The 1998 ESU Debating Tour to the USA Andrew Hume
It was not, perhaps, the most important phone call in modern history, but the call to arms I received one August morning in 1998 was no less remarkable for all that. After all, how often is one asked to pack one’s bags and jet off for ten all-expenses-paid weeks in the USA, and in the service of one’s country, no less? This, surely, was the situation for which the phrase “an offer he can’t refuse” was invented. Fortunately, it seemed that one of the original picks for the tour, Colm O’Cinneide, had indeed belatedly refused the offer to take part in this junket to end all junkets. As it happens, given that I took the call standing on a balcony enjoying the early morning sunshine of a luxurious Greek summer’s day, refusal was a thought that crossed my mind as well. However, when I realised that Trevor Sather would have to send himself in my stead, wiser counsels prevailed, and off to pack I went. So I came to the tour late on, rather like America to a world war. My partner was to be Ian MacMullen from Oxford University, whose warmth and grace toward me continued unabated until my performance at the debate in Williamsburg led to the first suspicions that I was not, in fact, Colm O’Cinneide at all. The original plan, to combine the wit and aggression of Glasgow with the sophistication and logic of Oxford, was swiftly replaced with a collection of lame but topical jokes about the Spice Girls, Bill and Monica, and my kilt, for which he even composed a haiku. Armed with what we considered a foolproof technique, we therefore arrived in the New World full of misplaced optimism. Bates College, Maine Having arrived to find New England practically underwater, it should have been no surprise that our first hosts thought it appropriate and topical to debate the raising of the Titanic. We were split up for this debate, with Ian and myself each partnering a Bates debater, and the result was a victory for Ian. Clarion University, Pennsylvania Split up again, this time to debate whether or not juveniles in murder cases should be tried as adults. This was a topical issue in the area due to a tragic local incident still very fresh in the minds of all present. Luckily, they took my jokes in the spirit in which they were intended, but all voted for Ian again. We were treated to hospitality in Clarion at least three notches above what we deserved; a cycling trip to a national park (note to self: next time, learn to drive); a 90-minute drive to eat chicken wings; and the sight of Ian leaping off a bridge in pitch darkness into the freezing river below, which is apparently how the youth in Clarion spend their time. The otherwise uninspiring town of Clarion was, consequently, one of the highlights of our tour. Duquesne University, Pittsburgh / University of Pittsburgh And so to the bright lights of Pittsburgh, which proved to be unexpectedly pleasant. The debate at Duquesne was not particularly notable, although I did get off-guard when one of the opposition asked me what proportion of students at Glasgow were African-American. They were scandalised when I said practically none, but we didn’t miss them. At Pitt, later that day, we debated in a building called the “Cathedral of Learning” which, improbably, does exactly what it says on the tin. Our opponents, Max and Ron, made a bet that Ian and I would come to blows before the ten weeks were up. Fortified by this vote of confidence, we moved on.
Cornell University, New York A beautiful Ivy League campus in a lovely part of upstate New York (they have their own on-campus nuclear reactor), staying in a house of which even Derry Irvine would be proud. The coach, Pam Stepp, made us feel very welcome, as did the students, who took us for a beer in a pub apparently named after a serial killer. We passed on the finger buffet. At the debate we ran a case on compulsory parenting classes. My suggestion, that a debate on childrearing was especially appropriate given that the opposing team consisted of two girls, was frostily received, but we won anyway. Towson University, Baltimore. Baltimore seemed very nice, though our stay was brief. We debated the pros and cons of the Bill Clinton impeachment process, and despite being tricked by the opposition into telling the audience about the time I lost my virginity, we won pretty easily. We found ourselves sharing a hotel with the competitors in the national under-16 cheerleading competition, which would be a great set-up for a joke if only I could repeat the punchline in public. Washington DC This came by way of hiatus in the tour, with former British tourist Liz Lamzaki showing us the sights. It was great fun, despite MacMullen insisting on walking everywhere. In the evening we were taken to an Ethiopian restaurant, which at first I thought was a wind-up, but turned out to be a real highlight, although there were long periods of waiting while each course was dropped in by parachute. Richmond University, Virginia Things began to pick up markedly here, as our accommodation in the university’s alumni hall was absolutely top-of-the-range, and the girls who ferried us around were extremely attractive, although their coach dismissed them as “airheads”. When it came to the debate, the opposition apparently tried to set some dreadfully clever American debater’s “technical trap” for us, but just ended up being rubbish. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia Williamsburg is more of a tourist attraction than a place to live, an old “colonial village” frozen in time. Think Windsor without the castle, and you’re nearly there. The debate was poorly attended, which given the quality of my speech was probably just as well. We were very well treated and taken out for an excellent meal afterwards, but couldn’t help wondering what we would have done had we been staying for more than 20 hours there1. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa Another real highlight – less for the beauty of urban (or indeed rural) Alabama than for the star quality of our hosts. We were taken to the most famous BBQ shack in the South (“No coleslaw, no potatoes, don’t even ask”) followed by a college football game with 83,800 in the crowd. One of the debaters even took us for Sunday brunch with her parents. I won’t say that Alabama was our favourite state of the tour, but as an exercise in hospitality it simply wasn’t ever bettered. I even got a present of a Barbie doll dressed as an Alabama cheerleader. Superb.
