some of these are simple things -- speech tics like "you know" or "I mean." But coaching also involves instilling O'Donnell's debate theory. "The trick is to persuade the audience," he explained to me. "It's psychological, and it rests in Aristotle's theory of enthymeme. Aristotle saw that pure logic can't carry a public argument. You need to make the audience go along with you. You do that by leaving out a premise the audience will add itself. . . .
Quick speaking hardly captures the velocity of collegiate debate. Varsity debaters talk at 350 to 400 words a minute -- about the speed of a fast auctioneer. Only experienced judges -- most of whom are coaches from neutral schools -- can actually follow the argument. For this reason, debate isn't a spectator sport. Sitting in a classroom at Annapolis for the opening debate of the tournament, a match between Liberty and Trinity University, I could make out only random bursts of words: "Chinese. . .production facilities . . . economic consequences. . .freely elected. . .patient. . .consequences. . .targets. . .moratorium. . .nuclear winter. . .human rights.. . ."
O'Donnell calls debate "a game of the mind," but it is also a sport that requires strength and stamina. Contests last 92 minutes, and each debater on each two-person team speaks three times -- opening arguments, cross-examination and closing arguments -- for a total of 23 minutes. At some tournaments, teams have five matches a day.
Debaters gulp air like competitive swimmers. Melissa Hurter, a senior from Huntsville, Ala., talked at high speed for nine full seconds between breaths (she and her partner Lindsey Hoban, a senior from Lake Ariel, Pa., keep in shape by playing wind instruments). The Trinity debaters sucked air after only five seconds and sounded as if they were drowning. Liberty won handily.
There is a tactical logic to speed-talking. Arguments -- even nonsensical or irrelevant arguments -- must be rebutted. Those left unanswered count against you. The faster you talk, the more arguments you can make, and the better your chance to rack up points. Debaters carry their ammunition, files of every possible argument and rebuttal, in 14-gallon plastic tubs.
The emphasis on words per minute presents Liberty with another challenge. Debate is generally a male sport; Liberty tends to be an exception. Many of its best debaters are, like Hurter, Southerners who come from a culture that frowns on fast-talking women. They compete against self-assured, big-city Northern boys who have been arguing since the playground. . . .
Liberty does have one great advantage: Despite its perennially high ranking, it is underestimated. "We're supposed to be dumb," O'Donnell says. "People take us lightly. And I won't lie, that gets the kids motivated. We get a lot of pleasure when we beat a Columbia or a Dartmouth."
There were no Ivy League teams at the tournament in Annapolis, but Liberty went up against Navy, Army, Boston College, Georgia, George Mason, the University of Michigan at Dearborn and a number of other bigger schools. They won two of the three divisions, novice and junior varsity. The following week in Austin, Liberty teams defeated squads from Emory and Northwestern. Heading into the National Debate Tournament, which begins later this week, Liberty was No. 1 in overall points in all three national rankings. . . .
One on one, the best debaters from Harvard, Northwestern, Emory and Berkeley will usually -- but not always -- beat Liberty's top varsity team. At the National Debate Tournament, a single-elimination shootout structured along the lines of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Liberty will be happy to finish in the Sweet 16.
This doesn't bother O'Donnell. "If we changed the way we recruit and concentrated on fielding an elite varsity, we'd definitely have a shot at winning the national tournament every year," he says. "But that's not who we are. I spend more of my time with the novices than I do with the varsity. The evidence we work up gets shared among all the debaters. Our goal here is to grow an entire program. We want to educate a lot of kids and instill them with a sense of mission. That's the secret of our success that and a lot of hard work." . . .
To safeguard his program, O'Donnell has embarked on a campaign to raise a $10 million endowment. More than 60 of Liberty's ex-debaters are now lawyers; some are doing very well. When he isn't coaching or recruiting, O'Donnell spends an increasing amount of time with them, trying to turn nostalgia and team spirit into hard cash. . . .