Alexander Schwab
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Arguing His Way to the Top
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LMU graduate student Alexander Schwab was named top speaker at the recent Yale Debate Tournament.
Feature:Every morning, Alexander Schwab faces a tough audience of sixth- and eighth-graders at Bret Harte Middle School in South Los Angeles.
“It’s my first year doing it, and it is supposed to be more of a ‘challenging environment,’ so to speak,” he says.
Schwab, a graduate of Harvard University, is involved with Teach for America, a program in which outstanding college grads commit to two years of teaching in an inner city or a rural public school. Schwab is concurrently working on a teaching credential and master’s degree in primary education at LMU.
“A lot of the kids are great kids who just want to learn,” he says of his pupils. “And some have terrible influences; some are already being influenced by older siblings who are in gangs or [involved with] drugs.
“But I wanted to do something where I felt I could make a positive contribution to society, and do something that actually played on some of my strengths,” he says.
One of those strengths is his ability to captivate and influence an audience: Schwab is a newcomer to LMU’s debate team and has already established himself as the man to beat.
Schwab finished as the top individual speaker at the recent Yale Debate Tournament and will compete in the upcoming World Universities Debating Championship in Vancouver, Canada, along with the LMU debate team. A veteran of debate competitions both as a student at L.A.’s Loyola High School and while at Harvard, Schwab participates only in British Parliamentary debate, a complex style of debate not common among American competitors.
“It’s sort of an odd style of debate,” he explains. “There are four teams in a round instead of two. So you have to be teamed up with a team you’re competing against, on the same side of an issue.
“You want to not only beat the teams opposite you, but also demonstrate yourself to be superior to the team on your side — not by contradicting them or arguing against them directly, but by showing them up.”
Adding to the chaos of this complicated form of debate is the fact that the topics of discussion aren’t known until fifteen minutes before the contestants step up to the podium.
“You can make guesses,” he says. “[In the last tournament] the final round topic was about immigration rights, and that’s something that’s been [in the news] a lot lately. They try to choose things that aren’t completely obscure, although … last world championships, there was a topic about creating an independent Kurdistan out of the current Iraqi state, and there was another about having independent courts for Aborigines of Australia.”
While most would be intimidated by the uncertainties associated with competitive debate, Schwab thrives on them.
“Honestly, I don’t have the attention span to debate the same thing over and over again,” he jokes. “I would get bored … this at least keeps you on your toes. And it also presents this ancillary benefit of making it impossible for others to out-prepare you.”
One thing is for certain, though: There will be plenty more opportunities for debate in Schwab’s future. He plans to study law.
“Basically my goal is to become a law professor; maybe a judge,” he says.