Washington State University’s intercollegiate Debate Club, also known as the Forensics Club, dates to the earliest days of campus, when informal literary societies debated themselves, each other, and other schools. On March 22nd 1898 the state college’s Columbian Society debated at the University of Idaho against one of their societies, with over 100 students traveling by train to witness the debate. A more formal campus debate took place that November, a three-part competition with Whitman College and UI. WSC’s 1949 debate team won the national championship. The Forensics Club appears to have been finally dissolved by the ASWSU in about 1985.
The collection consists of record relating to the running of Washington State University’s competitive speech team in the 1970s. In addition to summary administrative materials, the collections consists of programs and related documents from tournaments the WSU teams competed in. It also contains programs and other materials from state high school tournaments, some of which were hosted on the Washington State University campus. Instructions and forms for judging debate tournaments are undated, but most likely were used for the 1975 State High School tournament in Pullman, WA.
The first series is administrative materials. The second series relates to debate competitions, and is broken into two subseries: debate tournaments, and debate judging materials. The debate tournaments subseries has WSU debate tournaments first, and then state high school tournaments.
The collection is arranged into two series. Within these series and subseries, materials are arranged alphabetically by subject.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions may apply.
[Item Description]
Washington State University Debate Club Records, 1972-1981 (Archives 392)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
These materials were transferred by Jim Abbott of Washington State University Library’s Communication program on Dec. 22, 1987 to the WSU Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, where they were retained as UA1987-34.
This collection was processed in June, 2019 by University Archivist Mark O’English.
Some debate team records are held in the State College of Washington Speech Department Chair Records,
1923-1946
Washington State University Speech Department Debate Team Photographs,
1928-1957
Some debate team documents, including programs and a history covering 1899-1927 can
be found in the Speech Department portion (WSU 151) of the
Other smaller sets of debate materials exist in other MASC collections.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.