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Program Philosophy
Forensics at Gustavus
The Gustavus Adolphus College forensics program is named after Evan Anderson, the founding member of the Gustavus Communication Studies Department and the original sponsor of the Pi Kappa Delta Gamma Chapter at Gustavus. During his long and illustrious teaching and coaching career, Dr. Anderson won several national debate titles and mentored generations of Gustavus students. We are indebted to his intellect, his compassion, and his leadership of forensics at Gustavus.
The Evan Anderson Forum is a comprehensive, co-curricular forensics program that competes in eleven American Forensics Association individual events, as well as in National Parliamentary Debate Association Parliamentary Debate. Our program is grounded in the Three Crowns of our program: Education, Competition and Leadership. We believe in the liberal arts tradition of forensics, and we also whole-heartedly believe that forensics training is one of the best ways to develop a student's advocacy, research, critical thinking, higher-level analytical, rhetorical analysis and performance skills. Firmly grounded within the liberal arts tradition, forensics is what one alum termed "a college education in a nutshell."
Forensics is also interdisciplinary. Students learn to see problems and solutions from a variety of perspectives. A single debate topic, for example, might involve research that spans a number of disciplines. In addition, students learn to approach questions of fact, questions of value and questions of policy from the framework that is appropriate to each type of question. Our program is deeply committed to undergraduate research on a variety of topics and many of our students have presented papers at national conferences.
We are committed to making Gustavus Forensics the paradigm for what intercollegiate competition can and should be about.
