Richmond debate team competes to defend West Point saber at U.S. Military Academy Debate Tournament
After winning the West Point saber in 2007, the University of Richmond Debate Team returned to the U.S. Military Academy Debate Tournament to defend the saber. While the team did not win the varsity division again this year, the squad did, for the third time in Richmond debate history, return to the Final Round.
Ashley Fortner and Liz Lauzon replaced last year’s West Point winners, Ryan Smith and Joe Chicvak, and fought hard for a 4-2 record, beating two teams from Towson University as well as teams from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
With help from coaches Arnold, Luchetti and Handson, the Richmond team advanced to elimination rounds, beating a number of teams on both sides of the resolution.
On the negative in the octofinals, Lauzon and Fortner defeated City University of New York (CUNY) by arguing that a removal of subsidies would not necessarily prevent the industry from continuing to operate, ignoring the deeper problems related to the cultivation of the commodity itself. This argument was combined with a masking position that contends that if the sum total of governmental support is the problem than eliminating a few subsidies will leave the larger structure intact.
Lauzon and Fortner were affirmative in both the quarterfinals and the semifinals where they defeated teams from Liberty University and Binghamton University respectively. Even though the Richmond team has been running a fairly common case to reduce subsidies to factory farms, Lauzon and Fortner focused the debate on rhetorical and philosophical questions surrounding the human-animal dialectic, using theorists such as Foucault, Agamben, Adorno and others to rethink the relationship humans have with non-human animals and the ways humans obtain food in society.
Winning both of those rounds on 2-1 decisions, the team then lost on a 2-1 in the Final Round to a team from New York University. NYU went affirmative to win the saber for the first time in their history and defeated Richmond's argument about the futility of removing subsidies. Richmond persuaded one of the West Point officers to vote negative with the counter plan to expand subsidies under a condition to halt consumption (a conservation-based approach), but fell one-ballot shy of a repeat win.
Both Lauzon and Fortner will now compete for a spot in this spring’s National Tournament.
Posted November 25, 2008