Debating Pros and Cons

Peter Foley for the Wall Street Journal

In September, the Bard Debate Union at Eastern Correctional Facility in New York took on the debate team of Harvard University. The topic was whether public schools should be able to deny admission to undocumented students. Harvard was assigned to argue that they should not, and lost. The team on the other side, inmates at a maximum-security prison who are part of Bard College's Prison Initiative, argued, against their own belief, for enrollment denial and were named the winners by a 2-1 vote of the judging panel of debate experts. This brings the team's record to 3 wins and 1 loss (to West Point, which it also beat once) since its first public-style debate, in April 2014. “The purpose of work is not to reform criminal justice per se,” says Max Kenner, founder and executive director of the Initiative, “but to engage and to relate to people who are in prison, who have great capacity and who have that dedication and willingness to work hard, as we engage any other college students”: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/harvards-prestigious-debate-team-loses-to-new-york-prison-inmates?CMP=ema_565b