Whitman’s nationally recognized debate team fundamentally changed what debating looks like this semester by ditching their 40 pound plastic tubs and thousands of pages of evidence for sleek dell laptops.   Whitman’s team is the first college to fully transition to paperless debate.

This transition of the team’s evidence and files onto laptops has been on the mind of Jim Hanson, professor of forensics, since 1998 but this move has been made feasible only recently.

In high speed policy and parliamentary debate rounds, teams can’t afford to waste precious seconds of their speech time shuffling between different windows on a computer screen.  Hanson credits Aaron Hardy, Whitman’s Policy Debate coach for making paperless debating possible by changing Microsoft Word’s macros.   Macros are settings in Microsoft Word that can be controlled to manipulate how documents are displayed and organized.

“We kept testing it, but we still couldn’t get the evidence organized on the laptop. What Aaron did with those macros was solve the organizing problem.   What the macros do is you can just open the document and press a keyboard shortcut and it moves it to a new document,” said Hanson.

This move toward paperless debate hasn’t dulled Whitman’s competitive edge however.

“We save tons of paper and we save money, which means that more of our teams can travel to more tournaments throughout the year.   Our coaches have worked really hard to make sure the macro system is as user-friendly as possible and the only downside has been user error,” said Ali Edwards, a junior on the policy debate team.

The team saves money by not having to pay for airlines to ship up the twenty or so 40 pound plastic tubs across the country to tournaments.   Also, the team doesn’t have to purchase the hundreds of reams of printing paper and dozens of printer toners either.   Hanson roughly estimates the team now saves 80,000 pages of paper a year now.

“‘The debate team going paperless will allow the college significantly reduce paper use and hopefully encourage other departments to explore efficient paperless technologies,” said Karlis Rokpelnis, President of Campus Greens.

So far, this trend toward paperless debate has not caught on elsewhere.

“I’m certain that no other schools do paperless debating with macros like we have,” said Hanson.
The debate team which does more evidence oriented policy debate and more extemporaneous parliamentary debate remain the only team in both formats who debate without paper.

The team will be giving away its evidence tubs to high school debaters that attend Whitman’s summer debate camp.   The pages of evidence will be recycled.