The Belmont Abbey College Debate Team participated in the 10th Annual NCICU Ethics Bowl February 20th, focusing on compassionate decision-making in the context of a pandemic. Our students represented Belmont Abbey as a panel, weighing issues about vaccination policies and equity in public school education. The final presentations balanced ideal goals of government agencies with current limitations, advocating for the diverse needs of communities.
Belmont Abbey students spent the day refining their own advocacy among peers from NCICU institutions and learning from experienced practitioners in the field. This year, the NCICU Ethics Bowl did not have a competitive structure. While judges provided positive feedback to our students, no wins or losses were assigned. Instead, this year emphasized keynote speakers who have played key roles in managing North Carolina’s response to Covid-19. These included: Mike Sprayberry, Deputy Director of NC Emergency Management; Geoff Coltrane, Senior Education Advisor to Governor Cooper; and Mark Benton, Assistant Secretary for Public Health in the NC Department of Health and Human Services.
Our next competition will be the Pi Kappa Delta National Tournament, beginning on March 19th. Pi Kappa Delta is among the oldest forensics honor societies globally and represents a uniquely large national competition. This will be Belmont Abbey’s first year at the Pi Kappa Delta National Tournament, and we are hopeful to introduce our students to the full in-person experience next year.
To see our team in action, click one of the videos below:
“When we praise a poet,” says T.S. Eliot, too often we isolate out those aspects of his verse which resemble least anyone else’s—which depart most surely from his predecessors. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot challenges the critic’s inclination to “pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man,” and fixate upon this singularity “with satisfaction” Truth be told, no artist “has his complete meaning alone,” for his significance is indissolubly tied to “his relation to the dead poets and artists”. To gain fulsome appreciation of his achievement, you “must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”. When we rid ourselves of the penchant for originality and invention in favor of situating the new in the stream of tradition, we may just find that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”
