Seawolf Speakers round out East Coast trip with another strong performance

More than 140 teams from the U.S. and Canada attended the Yale Intervarsity Debating Tournament in New Haven last weekend, including squads from Stanford, Harvard, M.I.T. and a host of other Ivy League schools. The Yale Debate Association prides itself on gathering the strongest adjudication team of any tournament outside the World Championships, and this year's effort didn't disappoint. Among the experts evaluating the teams' performance were two World Champions, several finalists from the World Universities Debating Championships, winners of the Oxford and Cambridge IVs and a number of judges who have served on the final round panel of the WUDC.

Undaunted, the group of eight students representing the University of Alaska Anchorage turned in another outstanding performance to cap their trip East. Over the course of five preliminary rounds, the debaters faced their competition over topics like whether socioeconomic disparity in K-12 education would be solved with bussing students to different schools and whether democracies should ban parties with militant wings from participating in elections.

Continuing their amazing run that began with a final round showing at the Hart House Intervarsity hosted by the University of Toronto on the weekend of Oct. 15-17, the team of Akis Gialopsos (senior, international relations) and Amie Stanley (senior, political science) ended the preliminary phase of the competition ranked ninth out of 148 teams. Their strong showing qualified them for the quarterfinal elimination round.

There they squared off against a group of adversaries that included the team from McGill University (Montreal) who took first place to Gialopsos and Stanley's second at the Hart House tournament the weekend before. In a particularly satisfying turn, the Alaskans not only advanced from the quarterfinal to the semifinal round, but beat the McGill team in doing so.

In the semis, the Seawolves opposed the motion "Parliamentary democracies should reserve a quota of seats for underrepresented minority populations." Though UAA's team argued that doing so would pervert the principles of democracy and would likely encourage extremism among groups who wouldn't need to moderate their positions to earn popular support, the adjudicators found more compelling arguments for the motion from teams from Vermont and M.I.T. Though they didn't earn the opportunity to argue in the finals, Stanley and Gialopsos were among only four teams out of the 148 at the tournament to earn semifinalist recognition. Beyond that, to turn in back-to-back performances of this quality served to reinforce the reputation for excellence for which the Seawolf Debate team is becoming known.

The team's next competition is closer to home, with a regional tournament hosted by the University of British Columbia. For more information, please contact Director of Debate Steve Johnson at (907) 786-4391.