America Tour 2002 Report- Richard Osborne. Stop 1; Cypress College, CA. We flew into New York on September 22nd and, after an over-night stopover, arrived into Long Beach Airport to be met by Pat Ganer, Chair of the CID’s International Debate Committee and our Tour organiser. She explained that for the first 6 days of the Tour we would be ‘acclimatising’ to the US in the company of her Cypress students. During this time we were called on to do a few debating activitiestalking to classes of students about communication, or answering their questions about Britain generally. One particularly rewarding trip was to the local Santa Anna High School to see some of the work being done there as part of the University of Southern California’s Urban Debate Programme. The organisers were particularly interested to hear about the similar work being carried out by the ESU in and around London. The majority of our time, however, was spent being shown the sights of Southern California. Over the course of the week we visited sights as diverse as Disneyland, an English theme pub (‘Ye Olde Shippe’- home of welcome pints of real beer) and the utterly breath-taking golden sands and blue sea of Laguna Beach.
Stop 2; Wabash College, Indiana. After a long early morning flight (the first of our many brief visits to Chicago O’Hare) we touched down in Indiana. The college of which we were guests was Wabash College, one of only 3 remaining all male colleges in the US (as witnessed by the student newspaper headline which greeted us – ‘Do women REALLY need the Vote?’). We were staying in a house built by the college’s founder, Caleb Mills, 173 years ago. The house was stunning (including a grand piano, dining table to seat 18 and a three-room suite each), and we were relieved that the debate itself was a great success. We were asked to oppose the motion that ‘This House Believes that an Invasion of Iraq would Cause more Problems than it would Solve’, and won convincingly. More importantly, the audience seemed highly entertained, and the faculty members were delighted with the way it had gone. It was a relief to know that we could do it!
Stop 3; Kenyon College, Ohio. After another early flight (8.05, necessitating getting up at 5) we arrived in Ohio to be met by Shannon and Jon the debate club President and Treasurer respectively. After lunch they decided to take us to our first Wal Mart in order to show us the dazzling array of guns. It was terrifying. The debate that evening, however, was one of the best of the Tour. The audience was around 500, filling the campus theatre and creating a phenomenal atmosphere. We proposed an invasion of Iraq (we’d guessed by now that it was likely to be a recurrent theme of the Tour) and managed to win over both the audience and panel of judges. At a drinks reception held afterwards it seemed that almost all of the audience members wanted to congratulate us personally, and we spent the night being bought drink after drink. The feeling that we’d gone down so well in front of the largest audience either of us had