Towson University debaters have always been a scrappy bunch compared to their rivals from Harvard, Wake Forest and Northwestern.
They're used to cramming into a van for 16-hour drives to Atlanta and Chicago and sleeping in worn motels where the heat fails in January. The top pairs receive guidance from coach Beth Skinner and a few part-time assistants while their best opponents often rely on armadas of full-time coaches and graduate students to feed them arguments.
"It's a real David and Goliath story," says Christopher "Kit" Spicer, Towson's dean for fine arts and communication. "It would be kind of like our football team taking on the University of Nebraska."
But Towson's debaters worry that state cuts have left the budget so tight that their giant-slaying days are near an end.
Last fall, several rounds of state-ordered cuts to the university system led Towson to slash travel expenses across departments. By late December, those cuts had left the debate budget $5,000 in the red. Suspension of the season seemed a real possibility. The program's national ranking fell from 11th in fall 2008 to 53rd in fall 2009, largely because Towson couldn't send as many players to as many tournaments.
Spicer and Provost Marcia Welsh found $25,000 in the academic budget so that Towson's best pairs will be able to compete in key national tournaments over the next three months. But the budget strains have produced divisions within the team, which has about 15 members. Freshmen and sophomores who would have gained valuable experience at regional tournaments have been unable to travel at all. They hone their craft week after week without any hope of testing their mettle in real competition. That has led to grumbling about the few pairs who get to travel.
"It's very tense, because people want to compete," says Dayvon Love, who won a national championship for Towson in 2008 and helps coach the current team. "It impedes the growth of the younger debaters."
Fueled by innovative debaters from Baltimore City schools, Towson has become a national power in college debate, one that can stand toe to toe with far wealthier and more established programs. In a world of white, male privilege, most of Towson's elite performers are black and hail from neighborhoods where college seemed far from a given destination. They see debate as a platform to argue for social justice and prepare themselves for long lives of activism.
"Some people will use the skills they learn from debate for evil ends," says Adam Jackson, a senior from Baltimore who forms Towson's No. 1 pair with fellow Baltimorean Deverick Murray. "I'm developing the tools I need to fight those people. I want to make the whole community smarter."
The best debaters worry that without traveling to top tournaments, underclassmen will be unprepared to carry on the team's legacy of excellence in two or three years.
"The only way I was able to get to the level I am now," Murray says, "is that as a sophomore, I was able to travel to all those tournaments and get beat bad. I learned from it."
Without such development, "I think that our future is in jeopardy," Skinner says.
Spicer hopes to negotiate a more robust annual budget for the team so every year won't be a scramble. He believes in debate, both as an intellectual training exercise and as a recruiting tool for promising urban students. He says he's optimistic that Welsh will make a "good faith" effort to give the team enough money to remain competitive nationally.
Towson's best pairs have stormed the college debate world in part by chopping at its white, male underpinnings.
Murray and Jackson graduated from Digital Harbor High School and discovered their love of formalized argument in the Baltimore Urban Debate League. They chose Towson largely because of its debate scholarships (the Towson program offers about $200,000 a year in aid).
When they arrived, the team was dominated by Eastern European imports who stuck to traditional approaches. But Love, Murray, Jackson and others decided to personalize their arguments, to speak frankly about the difficulties of entering the stuffy debate world as black men from Baltimore.
Jackson remembers his eureka moment. During a debate in New York his freshman year, he listened to a white opponent reel off clever facts about school busing in front of an audience full of white faces. When it was his turn, he says, "I just get up and go nuts. I say this has no relevance to my experience as a black person. I throw my papers down.
"I never wanted to feel that way again," he says. "I didn't want to play it as a game. I wanted to approach it as something that means something to me."
He and his cohorts would channel their frustration into a brash, new style. They'd pepper their speeches with hip-hop verses, spoken-word poems and personal reflections on race. Debate would cease to be some game of young overachievers outwitting each other in abstract discussions about foreign affairs. It would become a platform for talking to the future senators, CEOs and judges of America about social justice.
When Love and Deven Cooper won the 2008 national championship (the first black team ever to do so), they did it by arguing that the topic, Middle East affairs, couldn't be engaged before a more fundamental discussion about the problems of exclusion in the debate community.
They considered the approach an act of conscience, not an optimal strategy for winning. But it worked, and similar social critiques have produced excellent results for Murray and Jackson, who were ranked among the top 25 pairs in the country last fall.
"The reason why our arguments win so much, I don't want to be arrogant, but it's almost like we're on the side of truth," Murray says.
Towson's iconoclastic style has drawn widespread interest in the debate community. Love says he often receives Facebook messages from young black debaters. "It means a lot to them that we've had success doing it the way we do," he says.
But the frank talk about race, class and gender oppression (the Towson team includes several women) sometimes disconcerts opponents and audiences.
"Race is a hard subject for any college student, especially one who comes from enough privilege to attend Harvard, Berkeley or Wake Forest," Murray says. "All of a sudden, this student from Towson is up there reading a poem about race, and it can get rough. People get hurt. They assume you're saying that they don't like black people."
Discomfort with the status quo, of course, is part of Towson's design. It's a mistake to view the approach as a gimmick, says West Virginia University debate coach Neil Berch.
"The things they say are heartfelt, but it's important to note that they're also backed by an unbelievable amount of scholarship," Berch says. "One of the things we've tried to emulate is their depth of scholarship."
Murray and Jackson spend 60 hours or 70 hours a week on debate and do enough research for a 100-page paper every time they construct an affirmative case for competition. Somehow, preparing for verbal warfare fires their imagination in ways that classes never have.
Debate has changed Murray's life. Two years ago, he was a computer science major looking ahead to a lucrative entrepreneurial career. Now, he's president of the Towson Black Student Union and a political science major with ambitions to "fight for people not in the political realm."
Jackson, who says he probably never would have gone to college if not for debate, leads another group called Brotherhood: Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, which promotes discussions about prejudice on campus. He sees high-level debate as a vital interest for Towson, a source of opportunity for city kids that cannot be sacrificed over a few thousand dollars.
"Debate, for a lot of people, can save a life," he says. "People who might otherwise die or be in jail, this might be the only reason they read books, because they're engaged in a debate."