National Debate Tournament

The National Debate Tournament is one of the national championships for collegiate policy debate, public forum debate, Lincoln-Douglas debate, and other events in the United States. The tournament is sponsored by the American Forensic Association with the Ford Motor Company Fund.

The National Debate Tournament (NDT) began in 1947 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Twenty-nine schools competed at the first NDT debating: "Resolved: That labor should be given a direct share in the management of industry". It remained at West Point through 1966, at which time the Tournament Director met with the district chairs and advised them that at the tournament banquet of the Military Academy's decision to discontinue hosting the NDT in the ensuing years in part because of the increased demands on space and money that the United States' growing involvement in the Vietnam War was placing on the Academy.

Since then the tournament has moved to different member schools each year and only three schools have hosted it twice.

In the first NDT, teams were nominated by committees from their district. This was soon replaced with district qualifying tournaments. Eight, post district tournament, "second round" at-large bids were awarded beginning in 1968 and continuing through 1970, enlarging the field to 44 teams, and two of these second round selections "cleared", or finished in the top sixteen in the preliminary rounds, in 1968, three cleared in 1969 and four of the eight post district tournament qualifiers cleared in 1970.

Prior to 1970, a school could only send one team to the NDT, but the tournament committee relented to pressure from some of the more successful programs and a total of eight schools sent two teams to the 1970 National Debate Tournament that year. The winner of that tournament, designated Kansas "B", would not have been eligible to participate if the one team per school rule had remained in force.

In 1971, the format was amended to assign seventeen at large bids prior to district qualifying tournaments followed by the selection of an additional 27 teams by the district tournaments and another eight in a second at large selection round, enlarging the field to 52 teams. Ten regular season tournaments were designated to be "qualifying tournaments", such that winning one earned that team an automatic NDT berth, and the remainder of the first at-large round teams were selected by vote of the selection committee. That format lasted for just two years.

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