Welcome, colleagues, coaches, alumni, donors, and those who wandered in for the free coffee, to the 85th Annual New England College Debate Finals, coming to you live from a carpeted auditorium whose acoustics were designed to flatter confidence rather than truth.
This year’s finalists—Princeton and Brown—have arrived by the usual route: six months of red-eye flights, dropped arguments, and the quiet conviction that someone, somewhere, will finally understand what they meant by “framework abuse.”
Before we begin, a brief recap for those new to the sport.
College debate is not a search for truth. It is a procedural art form, governed by flow sheets, time signals, and the sacred rule that any argument unanswered becomes true.
Evidence matters, but framing matters more. Creativity is encouraged, provided it does not interfere with line-by-line refutation. Insight is prized when it simplifies; originality is rewarded only when it collapses cleanly. Judges do not ask, Is this right? but rather, Was this extended, weighed, and conceded somewhere around minute 5:43? Victory belongs to the team that tells the judge, calmly and repeatedly, what the ballot page is waiting to hear.
With that groundwork in place, we turn to tonight’s resolution, adopted unanimously after only mild protest:
Resolved: Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory, with the Lead Pipe.
The room does not laugh. The room does not blink. Laptops open. Timers reset. The weirdness goes entirely unremarked.
The Affirmative (Princeton)
The First Affirmative rises, smooth and untroubled. They begin by defining terms, because definitions are where all good crimes—and all good rounds—begin.
- Colonel Mustard is framed not as a person but as an agent, representing elite militarized structures.
- The Conservatory is not merely a room, but a controlled environment, enclosed, glassed-in, optimized for visibility.
- The Lead Pipe functions as both instrument and symbol—industrial, blunt, premeditated.
From here, Princeton advances three contentions.
Contention One: Predictability.
The Conservatory is uniquely foreseeable. Glass walls create transparency, which increases surveillance, which increases certainty. The Lead Pipe, unlike poison or rope, offers deterministic outcomes. The Affirmative argues that predictability stabilizes narratives and prevents escalation.
Contention Two: Structural Inevitability.
Colonel Mustard does not choose the Conservatory; the Conservatory chooses him. Elite actors are drawn to elite spaces. The Lead Pipe is merely the final link in a chain of historical causation. This is not murder—it is path dependence.
Contention Three: Comparative Advantage.
Even if violence is bad, the Affirmative argues, this violence is less bad. The alternative locations—Kitchen, Ballroom, Library—create spillover risks. The Conservatory contains harm. The Lead Pipe ends things quickly. On net, this is the most humane option available under the resolution.
They sit. The timer beeps. Everything has been signposted.
The Negative (Brown)
Brown stands, visibly concerned but impeccably flowed.
They begin with framework, insisting that the round should be evaluated under a moral culpability lens, not a logistical one. Murder, they argue, cannot be reduced to efficiency metrics without doing violence to the concept of responsibility itself.
Turn One: Agency.
Colonel Mustard is not a structure. He is a person. The Affirmative’s attempt to dissolve him into systems is a dodge. If he swings the pipe, he owns the swing.
Turn Two: The Conservatory Myth.
Glass does not create accountability; it creates spectacle. The Conservatory invites performance, not restraint. If anything, it incentivizes the crime.
Turn Three: The Lead Pipe Problem.
The Lead Pipe is not humane—it is intimate. It requires proximity. This is not containment; this is cruelty.
Brown concludes by arguing that the Affirmative has confused narrative closure with justice, and urges the judge to reject a world in which murder is weighed on a scale of comparative convenience.
They sit. A judge nods. Someone underlines something twice.
The Rebuttals
What follows is familiar.
Princeton collapses to predictability and containment, insisting Brown dropped the determinism claim in the 1NC. Brown insists they answered it “in spirit,” which is not a recognized category.
Both teams agree the round “comes down to framing,” though they mean different framings. Each tells the judge, earnestly, that even if everything else is true, this one issue decides the ballot.
Time expires.
The Decision
The judges retire.
There is a pause. Whispering near the ballot table. A sudden clearing of the throat by the tournament director.
An announcement:
“We regret to inform the audience that Judge Three will not be returning. He has been discovered in the pantry. The weapon appears to be a wrench.”
The room goes quiet.
Someone asks whether this affects speaker points.
The timer, obedient to rules older than anyone present, resets itself to zero.
