Keynote address from the Tahoe Conference on academic debate.

• Author: Chemerinsky, Erwin

Erwin Chemerinsky (*)

It is a tremendous honor and pleasure to have been invited to deliver this keynote address. Debate was the most important part of my high school and college education. Other than my parents, the two people who most profoundly affected my life were my high school and college debate coaches, Earl Bell and David Zarefsky. I feel I owe an enormous debt to my debate coaches and the debate community which gave me so much.

I must confess that I found preparing this talk very difficult. In part, this is because it is somewhat intimidating giving a speech in front of a room of debate coaches, experts in public speaking and rhetoric. Even more important, I realize how long it has been since I debated or even saw a college debate. I graduated from Northwestern in 1975. I realized that my speaking to you is the same as someone who graduated in 1949 speaking at a conference in 1975. Now that's a really scary thought.

I have not heard a college debate since 1978, the year I graduated law school. So obviously it would be foolhardy for me to say anything about debate as it exists today.

I was told that the theme for this conference is "diversity." I very much share your commitment to this goal. When I was a debater, the debate circuit was almost exclusively white and predominately male. I can recall few African-American debaters and even fewer Latino or Asian debaters. There were some very successful women debaters and coaches, but they were few in number. My hope and expectation is that this is an area where there has been great improvement in the last quarter century. It may be that there are still things that can be done to better reach out to minorities and women and ways to make the debate circuit more hospitable to them.

Certainly, more than 20 years as a law professor has convinced me of the importance of diversity in the classroom. I have taught constitutional law in almost all-white classes, and in classes with a significant number of minority students. There is a huge difference in the nature of the discussions. This past semester, I taught a class at UCLA Law School to fill in because of an emergency. I had 85 students; not one was African-American and only a few were Latinos. Because of Proposition 209, affirmative action has been abolished in public universities in California. There are few Black or Latino students at UCLA Law School as a result. When I discuss racial profiling at the University of Southern California, there always are several Black male students who tell of being stopped by the police for no reason besides driving while being Black. It is so different to discuss the same topic in an all-white classroom.

But I am sure we all agree over this, so it did not seem the appropriate focus for this talk. As I struggled to prepare this talk, I spent a good deal of time thinking about my debate experiences and what they have meant in the years since I graduated. I decided to talk about that--which things from debate haven't mattered much over the last 25 years; which things mattered enormously; and what things I didn't learn in debate that I wish I had.

Frankly, there are a few things that I learned in debate that haven't mattered much. My guess is that you think that I'll begin this list with talking very fast. Actually, though, that has not been a big deal. When I started teaching, some students said, "slow down" and I trained myself to do that. The person in the office next to me says she can always tell when I'm doing a radio interview because I use a different, much more deliberate speaking style. But debaters all learn this. My former college partner tells a story of his first jury trial and the court reporter breaking her machine because he was talking so fast. He learned and has become a very successful trial lawyer. Besides, there have been times when talking fast has been a great advantage. Several times I have given speeches in which I get a signal that I have 5 minutes left, but realize I have 15 minutes of material to cover. Being able to go into overdrive is a great benefit. During the O.J. trial twice a week I appeared on "Rivera Live." If you ever watch shows like that you know that being able to talk very fast to get one's points in is a necessity.

There are some things from debate that have not mattered much since. One is the...