The thing I always loved about being a debate coach—anything was possible. Debate was, basically and for most of us, lucid. You’re aware that you’re in a dream, suspended in time and space. Different rules applied, but there was always enough to keep you grounded.
Any idea could be tried on, experimented with, used as a weapon, and then dropped just as easily. Those were the stakes of the table. Any advocacy could be tested, jettisoned, or manipulated. Like Juice WRLD with drugs—sometimes dedicated, sometimes reckless, always a vibe, and never the same dose as just before.
When the zero point is “we are here to debate,” lots of possibilities breathe life. Some are immediately exclusionary; others are radically inclusive. Like the idea that just because you said it once didn’t mean you needed to mean it forever, that you can forgive anyone, and that people have indeterminable value.
Ultimately, very punk.
Of course, the debater is always more persuasive when they actually believe what they are saying or at least retain a detached and logical-seeming POV engaged at a level of procedure. Pure sophistry has a stench. By the time I had stopped taking students to tournaments near the start of COVID, the Jewell team was attending what were called the “Social Justice Debates,” a debating series organized around genuinely built collective consensus toward practical methods of things like land reparations.
I took students with no experience debating—students who had been subjected to heavy recruitment tactics like “having alumni pay their deposit to enroll” within 30 days of classes starting, etc. For a while there, the recruitment tactics ultimately meant the team had a lot of students who didn’t have a ton of high school experience, but someone gave them a scholarship—great, welcome—and we needed to serve those students in some meaningful way because they were on a “Jewell Journey.” Some never graduated; many did. I pray each student felt safe in our travels.
They’d go to D.C. for an event at Howard or to Atlanta for Morehouse and Spelman. These were, in fact, some of my happiest and most thoroughly thought-provoking memories of listening to debate arguments. We had given up competition and illusions of winning altogether. It was just about the depth of position and honestly comparing them. One side would say that Black Americans should receive land reparations in the form of individual payments like cash or access; others would argue for a demand for actual land, and hybrid positions would emerge out of nuanced ethical and reconciliatory traditions—all in the celebration of Black life and joy.
Joy basically wasn’t a question or a price of admission that anybody was paying at these debates.
When it comes time for a school like William Jewell College to completely reimagine itself, it’s only right to express the opinion that William Jewell should reimagine itself as being returned to the cradle of the community that birthed it and re-sewing the land with seeds of opportunity for the ancestors of people enslaved by its persistently indefensible namesake.
It’s easy to believe that institutions could never right their core traumas. Yet, I advance—they can, should they so choose. They would rather erect yard signs to signify their own victory and incompetence than simply return the ill-gotten land.
If not for the fact that declaring it is possible makes one seem insane, it’s a perfectly sane thing to think—that a financially struggling college Board of Trustees could, in fact, shut down and return its land resources, including Jewell Hall, to the ancestors of enslaved people living in Clay County, MO.
If the goal is to “reimagine” Jewell… what are the limits of your imagination? That would be perfectly within the scope of the mission of the William Jewell College Board of Trustees.
Could a PWI cash in the slave master’s fortune and reimagine itself on a path to becoming a predominantly Black municipal college run by a qualified Clay County charitable land trust?
Are we dreaming or just reimagining?
Big possibilities or narrow endings?
Draw the boundary, because I need to know.
It calls into focus that we’re not all dreaming the same dream.
Because Jewell is never giving back the land… 🪦⛓️💥
That’s my dream.
What’s your dream?
About Kyle Dennis
👋 Hey! I'm Kyle Dennis, a recovering academic who turned my background in classical rhetorical theory into a career in product design and marketing. This a personal blogthat contains musings and personal experiences about topics close to my life which include my journey to Islam, politics and US government, guns, drugs, eduction policy, dis/ability, and details about my time as a campus DEI agitator.
Currently writing -- "Oberservation February" about race and Higher Education.
* If you don't want to read my candid opinion on those things, click here to see a very cute picture of a random dog.
