THE GREAT DEBATERS: GENESIS OF A REFLECTIVE STATEMENT

Robert F. Cohen

When I saw The Great Debaters this week, all my instincts as an educator were once more confirmed. The film echoes my belief that education is the great equalizer and that without it we could never make the progress that we need to make in our society. It tells the moving story of how the members of the debating team from Wiley College, a small “Negro” institution in Texas, wrested the championship cup from their esteemed opponents, the members of the Harvard University debating team. This victory was celebrated by an enraptured audience in Harvard’s Memorial Hall and by impassioned listeners to the broadcast that was being transmitted simultaneously over the nation’s radio waves. Absent at the moment of triumph, but not at all surprised about his students’ success, was their teacher and debating coach, Mr. Melvin B. Tolson, who had imparted in his protégés the love of learning, an appetite for questioning the authenticity of facts and sources, and the confidence needed for independent work.

The time was 1935. The nation was still paralyzed by the grip of the Great Depression, and history, as we know it today, would soon unfold. Against the back- drop of a chronology of events that has brought us up to the present through various “reference points” currently designated by historians as the Jim Crow South, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Age of Technology, and the Digital Age, the students of the debating team were to assume prominent positions in society that would change the face of their, and our, world. One of them, whose eloquent speech on the virtues of civil disobedience brought the Memorial Hall audience to its feet, was James L. Farmer, Jr., the founder of C.O.R.E., the Congress of Racial Equality.

Through Mr. Farmer’s and others’ efforts, the life of the “Negro” in the United States has been transformed significantly since the momentous debate. One sign of progress involves the integrity of a name and who gives it to whom: Now, instead of being identified in terms determined by the white majority, “Negroes” refer to themselves as “Blacks” or “African Americans.” Another sign of progress lies in the fact, plain and simple, that one of the serious contenders for the Presidency today is an African American. Surely, despite the many inequities that still exist in the lives of African Americans and other minority groups in this country, one cannot ignore these important guideposts on the road towards progress, and as an educator, I do not think it would be presumptuous of me to say that a good part of the progress made in our nation’s recent past was given its impetus in response to the miracle of education.

You can understand my dismay when I learned that Denzel Washington, the director of The Great Debaters, fictionalized the truth when he “moved” the venue of the debate from the University of Southern California to my alma mater, Harvard University. Nevertheless, in the spirit of “debate,” let me say that despite this modification of the real story, the “truth” of the film still rings loud and clear, and the parallel that I wish to draw between Mr. Tolson and myself and the students at Wiley College and our students at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College remains, I believe, equally as sound. Although Hostos Community College is not Wiley College, and the current year, 2008, is not 1935, I do not feel so different from the debating coach; nor are my students so different from the members of the debating team.

I affirm a deep affinity with Mr. Tolson in the imaginary dialogue that I have been having with him, and I know that he would agree with my personal pedagogy. Like Mr. Tolson, I want my students to develop resilient minds that will embrace the truth and seek to discover it – a pursuit that will be possible only if they cultivate within themselves the building of cathedrals of thought, whose infrastructures, when balanced soundly on beams of pure reason and logic, will permit them to read, write, speak, and think rationally. This, of course, is a very difficult enterprise to embark upon. However, it can most probably be achieved through much trial and error by finding ways to develop students’ “reading-thinking-debating brains” through an exposure to the full scope of human knowledge on issues that will make them ponder not only the immediacy of their personal situation but also their broader responsibility towards the welfare of humanity. Imagine how important such an education is for Hostos students who, like their Wiley College counterparts, come from a disenfranchised segment of society that “yearn[s] to breathe free”1 while at the same time seeking acceptance from the mainstream. Our mission to educate our students is indeed a sacred one because with the promise of an education our students will prosper. They will also have a more assertive voice in determining the future course of the society in which they live.

The guiding principle behind all my actions in the past three years has therefore been to exercise my students’ “reading-thinking-debating brains” against the canvas of a general liberal arts curriculum. It is through this medium that I believe we can accomplish our mission, which is to help students to erect cathedrals of thought within the connective tissues of their minds so that they will be able to realize their goals not only as students but as citizens of the world.

1 Words borrowed from Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.”