The Lehigh Debate Team is a student organization dedicated to building students' confidence, presentation abilities, and argumentative skills. This propels their opportunity to thrive in public speaking and compete in intercollegiate parliamentary speech and debate tournaments, whilst also expanding their worldviews. Our club meets every week to discuss case writing, argumentation, cross examination, and oratory defense. We are an official member of the American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA), which is the most competitive debate league in the United States.
Our goal is to raise enough money to attend tournaments at Swarthmore, Yale, and Columbia next fall. The gifts we receive will contribute to paying for transportation, food, registration fees, and overnight stays to give everyone on our team the opportunity to test their skills and learn more from the world of speech and debate. Each tournament costs around $1000. This year due to insufficient funds we had to cut many people from tournament rosters.
Our competition based club puts us in a position to represent Lehigh as a strong liberal arts university. With little outside help and the absence of a hired coach, we’ve won countless speaking awards and recognitions at schools like Princeton, Lafayette, and Swarthmore. You can read about all of our accomplishments and events on our Instagram page @lehighdebate.
