Wake Forest Debate Slams "Secret" Secession Meetings at Their Tournament

From Len neighbors:

Thank you all for coming to the 58th Annual Franklin R. Shirley Classic at Wake Forest University. We love having all of you on campus with us, and we hope you had as much fun as we did. Maybe you’ve heard of what we call the “Spirit of the Shirley”, something that to a cynic might sound like a marketing slogan. It is, in fact, an organizing principle for our tournament, representing for us a combination of stiff competition, innovation, hospitality, and public deliberation. One of the initial things a Wake debater experiences in their first year is a head-first immersion in the Spirit of the Shirley and it is something that unites our alums across decades.

This year, we went out of our way, in the Spirit of the Shirley, to set up some public discussion forums about the future of debate. We rented hotel space on Friday night for discussion, ensured meal times long enough for ad hoc conversations, and made time for meal-time forums to publicly deliberate about the future of debate. Despite all this, we believe there was an organized, private conversation to steer the future of our activity and that great care was taken to avoid any public knowledge of the meeting. We were dismayed to discover this, something so clearly a repudiation of the Spirit of the Shirley.

Secrecy like this is not consistent with the Wake Forest debate tradition, or with the future Wake Debate we are trying to build. We are always open to discussions about the future of our activity, ways to innovate for competition, and ways to improve the educational experience for our students, but we would like to be very clear about something: any proposal created by a small number of people in secret cannot and will not receive our serious attention.

We suspect that many others feel the same way.

Posted on behalf of Len, Jarrod, and Justin