ROOTS IN RHETORIC

Named in 1950 after noted Emory student and U.S. Vice President Alben W. Barkley, who served from 1949-53 under President Harry Truman, the Barkley Forum long predates the moniker. In fact, the roots of the organization reach back to a time before the university was even in Atlanta.

Shortly after Emory was founded in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia, two literary societies — Phi Gamma and Ignatius Few — were started by students who staged weekly debates on campus. All students attended. And the subject matter of these discussions would be familiar to any college student from any time.

“It was essentially a collection of students who wanted to push back on the staid curriculum of the time,” says Ed Lee III, senior director of faculty inclusivity for Emory College of Arts and Sciences and former director of the Barkley Forum.

“In many ways, that’s the DNA of the Barkley Forum. Debaters get to play around with established research and create their own arguments and new perspectives on how the world should work and be governed.”

The tradition followed the school to Atlanta in 1919. Soon, these literary societies began representing Emory in debates with other institutions. By the mid-1920s, an Emory team of orators was holding its own against intercollegiate rivals throughout the U.S., including Princeton and Harvard, and in the U.K. versus the likes of Oxford University and Cambridge, that would visit Glenn Memorial sanctuary and entertain audiences almost every year.

World War II and strict travel restrictions ended these informal competitions and the literary societies disbanded. But when the troops came home in the mid-1940s, flooding U.S. colleges with young GIs, the United States Military Academy hosted the first National Debate Tournament. Emory’s revived debate team was eager to get back to the podium.

In 1960, Glenn Pelham, who had coached the team that had won the inaugural Barkley Forum for High Schools and would go on to become a two-term Georgia state senator, took over debate at Emory. Pelham ushered in a period of unprecedented success, culminating in the school’s first Delta Sigma Rho-Tau Kappa Alpha national championship in 1967. And he also started to chip away at the white male hegemony of collegiate debate, especially in the South, recruiting women and Black students.

Once before a debate at the University of Alabama, which had been embroiled in civil rights protests, Pelham called ahead to make it clear that Emory would not participate unless Alabama officials could guarantee the safety of Black debater Marsha Houston, a Barkley Forum student competitor who would co-found the Emory Black Student Alliance and later become a pioneering Black scholar, feminist and activist.

“He was a big man,” says Melissa Maxcy Wade 72C 76G 96T 00T, one of Pelham’s star pupils who, as an undergraduate, was the third seed at the 1972 National Debate Tournament. “Everyone was afraid of him, so Marsha was safe.”

Upon his retirement in 1972, Pelham tapped Wade to be his replacement as director of the Barkley Forum.

Wade would grow the ranks and reach of the organization to unforeseen heights, doubling down on community service and the diversity of voices in the forum. She would usher in the future.  “I was 21. I was clueless. I was a good debater, but I knew spit about teaching,” says Wade. “But I see now that Pelham orchestrated my hiring. He understood that the future was coming.”

ERA OF SERVICE AND EXPANSION

When Wade first arrived at Emory as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, she was one of few women in debate. There were even fewer people of color. When she took over as director of the Barkley Forum in 1972, she set out to correct both shortcomings.

Diversity was more than just the right thing to do. In Wade’s view, having a robust and eclectic group of voices, perspectives and life experiences was vital to success in debate. Teammates pool their research, practice against each other and generally bounce ideas off one another. Naturally, a variety of viewpoints — thoroughly interrogated, discussed and refined — leads to better-rounded arguments.

This search for a deeper and more diverse pool of debaters dovetailed with Pelham’s tradition of service in 1985 with the founding of the Urban Debate League (UDL), which began as a graduate school project and evolved into a partnership with Atlanta Public Schools to bring debate and educational resources — via Barkley Forum volunteers — into lower-income communities. It’s an effort that’s been replicated in more than 20 other cities nationwide.

“Melissa Wade had a dedication to making debate accessible to as many students as possible and ensuring that the most vulnerable had the opportunity to learn about debate,” says Lee, who as an Atlanta Public Schools student fell in love with debate through the UDL in the early 1990s. “She saw the need and the desire of other students who yearned to craft an argument.”

Wade’s efforts soon began to bear fruit. First, the overall ranks of the Barkley Forum started to grow. While most schools would send eight to 12 debaters to a tournament, Emory would send more than 20, eventually approaching 40. And these large cadres were increasingly diverse. In 1996, Kate Shuster was part of the duo that won Emory’s first National Debate Tournament.

Since then, at least eight other Emory debaters who do not identify as men — including women, nonbinary and transgender people — have won national championships. Aimi Hamraie 07C won the National Debate Tournament with teammate Julie Hoehn 08C in 2007.

“When I first arrived at the Barkley Forum, I had assumed it would be a very traditional approach to things,” says Hamraie. “It was quite different. It was a large, multiracial and multicultural community. And it was really a community, with a lot of mentorship between students, especially older students mentoring the younger.”