1.
The answer awaited us in Crawfordsville, Indiana – of which more later.
Colorado State University, Fort Collins In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a delightful stop. The debate was a great success, with a large and responsive audience, and the hospitality from Colorado State debaters was, frankly, above and beyond the call of duty. If you don’t know what this means, I suggest you ask Ian. Metro State, Denver Our solitary experience of an American debating tournament, which was similar to a British one except with a lot more debating and a lot less drinking. No wonder they never win Worlds 2. Still, the hospitality was once again flawless. We debated the winners of the tournament and, despite not having any arguments, entertained the audience with our vision of feminism in the 21 st Century (“The Spice Girls: Empowerment through Submission”). I met a bodybuilder who assured me that with a two hour workout and three steak dinners per day I would achieve an iron stomach 3, I fired a gun, met a double murderer over beers, gave my shirt as a keepsake to a young lady, and nearly broke a pretty important law almost immediately afterwards. All in the same day. Colorado College, Colorado Springs The briefest of stays – just time to debate and then catch a few hours sleep. However, if you ever should meet the dean of students, Mike Edwards, tell him a joke and stand back. His whooping cackle could split metal, and will stay with me to the grave. University of North Texas, Denton Yet more superb hospitality – by now we were beginning to think they had mistaken us for someone else. Another big crowd for the debate as well. This was also the stop where I started drinking Margaritas. Mark DeLoach and his team just couldn’t have been more welcoming. Baylor University, Waco, TX Another big crowd, although I can only imagine someone was handing out sedatives at the door. Nevertheless our hosts took us for an eventful round of golf and some nice meals, including one where I had a crack at the 32-oz steak known as “the Widowmaker”. Apparently the town has the largest proportion of bars to churches in the US, although I couldn’t even begin to tell you what that means. Anyway, they take their religion pretty seriously in Waco, as you might imagine. University of Texas at Tyler Another very well attended debate (over 400 people watched), at a school very keen on public debating. This was the point on the tour where I got bored of the intellectual burdens associated with justifying my assertions, and took to deflecting criticism by describing my arguments as “self-evident”. Despite this brazen display of contempt for the fundamentals of debating, we won again.
2. 3.
Since the time of writing, an American team has, of course, won Worlds; but to the best of the author’s knowledge, neither of the team members hails from Colorado. Unfortunately, the large gentleman neglected to tell me what would happen if I did the latter without doing the former. This information would have been considerably more useful.
University of West Georgia, Carrolton A real one-horse town. The coach, Mike Hester, had been on the tour to the UK a few years previously, and so knew the score. Consequently we had a very pleasant day. The audience here was mid-sized, but the debate was carried on local television, so perhaps in retrospect my Christopher Reeve gag was illadvised. Mercer University, Macon, GA Macon is hardly the bright centre of the universe, but after Carrolton it seemed like it. Joe Zompetti was a really hospitable fellow and treated us extremely well. The debate wasn’t great, but all was redeemed by our introduction from the Dean of students, who had brought the wrong bit of the faxed details he had been sent, and so just read out Ian’s address and phone number to a baffled Georgia audience. This was also the stop at which the American car culture really got to us – driving 100 yards to breakfast… Valdosta University, GA Another swift stop. Having addressed the local rotary club, we debated on women in the military, although our supply of jokes dried up somewhat when our opponent in the debate began to boast that her house contained “over 30 weapons”. Imagine our relief at discovering that only 20 of these were guns. University of Missouri, St Louis An odd day in a lovely city (“I know Scots were explorers too, but did they build a big arch?”). We debated at an Urban League tournament with an audience who were unprepared to listen to even a word of what we said. All our years of debating humiliation should have prepared us for the experience, but after five weeks of being spoilt, it was a sobering experience. St Louis itself was very pleasant, except for the machine in the Science Museum which told me I weighed about 48 stone4. Webster University, St Louis A very small debate could hardly take the shine off an eventful day. We spent most of it taking the mickey out of one of their debaters because we reckoned that her best friend was in love with her – his last present to her had been a double photo frame – and while her shock slowly transformed into mere disagreement, we discovered a couple of weeks later that, splendidly, they had hooked up together days afterwards. Feeling that our work there was done, we moved west. University of Kansas, Lawrence You would have thought that policy debaters would be unflustered by a team standing up and proposing a policy, but it appears not. Ian got very angry and briefly threatened to turn into the Incredible Hulk, but the red mist soon dispersed, and our day in Kansas passed off without further incident.
