USF Wins National Championship in Debate
Elise Green ’26 and Mecedes Lindsay ’26 teamed up to win the championship in the Social Justice Debates tournament at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
“This is USF’s first national championship in debate,” said Robert Boller, professor of rhetoric and director of the debate program at USF. “We beat powerhouse programs Claremont, Morehouse, and then the University of Vermont in the finals. Beating large programs such as Claremont and Vermont is very difficult. They have three or four full-time coaches and 50 to 70 student competitors.”
The USF team is 15 students, a full-time coach, and a part-time assistant coach.
Thirty universities competed in the four-tournament series that culminated at Morehouse on Feb 7–9. This year’s topic was housing justice, with USF’s Ronald Sundstrom, professor of philosophy, chosen as the featured topic scholar for his book Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction.
How did it feel to visit Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr.?
“Inspiring,” said Lindsay. “We walked around the campus, and I saw an MLK statue with one of his quotes that I added to my speech.”
Green and Lindsay moved through six rounds to reach the finals. “At first people looked at us like we’re just a small liberal arts school from the West Coast, but when we reached the quarterfinals, they started seeing us as competition,” Green said.
The debate topic: To achieve housing justice, the United States should focus on the root causes of homelessness rather than provide permanent housing and support services.
“When we first got the topic, I thought, ‘Yes! We can do this,’” Lindsay said. “USF is a social-justice school. My sociology classes cover issues of homelessness. And back in January I attended a Martin Luther King event on campus. I talked with the students who organized that event. I’ve applied everything I’ve learned. It all fits.”
Green said that her economics classes touch on topics of justice, including housing. “Anything around housing justice is rooted into economic systems, so whatever I learn in debate I can bring to my classes and whatever I learn in my classes I can bring to debate,” she said.
“Also, I have a personal stake in this topic,” Lindsay added. “I’ve had family members experience homelessness, and even pass away because of it. You don’t need to have personal experience with a topic to debate that topic, but it helps to ground it in humanity and in reality.”
Green and Lindsay both credit their teammates. “It was a total team effort,” Green said. “We stayed up all night prepping.”
Lindsay added that Ronald Sundstrom helped, too. “He helped every team, on both sides of the issue, for all three days. The debate coach from Morehouse told me that never have they had a topic expert really be there, show up, and want to see the teams grow.”
The Social Justice Debates are in their ninth year. This is the first year a school from California has won.
After their victory on Feb. 9, Lindsay said, she received a text from the University of Vermont team. “They told me that they’re going to take what they learned from Elise and me and actually apply it in their work in homelessness and homeless shelters in Vermont. It felt really nice to be a part of something like that. This is the essence of civic debate: to learn from it, grow from it, and apply it to the real world.”