Wade is quick to note that none of this would have happened without the extraordinary support, financial and moral, of the Emory administration — a backing that has been unwavering in the years since.

“Emory leaders have always brought a degree of appreciation for what the Barkley Forum does that is missing at other institutions,” adds Mikaela Malsin 10C, the current director of the forum and yet another former Emory debater tapped to lead the program. “They understand how much Emory is a locus for debate and how powerful it is as a campus feature,” Malsin says. “That appreciation goes from budgetary decisions to casual conversations you have on campus with people who know the Barkley Forum’s reputation. The deep appreciation across campus is unmatched.”

SHAPING THE FUTURE

As a transformational student experience led by Campus Life, Barkley Forum members often go on to be successful alumni and ambassadors of the university. Barkley Forum debaters have graduated to serve in a wide range of fields, including medicine, political science, business, law and education.

The short list of notable recent alumni includes Hank Tomlinson 96C, director of the Division of Global HIV & TB for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Cyrus Ghavi 06C, senior counsel with the National Football League; Catherine Beane 90C, senior vice president of public policy and advocacy for the YWCA; Stephen Bailey 01C, co-founder and CEO of ExecOnline; Henry Liu 04C, recently named director of the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission; U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) 04C 04G; former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.) 91C; and Michael Horowitz 00C, current U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, just to name a few.

One reason for the broad success of Barkley Forum graduates is that the skills needed to prevail in competitive debate are broadly applicable. They include research, public speaking, persuasiveness, teamwork and anticipating counterarguments.

“I took the academic career path, which was similar to the stuff I did in debate,” says Hamraie, who is now an associate professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “Reading high volumes of published research and using those research strategies is very similar — except it’s now less intense, less competitive and I sleep a lot more.”

Rajagopal, who graduated from Emory College of Arts and Sciences this past May, says he’s already seen the benefits of debate in his preparation for medical school. “In debate, you learn to process information quickly and read through massive amounts of literature at a fast pace,” he says. “It also teaches you to be a good and balanced speaker who approaches issues with nuance, which is huge in modern medicine, where you have to use the evidence to reach a conclusion.”

Perhaps no element of debate is more universally applicable — and some might argue, more in demand these days — than the core tenet of critical thinking.

“My experience in the Barkley Forum shapes the way I see things insofar as a way of thinking about the world that is strategically oriented,” says Malsin. “Debate really reveals the nuance and gray area in all things. Because you have to argue both sides in debate, we are familiar with why an argument might be or might not be true. We see dimension to the way the world works that might otherwise be opaque.”

And, of course, Barkley Forum’s decades-long history and tradition has spawned its own culture that spans generations of alumni, providing a ready professional network and support system for graduates of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

“You have this special connection,” says Kessler, who also graduated from Emory College this May and will be continuing her education at Harvard Law School. “I’m connected to debaters from the past; I know several who’ve invited me out to coffee or dinner who want to continue to help Emory debaters. And as we continue to interact, you want to pay it forward, too.”               

FACILITATING DISCUSSIONS ON DIFFICULT TOPICS

In 2017, the organization lengthened its title to the Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation and Dialogue to reflect an expanded mission. The forum began reaching out across campus and communities to facilitate broader discussions on difficult topics of the day.

According to Barkley Forum officials, past and present, the outreach couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. They lament how our society is awash with misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. The flood of unreliable news has washed people into separate, insulated spheres, both online and in person, where their beliefs are unchallenged and reinforced. And yet, now more than ever, those with differing opinions and perspectives are unwilling to even engage in civil discourse, much less open themselves and their minds to the possibility of seeing things in a different light.

“In debate, you assume there are multiple legitimate perspectives,” says Lee. “You also assume that there is always better research and better thoughts to be found. Debate encourages — nay, demands — that you not be dogmatic in the positions you take. Genius is developed when we are willing to collaborate with people with different perspectives and different ideas.”

Wade says Barkley Forum can be a beacon in a time when nuanced topics have been reduced to 140-character tweets and sound bites that drive media.

For instance, the Emory Conversation Project, a facilitator-training program, provides safe spaces for structured, face-to-face dialogue that can potentially bridge differences and connect communities. “It drives conversation,” she says. “I am so struck by what debate can do for empathy.”

Meanwhile, the Barkley Forum itself fosters a long and deep connection among students from decades past as it sends skilled debaters and rigorous thinkers out into the world. Lee talks about a wall in the Alumni Memorial University Center where the Barkley Forum offices are located. Photos of debaters from the 1940s all the way to the present hang there.

“I am the keeper of the wall,” says Lee. “I want students to see themselves connected to a past and a future. This is a space where if you want to debate, you can debate. When you show up willing to share your ideas, someone will listen. But you must be willing to reciprocate and listen to them. The only price of admission is a commitment to considering perspectives that are different from your own.

Photography courtesy of Barkley Forum and Kay Hinton. Design by Elizabeth Hautau Karp.