From left: Malone, Just, and Cormack. Photograph: Joan Seidel

Outside Gasson 100 on the evening of October 2, adjunct associate communication professor Bonnie Jefferson hands out questionnaires to undergraduates in her “Rhetorical Tradition” class, who form a large contingent among the spectators gathering for the impending event—a contest between the University’s Fulton Debating Society and the international debate team from Great Britain. Jefferson is asking her students to consider: Who’s the best speaker? Who has the best arguments?

Two tables flank the lectern onstage. As the audience fills the 250-odd seats, the British pair, Alex Just and Alistair Cormack, confer in front of a laptop at the table on the right, while Boston College sophomore Matthew Maerowitz sits alone at the table on the left, flipping through pages of notes. Five minutes before the debate is due to start, his partner, sophomore Ryan Malone, bounds onto the stage, bulging backpack slung over one shoulder, after a day of midterm exams.

For Just and Cormack, on their fifth stop of a three-month, 32-campus tour of U.S. colleges sponsored by the National Communication Association, debate is the only business of the day, apart from a little sightseeing. Just, wearing formal Scottish dress—black tie with kilt, silver-buttoned jacket, sporran, and ghillie brogues laced up the calf—in honor of his native Edinburgh, is in his final year at Oxford University. A former president of the Oxford Union—the debating society founded in 1823 and renowned as a training ground for politicians from William Gladstone to Benazir Bhutto—he has been a regular finalist in international debate competitions since high school. The tuxedo-clad Cormack, a recent graduate of the University of Durham, was president of the Durham Union Society and ranked as one of the top 10 European speakers of 2006.

Maerowitz and Malone are also inheritors of a long tradition. Debate at Boston College dates back to 1868, when a Senior Debating Society was formed, the forerunner of the Fulton Debating Society, formally constituted in 1890. In 2006–07, the National Debate Tournament Committee ranked Fulton Debate as the country’s eighth best program. Last spring, Maerowitz, an economics major from Arizona, received the University’s first Quinn award, which recognizes an outstanding first-year debater (the award is named for BC economist Joseph F. Quinn, the former A&S dean). Malone, a political science major from Minnesota, partnered Allen Best ’07 on the winning side in the 115th annual Fulton Prize debate last April.

Just and Cormack smile and wave as Fulton Debating Society director John Katsulas introduces the teams and sets out the rules of engagement: four eight-minute “constructive” speeches, each followed by a three minute cross-examination, concluding with four-minute rebuttals from every speaker. The debate will be parliamentary style, loosely derived from the procedures of England’s Parliament, with the BC team, by prior arrangement, taking the so-called government, or affirmative, side in favor of the resolution: “This House believes that an invasion of Iran would cause more problems than it would solve.” At the end, the audience will vote for the more persuasive team by a show of hands.

In a conversation earlier, Katsulas explained how the contest would differ from policy debate, the style with which the BC team is most familiar. Policy debate typically takes place in front of a judge. Great weight is given to evidence, and debaters develop a quick-fire delivery in order to cram as many talking points as possible into their allocated times, an approach that Maerowitz later admits “makes no sense to anyone who’s not involved in policy debate.” Unlike the British pair, hardened in quasi-parliamentary showmanship, grandstanding, and heckling, Maerowitz and Malone have little experience of making their case to a large audience.

Maerowitz has the tough job of opening the debate, without any sense of the opposition’s style or tactics. But he has clearly taken on the challenge of appealing directly to the audience, as he outlines the government case. “Any military attack on Iran will make the Iraq war look like a picnic in the park,” he warns, arguing that military action would not halt Iran’s nuclear program, would destabilize the Middle East, prolong the rule of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and alienate key European allies, including the British. “Shame!” calls Just, grinning.

Cormack takes the podium to quiz Maerowitz: “Could you clarify for the House tonight whether you think Iran should have nuclear weapons?” he asks. That’s beside the point, says Maerowitz, opening the door to Cormack’s rhetorical query, “So Boston College would like a nuclear Iran?” Having raised a laugh, Cormack reminds his opponent that at least one key ally, “those cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” the French, have recently made bellicose noises about Iran. “What about the possibility of Iran developing nuclear technology, and giving it to groups like Hezbollah and terrorists in Iraq? Possibility?” pursues Cormack in his high tenor. Maerowitz concedes that it is.

When Just steps up to the lectern, he praises the host institution as “the premier academic establishment in the whole of Boston,” and notes that Oxford also has “this small rival based in a place called Cambridge.” Mixing self-deprecation—“I don’t understand about heavy water and enriched uranium”—telling quotation (he twice refers to Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map”), and unabashed rhetoric (“you guys have to think of yourselves as . . . people who believe in liberty and freedom and democracy”), he makes the case that a nuclear Iran poses an unacceptable risk to the international community, that diplomacy has failed, and that military action is the only option.

Malone quickly learns from Just’s crowd-pleasing tactics. “I hope you’re ready to take a trip with me,” he croons into the microphone, asking the audience to think back to March 2003, “when the young David Ortiz had just been picked up by the Red Sox”—and when the United States invaded Iraq. “How’s that working out for you?” he asks. But Just and Cormack have so adroitly reframed the debate in terms of the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, that when Katsulas asks the audience for the deciding show of hands, the split is about 3:2 in favor of the British pair.

Afterward, Malone praised the U.K. team’s ability to force their opponents onto the defensive: “When a team is that good, they tend to dictate what you have to say.” Maerowitz agreed. “They were so good at impromptu speaking, and so good at thinking on their feet,” he said. Both said they’d enjoyed their foray into a debate style that prizes wit and persuasion over the relentless recitation of evidence. And they’d learned something: “For audience debate,” said Malone, “they did a better job of explaining their argument.”

Experience counts for a lot, said Just, speaking by cell phone from the back of a car somewhere between Waco and San Antonio, Texas. “We’re much more used to public debate than most of the American teams,” he said. “We’d probably be rubbish at policy debate,” he admitted cheerfully.

Jane Whitehead is a writer in the Boston area.

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