Don’t Argue with These Two!

Teddy Wyman (CAS) (left) and senior Jasper Primack (CAS’19) were named the best debate team in the country in April at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J., tying for first place with Georgetown at the American Parliamentary Debate Association. Photos courtesy of BU Debate Society

If you happen to find yourself at some point in a conversation with either Jasper Primack or Teddy Wyman, and the subject turns to politics or law or government, here’s a friendly tip: don’t argue with them. You’ll lose.

It might even go something like that famous scene in a bar in Good Will Hunting, when the secretly brilliant character played by Matt Damon embarrasses a Harvard student arguing over economics and the Revolutionary War.

Primack (CAS’19) and senior Wyman (CAS), both members of the BU Debate Society, won the best debate team in the country in April at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J., tying for first place with Georgetown at the American Parliamentary Debate Association. Primack finished second in the Speaker of the Year competition and BU as a school finished 9th out of 20. Where did the team struggle? Primack says it was when Yale’s team proposed debating that “postcolonial states should use a capitalist development model, rather than a socialist development model.”

Got that?

BU Today caught up with Primack following his and Wyman’s impressive showing. He shared some thoughts on how they achieved their accomplishment before he heads off to law school at the University of Chicago:

Primack: Teddy is from Portland, Oregon. I’m from Newton, Massachusetts. We both did debating and competitive public speaking in high school.

We both got to BU, I started in 2015, he started in 2016, and we both joined the Boston University Debate Society. We met when I was a sophomore and Teddy was a freshman.

There is obviously a great deal of educational value in debating, and you learn a lot about the topics discussed.

My goal was simple when I started out. Earn a title. Either at the national championships or in the team of the year rankings.

It works like this: A team is two people. Universities have multiple teams, and the universities compete against each other.

We compete up and down the East Coast. The farthest south we go is University of North Carolina. We also go to schools in the Midwest; the farthest was University of Chicago. We don’t travel by plane. We compete more against Yale, Brown, and Harvard.

Yale and Harvard have a gigantic number of titles historically, both team of the year and national championships. The fact that a team from BU was able to beat them is definitely a point of pride.

Even though we compete as a team, each partner’s score is ranked. I was second across the entire association. I am quite proud of that.

The Harvard tourney in early October is the largest in the association—150 to 200 two-person teams, five preliminary rounds. Teams are paired against each other, so there might be 80 matchups.

The way it works, there is a government team and the opposition team. The government team proposes a resolution, then the opposition team goes second and has no time to come up with their counterargument. At the conclusion of the speeches, judges decide who had the better argument, and then assign the team and individual scores. The team with the best combination of team and speaker scores wins.

Topics range from economics to politics to philosophy to sports to feminism. Part of the fun is figuring out what sort of interesting points to make, on top of what you would never normally think about.

Teddy and I are good at law and politics.

We ended in a tie with Georgetown. Their two debaters were a senior and junior. It was very heated the final few months. Teddy and I were in the lead for most of the year. They passed us, as I was doing law school visits on weekends. In the final tourney, we had to win or we’d get second. They were at 82 out of 100. We were at 81. If we won the last tourney, it was just large enough to get that one more point we needed. We were just holding our breath every single round. I was dying of nervousness. We won the tournament. And tied for first—the first time a tie had occurred since 2005.