“Resolved: The United States government should seek to try Edward Snowden for treason,” read the chalkboard at last week’s inaugural meeting of the Brown Policy Union.
Modeled after the Oxford Union, the student-run BPU gives “just a little bit more formality” to a standard political conversation, said Zach Ingber ’15, one of the BPU’s five founders and a Herald opinions columnist. Ingber said he was initially exposed to Oxford-style debate two summers ago while working in London. He developed the idea to form the group this past summer, recruiting the help of Katherine Pollock ’16, Will Hale ’15, Diego Arene-Morley ’16 and Felix Tettey ’15, he said.
“There aren’t venues for more formal debate over a resolution without going into the territory of the debate team,” Ingber said, citing the disappearance of the Janus Political Union, formerly the student arm of the Political Theory Project, which used to organize debates. The Janus Forum continues to organize campus lectures and discussions through its other branches.
“We’re trying to create something that pays a little bit of tribute to an old-fashioned debating society, but it’s definitely updated and more modern for Brown,” Ingber said.
Sitting in a semicircular formation, the 18 attendees would signal Ingber, who moderated the debate, when they wished to speak and usually started their arguments with the traditional statement “I support the resolution” or “I oppose the resolution,” optional at the BPU debates but mandatory at the Oxford Union.
In an Oxford-style debate, the presiding officer delegates speaking turns to keep members from interrupting others and ensure minority voices are heard. “When someone has the floor, they command the room” and are expected to “substantiate” their positions, Ingber said.
Members direct their comments to the presiding officer, a practice that “keeps a little bit of civility,” he added.
This forum for debate is meant to contrast the large number of informal “roundtables and discussions at Brown,” Pollock said.
The moderator of the debate does not offer his or her opinion. The body itself also does not take an official position, but the BPU asked participants to voice their stances at the end of the debate to help organizers select future topics on which opinion is divided. The Snowden debate was “split down the middle,” Hale said, with six votes for trying the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked confidential information for treason, seven against doing so and four abstaining.
The BPU debated the Equal Rights Amendment at its second meeting Wednesday, and plans to debate the academic boycott of Israel next week, Pollock said. The BPU is currently reaching out to student groups that may be interested in or have expertise in the topics, she added. Though the BPU hopes to form a core membership, the weekly debates will be open to all students, Ingber said.
Whether or not the federal government should try Snowden was chosen as the first debate topic because it is a “salient and current event,” Hale said. Though the BPU hopes to take on more “charged” topics eventually, the goal of the inaugural meeting was to make the debate setting “comfortable,” he added.
But with a more Brown-centric debate coming up on the academic boycott of Israel, opinions will be “more personal,” Pollock said. In January, the University denounced the American Studies Association’s decision to boycott academic institutions in Israel, The Herald previously reported.
“When there’s something at stake or something that could change the environment at Brown,” debates will be both harder and more exciting, Pollock said. To avoid becoming a space for a “visceral reaction,” the BPU will wait for an “appropriate time” to debate more heated topics, while at the same time not “pushing them under the rug,” Pollock said.
“It’s a very hard line to walk,” she said, adding that the BPU plans to wait on some of the more controversial issues until group leaders “feel out the format” and establish themselves on campus.
The creation of the organization will also build a space for policy discussion that has been “lacking” on campus, Pollock said.
Contrasting the BPU with similar groups at other universities that operate as “political unions” with different political parties, Ingber said, “We’re a policy union — a union of people talking about policy, rather than a union of parties.” He added that the BPU wants to keep policy substance at the forefront — a fundamental difference from the party-driven Oxford Union, but “Brown has always been a little bit more avant-garde,” he said.
“We’re going to try hard with the help of our members to select motions that are not (such) clear left-right divides,” Ingber said.
The BPU aims to discuss nonpartisan issues, Hale said, adding that otherwise, debate will be unproductive. The group also welcomes opinions “beyond American political discourse,” Ingber said.
At last week’s meeting, the founding members distributed a BBC timeline of the Snowden controversy around the room so all members had basic information from the onset. But there are no rules restricting the use of outside information in the debate. The BPU leaders said they hope to have a schedule of upcoming topics so members have time to research the issues, Ingber said.
With the “diversity of resolutions, some people will take a step back some weeks and other weeks they’ll speak more,” he said, stressing that members are welcome to attend just to listen.
It was “just a nice break from discussions at the Ratty where everyone’s interrupting each other,” said Alexander Kaplan ’14.5, a former Herald staff writer. “We were able to discuss in a formal mechanism that takes place in a very casual setting.”
Once or twice a semester, the BPU will also host a public debate, which would include a larger number of students debating on a stage, Ingber said. “As a group we’ll decide what the resolution will be and who we can think of to reach out to.”
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