If you happened to have been walking anywhere in the vicinity of the Erb Memorial Union on Friday or Saturday, chances are you noticed more than one gaggle of high school students dressed in formal attire and discussing anything from public policy to moral values as part of the annual Robert D. Clark Invitational Forensics Debate Tournament.
“We’ve had debates in Clinical Services, Northwest Christian University, The Ford Alumni Center and Knight Library,” Forensic Coordinator Benjamin Dodds said. “That’s all four corners of the University, and we’re also using every single building in between.”
The Robert D. Clark Invitational is an annual debate tournament put on by the UO debate team which hosts high school forensics competitors throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and even one school from Canada. The competition is fierce, but it’s good practice for the school debate teams to see what they’re up against when it comes time for state championships.
“The point of this event is to increase the amount of opportunities for students to compete in debate,” Dodds said. “We’ve had a really impressive turnout this year, so there’s plenty of great competition.”
According to Dodds, this year’s tournament had somewhere between 50-70 more participants than in previous years and hosted seven additional high schools — 42 in total.
High school Senior William Dalquist returned to UO’s tournament from Bend, Oregon’s Summit High School after coming in second place in the parliamentary debate category last year. A parliamentary debate is when two debaters from a school go into the debate without knowing what they’ll be speaking on. Once they’re presented their topic, they have 15 minutes to prepare an analytics based argument against their competitors.
“This is the biggest tournament in the state outside of the Oregon State Championships,” Dalquist said. “It’s a really great testing ground to see how well you’ll do in State.”
Dalquist’s parliamentary debate partner Liam Maher agrees, and says that the competitive field is a lot more diverse and challenging than other tournaments.
The twenty or so members affiliated with the University of Oregon debate team have been volunteering all throughout Friday morning till Saturday night to host the event. The tournament ended at 8 p.m. on Saturday and an awards ceremony followed.