Scholarship Essays for College Admissions

“In a few minutes we’re going to go strategize in different rooms by affirmatives . Thad’s
Guantanamo Bay group, you’re in 445. Roy, take the Body Cavity Searches kids to 413. The National ID and Extraordinary Rendition people stay with me in 455.”
“Uhhh.” a stifled yelp.
“You and James just go out in the hall and work things out yourselves.”

The words of my burly lab leader Josh Hoe ring clear when I stumble out of the classroom, tripping over twenty or so odd power cords scattered like snakes waiting to bite my ankles. Once outside, I’m left wondering exactly what I am to do when my lab leaders refuse to strategize with me. James Mollison, my partner, and I plop down on the cement floor of the Dennison building frustrated at the inability of our coaches to understand our way of thinking.
Our project: at the University of Michigan 7-Week debate institute, James and I took an
affirmative about banning the state’s practice of extraordinary rendition and created a new form of debate with it. Instead of the conventional debate about whether the ban on the practice of outsourcing torture should come from the Supreme Court or Congress, our method was to use the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to create in-round advocacy about the citizen’s relation to the state. Agamben’s contention is that victims of this U.S. policy are placed within a state of exception by the state apparatus: they are simultaneously both inside and outside the law. In the eyes of the law, they do not count, and therefore can be killed with impunity. Our affirmative’s thesis was that we are all in the same state of exception. Therefore, we need to productively resist state power to correct such future injustices. To do this, we endorsed Agamben’s alternative of “whatever being,” arguing that the only way to begin to form a coalition against bio-political practices of
the state is for citizens to create communities outside the state. Essentially, endorsing ourselves as subjects, creating groups in resistance to specific violent methods of the state.
Apparently, that is not kosher in the eyes of the debate community. Deviation from the norm of asking what the federal government should do in favor of asking what we should do as individuals is a break in debate tradition. At the exact moment I sat on the cold floor in Dennison, I understood how the culture of debate excludes anything that is not within its narrowly defined boundaries. While there is much talk of fairness and critiques of exclusionary practices within debate, the community I thought was supporting me rejected my attempt at bringing in new argumentation with calls of “cheater.” This fight became personal. Determination sank in and, Round One — I was out for blood.

“Extend the Gabel and Kennedy evidence: Engagement of fiat necessitates us to engage in sovereign politics - as per the Elden evidence, this means we’ll never have fairness because the sovereign constructs a hallucination of what fairness is.”

The response was incredible. What was argued against our endorsement of subjectivity was “torture good” and “dehumanization good” arguments. I felt alienated from the institution of debate: so intellectual, yet so closed-minded?
Every affirmative round at the tournament became a personal war against the dominant discourses of debate. Every speech, we gathered more ammo. Instead of AK47s and bombers, this war was fought with words and warrants. The carnage became the defeated negative team, as they struggled a “good job” after the round, eyes looking away.
The final battle was fought against two others from my lab group. The end came anticlimactically, as two of the three judges in the back of the room gave their decision in favor of the negative. The speed with which the decision was made led me to believe they had no remorse for siding with the easy way out. My eyes blazed with icy tears, and I looked over to James. His expression was self-assuredly aloof, which gave me courage to understand. It was not over.