Dear Donors, 

Thank you! Your generous support is helping to push us to our Friday goal of reaching 30%. We are so appreciative of your bold endorsement for critical thinking, free speech and respectful discussion. We will be leaving for the Oxford and Cambridge debate competitions this week and will be posting updates on our progress as soon as we can! Our top debaters will gain valuable experience while in the UK, honing skills that will undoubtedly help when we take the US Championships.  Your support is what makes all of our preparation possible so please consider forwarding our project to your friends! Spread the values of free speech, critical discourse and college debate! 

Thank you!  -Cornell Forensics Society  

Here's the video of the debate our team participated in for the Trustee's Council Annual Meeting. Svati Pazhyanur '16, Connor Monsees '18, Neshay Aqueel MILR '16 and Jiali Li '15 did an excellent job and are all exceptionally grateful for your continued support! 

The topic for debate was: This house believes that Cornell's best days are behind it.

Family, Alumni, Friends and Supporters: 

We are well on our way to reaching our final goal and we are so grateful for your help. So far, we can send three more teams to the championships!

This past week we sent three teams to the most competitive tournaments of the season at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Our teams finished just below the break (the points needed to make it into quarterfinals) and faced some stiff competition including law students and graduate students from the UK, Ireland, Malaysia, France, Latvia, Israel, the U.S. and others. This was a great opportunity for our students to challenge themselves and was excellent preparation for Alaska. 

As we get closer to our final push, we appreciate your continued drive and support as you share our project and story with your friends, colleagues and community. 

One of the people I consider to have made a great and lasting impact on my life is Sam Nelson. He was one of the first people to get me to question, substantiate, and validate my views, and even changed a lot of them. Almost every day for six years he pushed me to be a better person as my debate coach and mentor. Debate helped me become the person that I am and I am incredibly grateful to Sam and Cornell for the opportunities that they provided me. I can only hope that some of the students who get to participate in tournaments like this one learn half as much!  I'm happy to support the team!

Leah Salgado'12

Dear Donors, As the end of our project was coming nearer and nearer last week, we held our breaths and sent out appeal after appeal. With your generous support we not only met our goal - we smashed it! We are so pleased and grateful for your overwhelming comittment to free speech, critical thought and debate! 

After raising over $18,000 we will be able to send at least 18 debaters to the championship! What's even more exciting is the possibility of sending more than twenty students. Since we were able to rally you to our cause, we may be able to book tickets in bulk and receive a discount - allowing us to truly maximize our success. 

We will keep you informed on how the team is doing in preparation for the championship. First up on the road to victory is the World Universities Debating Championship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!

Our top three teams will be flying to Malaysia on December 27 and start debating on December 29. They face three straight days of preliminary rounds, followed by two days of elimination rounds. Nearly 200 universities from all over the world compete in the largest non-athletic university event in the world. 

Our top three varsity teams: Julius Kairey '15 and Justin Ying '16 Adnan Muttalib '16 and En Ting Lee '17 Jennifer Kim '16 and Minae Kwon '17 

We will send you updates on their experience and success, but for now, wish them luck!