Is This Really the End of the Debate?

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After two hours of this, it's almost midnight. Ryan feels exhausted. But i felt it in the room that people were like, we're not out of the debate. We can still win. At this point, there's only one speech left, and it's ryan's. I was nervous. I knew it was my last speech. And i had maybe five sentences written on a piece of, you know, just copy paper. The audio quality of this speech is kind of terrible, but, m we're just going to let it play. Right?

In competitive debate future presidents, supreme court justices, and titans of industry pummel each other with logic and rhetoric.

Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode originally aired in 2016, we take a good long look at the world of competitive college debate. This is Ryan Wash's story. He's a queer, Black, first-generation college student from Kansas City, Missouri who joined the debate team at Emporia State University on a whim. When he started going up against fast-talking, well-funded, “name-brand” teams, from places like Northwestern and Harvard, it was clear he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So Ryan became the vanguard of a movement that made everything about debate debatable. In the end, he made himself a home in a strange and hostile land. Whether he was able to change what counts as rigorous academic argument … well, that’s still up for debate.

Special thanks to Will Baker, Myra Milam, John Dellamore, Sam Mauer, Tiffany Dillard Knox, Mary Mudd, Darren "Chief" Elliot, Jodee Hobbs, Rashad Evans and Luke Hill.

Special thanks also to Torgeir Kinne Solsvik for use of the song h-lydisk / B Lydian from the album Geirr Tveitt Piano Works and Songs

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