• U.S.

Education: Wrangles

2 minute read
TIME

Debating livened the last weeks before college holidays. Wranglers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and from the University of Sydney (Australia), have been touring the country with enterprise unprecedented. At Iowa State College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts (Ames, Iowa), the three Australians, graduates all, sounded more effective than their hosts, winning an affirmative vote on “Resolved: That the Press exerts a harmful influence upon the community.” At Boston College, the Cambridge men lost, but won from George Washington University (Washington, D. C.), on the proposition thatthat Government had intruded too far upon the rights of individuals. The Oxford wranglers, all facetious in the traditional vein of the Oxford Union, ranged with fairly consistent success as far west as Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.), which beat them on Prohibition. They achieved their most brilliant victory last week at Franklin & Marshall College, in Pennsylvania-Dutch Lancaster, Pa., not two hours distant from Valley Forge and the cradle of U. S. liberty. The question: “Resolved: Monarchy is the best policy.” Then they went to Baltimore for the first international-interracial college debate on record. In Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, before an audience 95% Negro, they again lost the Prohibition issue, to the serious statistics and idealism of dark-skinned silver-tongues from Lincoln University. Speaker Turner of Lincoln made obeisance to the fame of Oxford, mentioning Poet Tennyson as one of her illustrious graduates. Speaker Franklin of Oxford, replying with thanks, was obliged to disown Lord Tennyson, who went to Cambridge. “And Oxford,” he added, “is a seat of learning and wouldn’t consider Cambridge for a patch.”

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