4.
With the benefit of hindsight, this machine may in fact have been a fortune-telling device of some kind.
The Mercantile Library, Cincinnati An unusual stop, in that we were debating in a library / private club with an audience who had paid $5 a head to see us speak. Despite this, it was a great success, and I did the one and only piece of research on the tour, cunningly managing to weave my new-found knowledge of the origins of the name “Cincinnati” into a speech on US foreign policy. In a curious incident, Ian was sent a large box of food for Hallowe’en by a female admirer, and his attempts to foist sweeties onto me were to be a recurring leitmotif of the next three weeks. Arkansas State University, Jonesboro My “Deliverance” joke was not appreciated in Arkansas (“That was Georgia, man!”), but all was redeemed by our trip to Graceland. Our hosts were, once again, excessively kind to us, even spending an hour with me in a doctor’s surgery when I hurt my back in just about the least exciting way imaginable. University of Southern California, L.A. South Central LA is not a place for the faint-hearted, although being from Glasgow I felt right at home. While I can’t imagine living in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Hollywood are names to conjure with, and the weekend was very enjoyable if somewhat disorganised. The debate itself was a straightforward enough win, as the opposition seemed to think that the best argument for legalising marijuana was the extra income farmers would make from it. Asuza Pacific University, L.A. A small college, and the most religious of the various denominational universities we visited. I somehow got roped into teaching a class on Elizabethan poetry, which ended abruptly when it became clear that Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was the only such poem I knew, and was frowned upon at Asuza because of its sexual content. Clearly these people had never watched Basic Instinct. This was election day, and we sat in a hotel bar and watched the Democrats sweep California, the state that had given us Reagan and Nixon, not to mention Eastwood. California State University, San Bernadino Blazing sunshine in November- we didn’t want to leave California. The coach here, Scott Rodriguez, is almost certainly mad, but was a very good laugh nonetheless. We spent an hour or so searching for the San Andreas fault, with mixed success, and then settled down to enjoy a debate on mining the moon for the fuels for nuclear fusion. It was by some margin the most bizarre debate I have ever taken part in. However, all was redeemed when I mentioned in my introduction that my accent might prove a hit with the ladies in this country. Confounding all prior experience, one enterprising young lady obliged by passing me her phone number at the end of the debate. I have it still, and may use it sometime, which should scare the living daylights out of her5.
5.
For a small fee, I would be happy to pass this phone number on, and complete the journey from harmless joke to criminal irresponsibility.
