American Parliamentary Debate Association
| Formation | 1981 |
|---|---|
| Type | Student debating organization |
|
Region served
|
United States |
|
President
|
Mars He (Harvard College) |
| Affiliations | World Universities Debating Council |
| Website | http://www.apdaweb.org/ |
The American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA) is the oldest intercollegiate parliamentary debating association in the United States, and one of two in the nation overall, the other being the National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA). APDA sponsors over 50 tournaments a year, all in a parliamentary format, as well as a National Championship. It also administers the North American Debating Championship with the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate (CUSID). Although it is mainly funded by its member universities, APDA is an entirely student-run organization.
APDA comprises about 80 universities, mainly in the Northeast, ranging as far north as Maine and as far south as Florida. Most of its members are private colleges, though several public universities also compete.
APDA members stage weekly debating tournaments, each at a different university and occurring throughout the academic year. Some weekends have two debating tournaments, one north of New York City and one south of New York City, in order to shorten transport time. However, centrally located tournaments or particularly prestigious tournaments, such as those at Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard will be “unopposed”, meaning that they will be the only tournament on that particular weekend. While APDA does play a role in creating a tournament schedule, the tournaments themselves are only loosely coordinated by the APDA body. Individual schools must ensure that their tournaments meet a broad set of APDA guidelines, but are free to tinker with their tournament formats.
There are a number of tournaments in which APDA does play a direct role. Most prominently, APDA sponsors a National Championship at the end of each year. Unlike all other tournaments, debating at Nationals is limited to one team per university, plus any additional teams who “qualified” for Nationals during that debate season. There are several ways to qualify for Nationals, but by far the most common through the 2006-2007 season was to reach the final round of a tournament. Starting with the 2007-2008 season, qualification was earned through year-long performance, gauged by how far debaters advance at tournaments of varying sizes.
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