RIP Jewell Debate
Funerals are for the living.
The oldest record I ever saw for the William Jewell College Debate team dated the existence of the team back to 1873, making the debating program at WJC one of the longest continuously institution-supported debate programs in the United States of America. Records collected by previous faculty directors show continuous intercollegiate competition through both World Wars and the U.S. war in Vietnam. Or at one time, I felt that was true enough to make this logo for a hoodie, which is now among the few remains of Jewell Debate.
Jewell continuously held intercollegiate debates with dozens of public and private colleges and universities throughout the entire Midwest during its period of institutional support, 1873 - 2025. That means Jewell first had a debate team just eight years after its slaver namesake was forced by U.S. law to give up enslaving people on the land where the Board of Trustees currently casts votes on financial futurism.
My favorite memory of you is how you taught me that institutions are banks of stories about bodies and that some willing whites would sooner cling to the plantation in its final days, degraded and famished, confused about its proposition, unwilling to admit the racist and exclusionary experiment has failed, than give it back to the people whose hands are imprinted on the bricks of Jewell Hall.
Amen.
The oldest record I ever saw for the William Jewell College Debate team dated the existence of the team back to 1873, making the debating program at WJC one of the longest continuously institution-supported debate programs in the United States of America. Records collected by previous faculty directors show continuous intercollegiate competition through both World Wars and the U.S. war in Vietnam. Or at one time, I felt that was true enough to make this logo for a hoodie, which is now among the few remains of Jewell Debate.
Jewell continuously held intercollegiate debates with dozens of public and private colleges and universities throughout the entire Midwest during its period of institutional support, 1873 - 2025. That means Jewell first had a debate team just eight years after its slaver namesake was forced by U.S. law to give up enslaving people on the land where the Board of Trustees currently casts votes on financial futurism.
My favorite memory of you is how you taught me that institutions are banks of stories about bodies and that some willing whites would sooner cling to the plantation in its final days, degraded and famished, confused about its proposition, unwilling to admit the racist and exclusionary experiment has failed, than give it back to the people whose hands are imprinted on the bricks of Jewell Hall.
Amen.