Humboldt State University, Arcata, Northern California From urban sprawl to majestic redwood country. Confronted with fresh air, I must admit that I normally feign illness and go in search of a telly, but this part of the country does stand out in my memory as hauntingly beautiful. Dismissed by many in southern California as “tree-huggers and potheads”, the students at Humboldt displayed a strong environmentalist streak, and the whole town had the air of being stuck in a 70’s time warp. We had a pretty big audience at the debate, which was nice, and then I had my first and, I swiftly decided, last brush with a Taco Bell. Chico State, California After a very pleasing incident in the morning when our concierge had to ring our room from across the road because he had locked himself out of the hotel, we braved a torrential downpour to drive across the mountains to Chico, Playboy magazine’s “No. 1 party school in the USA”. True to form, I remember little of this stop except a lovely lady called “Party Girl” whose true name I never discovered in two days of socialising. University of Iowa, Iowa City There was not much to see here, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t describe it. The debate itself, for about the twentieth time, was on affirmative action, and we coped fairly well with a novel spin on the motion. A fairly lengthy and complicated system of ballots ensued, which produced a very pleasing result; despite pretty overwhelmingly feeling that we did the better debating, not a single person had changed their view on the subject by the debate’s end. Never has the intellectual futility of competitive debating been more ruthlessly exposed. Butler University, Indianapolis. Another day, another affirmative action debate, albeit not as testing. We were quite impressed by Indianapolis, which boasted a great Italian restaurant, some nice brewpubs, and of course the de rigeur mall. I shall never forget the outbreak of teenage sobbing around us as Brad Pitt declared undying love for some woman on screen. The staff did most of the hosting for Butler, and very hospitable they were too. Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana In Colonial Williamsburg, you may recall (are you still awake?), we mused on what we would do if stuck in such a small town for more than a day. Well, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, we found the answer, and the answer was, nothing. Reminiscent of Williamsburg, minus the history, shops, bars, restaurants or indeed inhabitants, Crawfordsville, despite an oft-seen coffee-table book proclaiming it as one of the “top 100 small towns in the USA”, had precious little to redeem it, with the honourable exception of the local waterworks, which our guide made a point of showing us. The college itself was therefore our one hope of gainful occupation. In this remit it failed spectacularly. It is instructive that my tour diary ran out at this point. Francis Fukuyama contends that there comes a point in the story of human development when significant events cease to happen. In Crawfordsville, Indiana, Ian MacMullen and I reached the End of History. Against all this it’s worth saying that the debate went pretty well, and I got the chance to wash my clothes. Indeed, I washed some of them twice, just to pass the time.
Northwestern College, Evanston, Chicago By contrast, Evanston struck us as the sort of place where we would have happily spent a couple of days given the chance, largely due to its proximity to Chicago. Northwestern were the reigning national policy debate champions, known as the “Borg” for their hive-like mentality and commitment to debating (Cambridge, anyone?). Policy debate is very much a research-intensive discipline, demanding real sacrifice and time from its participants. While we both felt that policy debate really isn’t debating in any conventional sense, I think we also recognised that those who take part put in the sort of time and effort that would be anathaema to the average British debater, your scribe very much included. All that having been said, we were treated to yet another affirmative action debate, which went off without any major hitches, and I has my twenty-ninth and final steak of the tour. NYU, New York After our exhausting and, let it be said, selfless travails of the previous nine weeks, New York felt almost like home. Our host was Will Baker, who seemed to be a jack-of-all-trades, working simultaneously for the church, the UN, NYU, Columbia University and the Urban Debate League. It was at the latter that we were again forced to concede that perhaps we weren’t the masters of audience manipulation that we might have begun to believe. Admittedly, standing up in a deprived inner-city school and proposing the abolition of the minimum wage is about as welcome as an opal-mining case at an IV final, but we struggled manfully, and it could have been worse, though I can’t really think how. The rest of our time in NY was great fun, meeting up with some of our hosts at the National Communication Association Conference, having Trevor Sather buy us drinks, taken out to the Grand Central Oyster Bar by erstwhile ESU factotum Clark McGinn and so on. And then it was time for a tearful farewell to Ian, a train ride up to Boston and a flight home.
All thanks to Trevor, though I’m not entirely sure what for, to all our hosts for their hugely appreciated and spontaneous hospitality, and to our American co-ordinator, Allan Louden, for co-ordinating what must have been a logistical nightmare. And finally, huge credit to Ian for putting up with my morning grumbling, my drinking, my constant and surely pretty trying quips and sub-Frankie Howerd witticisms, my sporadic anti-Oxford sentiments, and the frequent mediocrity of my debating, which was bolstered only by a stock introduction which he had to listen to at least twenty times. And so, the ten most over-used lines of the autumn: 1. 2. 3. 4.
“So where do you go to school?” “It’s only recently that Bill Clinton learned that ‘harass’ is in fact one word” “So is this your first time in the States?” “If we can’t win through the brilliance of our arguments, we’ll win through the accent in which we deliver them” 5. “Which one of you is going to Harvard next year?” 6. “Which one of you is which again?” (I’m betting Ruane and Milnes heard that one a lot) 7. “Hugh Grant went to my Oxford College, you know” 8. “Your accent is so cute!” 9. “We’ve chosen the affirmative action topic. Is that okay?” 10. “So what do you think of our President?”
Andy Hume
November 1998 / February 2003