The team of prisoners didn’t even have the Internet for research.
By Raif Karerat
Just months after winning the national title, Harvard University’s elite debate team has met their match, with their rhetoric failing them against a group of New York inmates.
The debate took place on Sept. 18 at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month, they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.
In a Facebook post, the Harvard undergraduates said they were proud to lose to the “phenomenally intelligent and articulate team” of inmates.
The prison team — which wasn’t allowed to use the Internet for research, per USA Today — made the case against allowing undocumented children into public schools, a position with which they personally disagreed.
According to the Associated Press, in the two years since they started a debate club, the prisoners have beaten teams from the U.S. military academy at West Point and the University of Vermont. The competition with West Point, which is now an annual affair, has burgeoned into a rivalry.
“Students in the prison are held to the exact same standards, levels of rigor and expectation as students on Bard’s main campus,” said Max Kenner, executive director of the Bard prison initiative, which operates in six New York prisons. “Those students are serious. They are not condescended to by their faculty.”
Inmates can earn various degrees through the initiative, which is taught primarily by Bard faculty. About 15 percent of the all-male inmates at the correctional facility in Napanoch, N.Y. are enrolled. Kenner attested that graduates have continued their studies at esteemed institutions such as Yale and Columbia.