Mercer debaters make history and inspire more minorities to follow their path

Walking into a chapel at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Kyle Bligen had headphones on and his head down. Save for a few handshakes and hellos, he didn't pay attention to the crowds of people gathered outside the chapel or to the several hundred packed inside to watch him. He only saw the podium at the front of the room and the pair of students already sitting on the stage waiting for him and his partner, Jaz Buckley, to arrive.

Mercer University seniors, Buckley and Bligen were about to compete in the National Parliamentary Debate Association Tournament , the highest debate competition in the country and a goal the pair has been working toward for the past four years.

“I get nervous. The farther we go, the more pressure there is to keep going so I’m always on edge,” Buckley said.

Buckley is from Columbus and first got into debate as a high school senior at the encouragement of her mother and friends.

“I always knew I wanted to be an attorney but I realized my senior year that I should maybe try debating,” Buckley said. “Two of my friends were on the team, they trained me really well and at my first tournament, I won.”

At her last high school debate competition of the year, Buckley went up against a senior from Peachtree City, who just so happened to be Bligen. The two said they remembered each other but didn’t think much about it until they both turned up at Mercer several months later.

“We show up to class and Jaz was sitting in the front row when we walk in. We’ve been debating together ever since,” Bligen said.

It was by pure coincidence Buckley and Bligen both ended up at Mercer University. A coincidence that set them on the path to success as debate partners.

“It is an oddity in debate to have been partners for four years. But we know each other really well, we trust each other as people and we’re friends,” Buckley said.

During their freshman year, Bligen and Buckley did so well as a team they made it to the tournament for the first time, an unheard of achievement for first-year students.

Three weeks prior to the competition, debaters are given a variety of potential topics to research. Once they arrive, teams are given a specific issue, known as a resolution, and a stance they must take during the argument. Competitors are either required to argue the resolution from the point of view of the government, in support of the topic, or as the opposition. They are then given 20 minutes to prepare an effective argument consisting of three speeches.

“You have to be able to communicate what it is you’re trying to argue for quickly and succinctly. You have to be really willing to learn and to put yourself out there,” Buckley said.

Despite being eliminated in the semifinal rounds, the team became the top novice team in the nation with Buckley taking home the top speaker award overall, the first African-American woman to do so.

“Our first year, we did a lot of things that I’m still proud of and we changed a lot of things about debate and put ourselves on the map,” Buckley said.

From there, the two honed their skills and practiced for the next several years, earning awards along the way. They made it to tournament each year, but never far enough to compete in the finals.

Bligen and Buckley said what makes them so successful is their ability to mold whatever debate topic they are given into an opinion they are actually passionate about outside of debate.

“We always find a way to turn the side into something that we agree with. ...Our creativity is what makes us good. It’s what makes our team innovative,” Bligen said.

This skill landed them a spot in the finals in that chapel in Oregon during the last several weeks of their senior year at Mercer. After days of semifinals competition, the two found themselves up against another pair of seniors from Texas Tech. The topic? Arguing why the NCAA should or shouldn’t be disbanded.

“We were trying to make the argument that a predominant amount of minorities in the United States go to college on an NCAA scholarship so if you disband the NCAA, if minorities are asking you to pay them for their services ... that’s discrimination,” Bligen said.

Mercer University professor and debate coach, Vasile Stanescu said the pair used a particularly challenging argument in their final round.

“ (The tournament) is the single hardest, most time consuming, most demanding intellectual competition that an undergraduate can ever undertake,” Stanescu said.

After their speeches, the teams were asked to take their seats. The two sat in the church pews, anxiously waiting to hear their names called as event organizers handed out award after award.

When they got to the final event, Buckley and Bligen heard the Texas Tech students announced as the semi-finalists in the competition and immediately knew they had achieved what they set out to do four years earlier.

“My immediate reaction was to laugh. Our team started screaming and I looked at Kyle (who had) his hands on his hips with a reaction that just said ‘we did it,’ ” Buckley said.

The win marked the first time in the history of the competition an African-American team won the title and the first time an African-American woman has made it that far in the competition. Bligen and Buckley noted the win isn’t just an accomplishment for themselves or Mercer University, it is also a win for minorities involved in debate everywhere.

“We became a model for young minorities to see success in academia,” Bligen said. “They can be successful when competing with intellectual ideas and that shows that minorities have a place in academia.”

Bligen and Buckley said they hope the award means greater representation for people of color in the world of collegiate debate.

“After we won the tournament, we had scores of people come up to us and say, ‘We were rooting for you, we needed you to do this,’ ” Bligen said. “They were living vicariously through us being on that stage because there might not have ever been a minority up there if we had not been there.”

But even with their achievement, Bligen and Buckley are still just two college seniors getting ready to graduate. Using some of the skills she learned as a debater, Buckley plans to earn her law degree from UCLA starting in the fall. Bligen hopes to become the assistant coach for the debate team at Mercer while working with his nonprofit, the Bligen Family Foundation.

“I think debate can be very empowering, but only if you can get into that space and have access to it. It helped me value my own voice and I want to see other people have access to that, it’s important,” Buckley said.

This story was originally published April 27, 2018 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Mercer debaters make history and inspire more minorities to follow their path."