Debate and Forensic Team

Summary

Today's Debate and Forensic Team at the College of Charleston provides an active program in speech and debate competition. The team is open to any full-time student in good standing academically.  Debate and forensic team members are not required to major or minor in communication.  

Debate and forensic students today compete in speaking, interpretation and debate events. Speaking events include informative, persuasive, after dinner speaking, rhetorical analysis, and limited preparation events: impromptu and extemporaneous speaking. Interpretation events include prose, poetry, duo interpretation, dramatic interpretation and programmed oral interpretation. The team participates in Parliamentary debate. Students may receive credit for participation with the team. 

The College of Charleston Debate and Forensic Team is a member of Pi Kappa Delta, a national speech honorary and the oldest intercollegiate forensic association in the United States .

For further information about the team, please contact the Department of Communication at 843-953-7017 .

Debate and Forensic Team History 

The Debate and Forensic Team has its origins in the 1830s and 1840s, when the College's two original literary societies were founded.  These societies were dedicated to the development of student proficiency in critical thinking and oral advocacy. The handwritten constitution of the "Cliosophic Association," for example, described the "object" of the association as "the intellectual improvement, and the instruction of its members in the art of Debate."  

Almost a century later, the literary organizations, the Cliosophic Society and the Chrestomathic Society, sent petitions to College of Charleston President Harrison Randolph and asked him to create what would become the College's first communication course.  As President Randolph explained in an April 1929 letter to Elliott Finger, a student and then the President of the Cliosophic Society, "I have long felt that one of the pressing needs of the College is a course in public speaking, and I hope that some means will be found for the development and improvement of this important feature of the college work."  This public speaking course was added to the College's course catalog in 1929-1930.

The traveling debate team, which competed against other college and university teams, emerged in the 1890s and would compete with such institutions as Davidson College, Clemson College, and the College of William and Mary.  The College also sponsored an annual oratorical contest for most of the twentieth century.  Prior to World War II, the College of Charleston, the University of South Carolina, and Clemson College were among the member schools of the South Carolina Inter-Collegiate Oratorical Association. 

While the College of Charleston was a co-educational institution before 1920, a Women's Debate Team was not permitted until 1937.  An undated report filed by "Professors Chamberlain, Easterby, and Grice," addressed the "debate situation" in 1939: "There should be a women's team as well as a men's team, and . . . approximately equal amounts [of money] should be spent on both.

Historic Alumni Hall