High school students flooded the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater in Bridgeport on Friday, as Yale and Howard went head-to-head in the Great Debate.
The 11th annual Great Debate, hosted by the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP, featured debaters from Yale and Howard universities and marked the first time the event has been held since the COVID-19 pandemic. The debate included two resolutions centered on hot-button state and national policy issues: one on Connecticut teacher certification and another on AI in the music industry.
“What we saw at that debate was nothing but pure excellence,” April Ryan, moderator of the debate and senior White House correspondent for TheGrio, told the News. “Neither school was less than the other. Both offered a substantial challenge to each other … As an HBCU [alumna], I was proud to be part of the conversation. I was proud to see Howard stand just as tall as Yale, and Yale stand just as tall as Howard.”
In 2009, the Connecticut NAACP hosted the first Great Debate to mark the centennial anniversary of the organization’s founding, according to Great Debate founder and NAACP Connecticut State Conference president Scot X. Esdaile. Inspired by the 2007 movie “The Great Debaters,” organizers hoped to inspire young people through intellectual competition.
The event also seeks to educate young people on the work of the NAACP and encourage them to explore the Black rhetorical tradition.
“The NAACP has always had to fight and mobilize to get our voice heard in the public square,” Esdaile said.
The first debate was between Yale and Howard, but many universities have since debated at the annual event. Past matchups have included Hampton and Columbia universities, Howard and Harvard universities and Yale and Wiley college.
Although approximately 3,500 people attended the first Great Debate, the event has since grown. This year’s competition — which Esdaile billed as “one of the largest intellectual competitions in the nation” in his introduction at the event — drew 4,515 attendees, mainly teachers and students from across Connecticut.
Sonam Wangchuk ’26 and Howard senior Shonciré Graham are members of the Yale Debate Association and the Howard University Speech and Debate Team, respectively, and competed in this year’s Great Debate.
Both Wangchuk and Graham said that the sheer size of the crowd was a challenging aspect of the debate. Graham added that she felt particularly nervous because most of the audience members were high school students.
“If you say something wrong, they’re going to let you know,” she said. “And there’s also the weight of just knowing how impactful [the debate] could be. You’re more nervous about making sure that you do things well and in the right way.”
While the YDA and HUSDT usually compete in the traditional parliamentary debate style, the Great Debate was an exhibition parliamentary debate. Unlike parliamentary debates in the national circuit, exhibition debates have no officially declared winner. Exhibition debates also often have larger audiences and are therefore more of a “performance,” Graham said.
Wangchuk said that he and his partner, David Bloom ’25, had more trouble adjusting to the new debate style than with preparing their arguments for the debate.
“You can say all these beautiful [parliamentary debate] mechanisms, but it doesn’t mean anything to someone who doesn’t do debate,” Wangchuk said. “We were talking about, how can we convey these ideas in a way that is meaningful and that people can understand while also getting our point across?”
Esdaile emphasized that the two debate topics were selected due to their relevance for the students and teachers in the audience.
The first resolution was directly connected to the work of the Connecticut NAACP, which has fought for years to diversify classrooms, firehouses and police departments in Connecticut’s largest cities.
Graham, who debated the first resolution alongside fellow Howard senior Charlye Jackson, pointed out the connection between rigorous teacher certification exams and a lack of racial diversity among teachers in Connecticut.
“While [a standardized exam] itself might not be racist in nature, there’s a lot of things that are systematic that can make it hard for someone to be successful in something standardized,” she told the News. “You shouldn’t lower the standard to address discrimination, but rather do the things that it takes for someone to get to that point.”
The second resolution was particularly relevant in light of the recent WGA and ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, the latter of which continues to paralyze the film industry. A central point of contention in labor negotiations has been the impact of artificial intelligence on writers and actors. Similar questions surrounding ghostwriting and AI sampling have rocked the music industry.
Wangchuk, who debated the second resolution with Bloom, added that this topic led to discussions of cultural appropriation in music.
Friday’s debate was “a lot more tech savvy” than in previous years, Esdaile said, with an emphasis on video engagement. Attendees were shown a video on the history of the event and the long tradition of Black oratory. Ryan and the debaters entered like professional athletes to upbeat music, a video montage and cheers from the audience.
Juliana Dalmacio and Adlin Rizal, two juniors at Hill Regional Career High School and members of the school’s debate team, attended the event and said they found the videos engaging.
Wangchuk added that the debaters served as positive examples for the audience, particularly Black students and students of color unaccustomed to seeing debaters who resemble them.
“People of color generally tend to see certain models in their life that don’t necessarily reflect the full sphere of things that they might be able to do,” Wangchuk said. “There’s a lot of intellectual value to debate, especially for people of color that might otherwise be forced into certain specific stereotypes and specific models about what exactly [they] should be doing.”
Dalmacio and Rizal said that much of the crowd felt inspired by the debaters, who helped fuel their enthusiasm for debate.
Rizal said that she cheered for the debaters “like [she] was at a concert.” Similarly, Ryan said that the crowd’s energy was reminiscent of a Beyonce Renaissance tour concert.
“They were such great role models, and we could relate to them,” Dalmacio said. “We were just so inspired by the debaters [and] seeing what we could do in the future, that it just led to us cheering for them even more.”
The debate concluded with Esdaile handing out trophies to both teams.
He also invited members of the audience to come onstage and talk with the debaters.
“It was just so shocking, the way that the students crashed the stage,” Graham said. “They just wanted to take pictures, treating us like celebrities. I [thought], ‘I’m going to take a picture with every single kid that hands me their phone.’”
Esdaile told the News that he hopes Yale students will get involved in the reorganization of the University’s NAACP chapter, one of eight college chapters and youth councils across Connecticut.
The Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater seats over 5,700 people.
Contact Maia Nehme at maia.nehme@yale.edu and Zachary Suri at zachary.suri@yale.edu.