November 2024 update: The Lawrence Debate Union is celebrating their 125-year anniversary of debating at the University of Vermont! This comes on the heels of an incredibly successful spring semester in which they won two national championship titles: the Yaatly Online Debate League (YODL) National Championship, hosted at US Air Force Academy, and the Social Justice Debates National Championship, hosted by Morehouse College. LDU has been promoting dialogue and speaking truth to power in their 125 years at UVM and plan to continue doing so for many years to come. Interested in helping to celebrate the anniversary and ensure the future of the program? The team is hosting a 125th anniversary fundraiser. 

For more than a century, the Lawrence Debate Union (LDU) at UVM has promoted respectful discourse, a polite way to communicate and convey ideas and opinions that is often lacking in today’s considerably divisive environment. According to Helen Morgan-Parmett, Ph.D., the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and director of speech and debate in the Department of English at UVM, it is the very basis of the LDU’s mission.

“Debate is rooted in the idea of creating dialogues across difference,” Morgan-Parmett says. “I think that the main thing it offers that’s different from other kinds of academic inquiry or other kinds of speaking and advocacy is that it forces people to reckon with opposing viewpoints.” She adds that it ultimately teaches people to be more understanding of, and more compassionate toward, those who might hold a viewpoint that is different from theirs.

Edwin W. Lawrence, for whom the LDU is named, started the University of Vermont debate team in 1899. The team won its first national championship in 1950 under the directorship of Robert Huber, a pillar in the national debate community who secured an endowment from Lawrence. After Huber retired in the 1980s, the directorship changed to Alfred “Tuna” Snider. Snider became internationally renowned for bringing debate to a broader global space, holding many workshops around the world with UVM students to teach debate to underserved communities, especially in war-torn countries.

Any student can join the LDU, regardless of their experience or major. Over the years, members have garnered countless individual and team awards as well as two national championships (winning the second in 2016), despite the fact that most of them come onto the team with little or no debate experience.

One such student is Bridget Grew, a senior majoring in secondary education, who didn’t have any debate experience when she transferred to UVM her sophomore year. She says she was looking for a community to join, and at her first meeting she was instantly intrigued by the team community and everything it was involved in. “I have become a better communicator, researcher, and advocate through my time on the team,” she says.

“A big misconception is that you have to be good at public speaking to be on the debate team,” Morgan-Parmett says. “But debate is probably the most transformative for the people who don’t see themselves that way.” She says she’s always surprised by the number of people who join the LDU who are terrified of public speaking or just aren’t comfortable putting their ideas out there. “Debate helps them work on those skills.”

Morgan-Parmett also didn’t have any experience when she joined the LDU as an undergrad in 1997. “I sort of randomly fell into it and it changed my life,” she says. After getting her master’s degree, she came back to UVM and coached the debate team for four years with her current partner, Justin Morgan-Parmett, lecturer in the Department of English and co-director of speech and debate. After earning her Ph.D., Helen Morgan-Parmett returned to UVM once again to fill the position of LDU director after Tuna Snider’s passing in 2015. She says she felt an immense responsibility to ensure that the team, its culture, and its commitment to novice debate continued.

Current LDU member Gavin Sicard, a senior pursuing a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in economics, says he first realized he wanted to join the debate team in high school, “because who doesn’t love arguing?” But there was always a schedule conflict. He admits that although his first meeting with the LDU was daunting, there was such a welcoming culture that he quickly felt like an integral part of the team. “I am 100 percent confident in saying that joining the debate team is the best decision I have made at UVM,” he says. 

Being on a team is also part of what it means to create respectful discourse. At all the events, students have to debate with a partner, not to mention that they’re part of a big team. “You have to travel with all these other people and maybe share a hotel room with them and sit in a van with them for eight to 10 hours,” Morgan-Parmett says. So, students quickly have to figure out how to respectfully engage with people they may disagree with or whom they may not even like.

Morgan-Parmett believes the most transformative thing about debate is that students find their voice. She says that it’s an amazing thing to go through as a college student while you’re also coming into adulthood and getting a sense of your beliefs and values and what kinds of impacts you want to make on people around you. Grew adds, “From knowing how to research and create an argument to being able to articulate my thoughts in a clear way, debate has empowered me to use my voice in a new way.”

For Sicard, debate provides a wide assortment of interdisciplinary skills. “I think the most important thing it instills is confidence, both in debate rounds and in everyday life,” he says. He adds that doing the research for debate events and going up against teams from around the country and the world “uniquely exposes you to new perspectives and ideas in a way that, in my experience, is unmatched on campus.”

At the beginning of each academic year, the LDU offers a seven-week novice program in which new members learn the basics of debate. Regular practices are held for the more advanced debaters, and the novices are welcomed to attend those practices, too. The result of this ongoing training? “We just went to a tournament and won the open division,” Morgan-Parmett says. The LDU also won the novice division and had the top speaker at the tournament, and six of its students won additional speaker awards in the top 10.

Julian Henry, a senior majoring in computer science and minoring in business administration, says that a friend who was already on the LDU encouraged him to try debate. “During that first practice, someone asked me in a debate round why culture was important,” he says. “I knew that I thought culture was important, but I had so much difficulty expressing it, especially at the same level as many of the seniors on the team.” He says he wanted to be able to answer questions like that and to always be able to eloquently speak his mind, so he kept coming back to the LDU.

One of Sicard’s favorite memories of being on the team was competing in the European Union’s Schuman Challenge. He describes going into the EU’s Consulate in Washington, D.C., presenting a case that took uncountable hours to develop, and interacting with people who actually create the policies he advocates for as a mind-boggling experience—one he’s had the chance to do twice.

Grew says that the day-to-day experience of working with her teammates and sharing time in the debate room is something she cherishes. She and the other seniors this year cooked a meal for the team at a retreat held in early September. “It was very special to be able to work together in that way,” she says. Sicard adds, “The LDU truly excels at creating a community, and I have made many close friends on the team because of it.”

Last year, Henry was selected to go to Madrid for the World Universities Debating Championship. “The tournament was amazing, but I also got to travel around Spain and Portugal with other members of the team and we had so much fun.” He adds that in some formats of debate, there is a challenging section called cross-examination in which students have to come up with a response on the spot. He says that practicing that aspect has made him better at job interviews because he can think quickly to figure out how to best answer questions.

This year, the LDU is working to coordinate their efforts with those of the Janus Forum, a separate organization at UVM that hosts debate events every year. The LDU is also working with the library and their new University of Vermont Press to extend the Janus Forum’s discussion beyond individual debate events.

The international work that started under Tuna Snider also continues under the Morgan-Parmetts’s leadership, including a three-year-long collaboration with Tanzania and debating societies there. This fall, about a dozen Tanzanian students are coming to UVM and will stay with hosts from the team throughout the week. “We’re going to do a variety of debate activities with them,” Morgan-Parmett says, “including a public debate in Burlington at the Richard Kemp Center on Tuesday, November 7th.” The Tanzanian students will then travel with the LDU to the University of Rochester to the Civic Debate Fall Championship Tournament the following weekend.

“We’re in tough times where we’re facing lots of big questions, from pandemics to racial justice to climate change to economic disparities,” Morgan-Parmett says. She hopes that debate will prepare students to tackle those kinds of questions in whatever capacity they can—and help them be more willing to change their minds. The LDU’s tagline, “I’m open to being wrong,” may be a revolutionary way of thinking today, she says, but it could be the key to a more cooperative—and respectful—future.