An Early Retirement

For Sandra Seville-Jones, four years at Harvard have provided great swings of intensity, from fulltime dedication to high-level debating to disenchanted passivity with the College's size and impersonality.

Seville-Jones arrived at Harvard as a heralded public speaker who had been recruited, by schools across the country, known to the nation's large and dedicated circle of debaters for her "absolute, total commitment to the activity," according to Chris Wood '83.

"She was a great, great high school debater and a legend nationally," Wood says. Seville-Jones' "legend" was assured, in fact, in her senior year at the Harvard High School Debate Tournament, when she won the Individual Top Speaker award with a near-perfect score.

Seville-Jones debated at an extremely competitive level in high school, with hours of research, rehearsing, and professional coaching. Lots of travel and fundraising were involved. And she thrived on it. Her reputation and talent continued to grow so dramatically that in her freshman year at Harvard, she and Bill Foutz '80 earned a number one national ranking before losing in the quarter-finals of the championship tournament that spring.

Her debating had become very rewarding but also nerve-wracking because of the demands college competition places on creativity, memory, discipline, and most of all, time. She and Foutz spent months researching the nationwide topic that year, "employment."

"We employed people by building nuclear power plants across the country." she remembers. They prepared extensively to defend the plan's environmental consequences, saying "we had 20 or 30 pages on why nuclear waste was the greatest thing We were going to glassify it, send it to outer space..."

Though she and Foutz placed among the top eight teams in the country Seville-Jones realized after her freshman year that she was missing a lot, and she decided to "take the next year off," referring to debating, not college.

She never did compete seriously again, save for an abortive comeback junior year. Support for debating from the Harvard administration waned, and she grew more and more alienated from the College itself. "The wear and tear on you can be really bad," she explains. "I met no one here my freshman year except my roommates and my roommates' friends."

Today Seville-Jones lives off-campus, deliberately separating herself from the day-to-day life of Harvard. A bad rooming experience sophomore year and frustration over the distance she perceived between herself and her advisors and tutors drove her towards other interests, and towards a lifestyle emphasizing pleasure more than pressure. And with few regrets.

"I was dull. I think getting out of debate has helped me do other things," she says. She has become an avid sports fan with cable television hookups that allow her to follow several baseball teams on a daily basis, and she counts a trip to Los Angeles to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch in the World Series as a highlight of her senior year.

But Seville-Jones misses the intensity and exhilaration that debating brought her, and she hopes her enrollment in Law School this fall will reintroduce challenges she has missed the last three years.

"Law School's competitive, and that's what people in debate want," she explains. "It's that adversary spirit again. It seems like a lot of work, immense. It's a challenge," and apparently one that she is eager to accept, albeit at her own pace.

Seville-Jones still blames Harvard for drastically cutting the debate council's funding, which eliminated coaching and research and discouraged her from competing with the same energy she had shown freshman year. But she does not regret her three-year "retirement."

"There are a lot of things I never would have thought of doing if I were still in debate," she concludes. "I can see where Law School may revert me back to that single-minded self."