While waiting for the 6 train, I listened to the story of Ryan Walsh. Against all odds—and there were many—he and his partner, queer black students at Emporia State University in Kansas, won the national collegiate debate tournament in 2013. After reading the 11-page ballot of Scott Harris, deciding vote of the tournament’s final round, I cried.

Then, I saw the backlash: conservative voices in the greater debate community, contesting the legitimacy of contenders who speak “gibberish.” As Jessica Carew Kraft wrote in The Atlantic, teams feel the hard work of policy debate preparation is “frustrated”, and the pedagogical goals of the activity “undermined.” Critics from outside the community see what they want: inclusive progress at last in the most elite extracurricular; affirmative action and political correctness run riot; or tensions, however thinly veiled, between institutions and the diverse populations they admit only at arm’s length.

I participated in Public Forum Debate, an event more accessible than policy, for four years in high school. We spoke more slowly, researched less heavily, with non-expert judges and a resolution topic that changed month-to-month instead of keeping one for the year. If policy debate was meant to prepare future lawyers, government officials, and private-sector stakeholders, the conceit of PFD was pure participatory democracy.

Even with that noble mission, Scott Harris’ ballot was not the first to bring tears to my eyes. Once, in the late rounds of Harvard’s national high-school tournament, we lost two-one on a question about abolishing birthright citizenship. The other team made its winning case on the backs of a permanent second class of non-citizen workers. They argued that poor immigrants were better off as slaves in the U.S. than free in Nicaragua—slaves because they would, under a skewed reading of the 14^th^ Amendment, pass down unfreedom to their children—and that the nation overall was better off for having their labor. One judge said we lost on impacts, never having proved that the arc of a moral universe ought to outweigh ramped-up economic output. Another said simply that we lost on a tightly argued framework to prefer U.S. citizens, or “America First.” (This was 2012.) I felt for hours after that I had somehow failed the undocumented children of this country, not to mention the 65,000 high-school graduates each year who lack citizenship. At the time, I didn’t even know any, from my lily-white Massachusetts suburb. The one judge in our favor refused the other team’s arguments on moral grounds, an act of unilateral juror nullification.

I wonder what sort of ballot Scott Harris would have written. He offered pages of precise consideration of frameworks, links, impacts; he regarded precedent with a wary eye; yet what he offered, eventually, was an appeal to the shared humanity of a community that can be a home.

In my four years at an Ivy League university, I met more former debaters than I can count. Looking back, I remember that my high-school debate team had a chip on its shoulder because we had no money and no formal coach. Despite being a very good public school in the suburbs of Boston, with great teachers and a beautiful new football field, we did not have and could not hire someone like Scott Harris. We had no one to spend every weekend driving vans like Scott Harris, to eat terrible food in break rooms like Scott Harris, to sleep in terrible motel rooms two-to-a-double-bed like Scott Harris, to write ballots like Scott Harris. The fact is that no one has written a ballot like Scott Harris. They’re usually too short, sometimes worse.

The fact is that the debate classroom does not and never did exist apart from the world at large. The fact is that metadebate, to paraphrase a German philosopher, is everything that is the case. The fact is that my partner and I were male-, cis-, straight-presenting, a Chinese-American student good at asking questions without seeming aggressive and a Jewish-American student good at cracking jokes, at tossing out opponents’ arguments with more intuition and charisma and less speed-read evidence. We were self-taught in a debate world that, while hard and political and socioeconomically problematic, we could call our home on day one. Yet, after walking across the campus of an elite school and seeing familiar faces, we still thought we were the outsiders.

I admire, respect, and look up to Ryan Walsh after he won the National Debate Tournament. I guess that’s part of the point. I wonder if I’d have the same admiration if he’d lost, if he’d dropped in semis, if he’s never made it to the tournament. I guess that’s part of it, too.

Revised 1 Jun 17.