Sic Transit Gloria

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Debating, New Style, is mightily heralded into being in yesterday's CRIMSON. The advent of "the first debate ever held with the speakers over 1,000 miles apart" is welcomed by what was probably the largest audience which ever listened to an intercollegiate debate.

A better acquaintance with the CRIMSON files would probably show that two or three years ago a Harvard Debating team speaking in Boston met a team representing the University of Oregon, speaking in Oregon, at that early time "spanning the Continent." A further journalistic excess is embodied in the unqualified glee with which the old order is allowed to pass and the large audience secured. Debating over the radio, as the Chicago debate was not the first to show, entails a sacrifice. The speaker stands in a studio before a machine, his audience imaginary, all personal contact lost, his time hopelessly circumscribed. Any pause, however effective in the studio, may lose him a large portion of his impatient hearers. The consequence is that, to be successful, he must write almost all of his speech in advance and read it to the microphone. This course guarantees that however rapidly he speaks; his sentences will have the proper structure, and his voice, carefully rehearsed in advance, the proper intonation.

The Oxford-trained Chicago team, which was apparently not reciting, was obviously hurried and at a disadvantage, outclassed in logic, sentence structure, and declamation. The speakers had not the time to think things out, to do more than shape their issues to meet Harvard's proposal. Clearly they would have done better to sacrifice the direct clash of argument and to confine themselves to the reading of papers on their side of the case.

Surely Harvard was justified by the result in declaiming all of its speeches, excepting only two or three minutes of rebuttal; but the transition from those precious seconds of direct clash and exchange of ideas to the meticulously phrased and memorized conclusion could not fall to jar the attentive listener. If such an inevitably mechanical performance must succeed to a notable Harvard and Oxford tradition in debating, we ought at least to go into the new order without any illusions as to what we are doing. We are sacrificing the ideal of the sport for the sport's sake to the glamor and tinsel of recognition by an audience. Henry C. Friend, 31.

(Editor's Note: The writer of the above communication doubtless refers to a telegraphic golf match with the University of Oregon which was held May 22, 1929. No debate with Oregon has been held within the last six years).