The university’s two political groups engaged with three different topics during a debate in Flom Auditorium. Christian Wiloejo/The Ram
By Joe Vitale
The university’s two political groups, the College Republicans and the College Democrats, debated last week on a number of issues that have divided the country and brought into question America’s role as a trendset- ter on major issues.
The debate, which took place in Flom Auditorium, considered the war against the so-called Islamic State, the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline and the economic and environmental costs of fracking. With nearly fifty students in attendance, the event was “powered” by the Fordham Political Review.
In an attempt to experiment with the traditional debate format, the first topic engaged four students and asked them to weigh possible courses of action against the so-called Islamic State, a terrorist group seeking statehood in the Middle East, which has claimed responsibility for an assemblage of brutal actions, including the beheading of two American journalists.
In a round-table format, the four students were dually moderated by Fr. Anderson, S.J., associate chair of the department of African and African American Studies, and Aaron DeVera, FCRH ’16, an executive editor of the Fordham Political Review.
The moderators asked panelists to address a number of questions regarding a “boots-on-the-ground” approach to stopping ISIS.
Adam Hamilton, considered the Democratic position on the topic.
“The only way to end ISIS is intervene,” he charged. “In order to stop this us must have concentrate effort. we need to remove them from power.”
Rob Gray, FCRH ’17, representing the anti-interventionist platform, considered America’s past with the Middle East. “Any limited intervention will be ineffective,” he said. “And any large amount of troops will be costly.”
Some of the panelists, including Gray, considered America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq as warning signs of the dangers of becoming entangled with the war-torn region.
“We are being asked to spend resources and lives we cannot afford: This is [a war] we should not ask our sons and daughters to fight,” he added.
Joe Moreski was also one of the panelists who advocated for a libertarian approach. “I am advocating for the U.S. to step forward and create something called a security assistance team,” Moreski said, adding that he would support some embedded forces on the ground.
Making use of twenty-first century technology, DeVera fielded questions via Twitter using the hashtag “#FordhamDebates.”
One Twitter user posed a question about the role of moderate Muslim countries — such as Turkey — in the future fight against ISIS.
“Turkey can be a very good ally, but it can also be a very bad ally,” maintained Carl in response to the question. “You need to have the moderate countries come together, and this diplomatic effort can only be led by the united states,” he added, advocating for a strengthened American voice on the issue. Given the nature of the round-table, no one perspective dominated another, making a decisive winner difficult to determine.
Following the debate, Anderson stressed the need to continue the debate over America’s foreign policy, especially its involvement in the Middle East. Calling it a quagmire, Anderson told The Fordham Ram how questions about ISIS and conflict in Syria “shadow how we stumbled into Vietnam,” and should prompt questions about America’s role in the international community.
The latter two issues, which were more domestically focused, assumed a traditional debate format.
The first topic asked the two debaters to consider the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a proposed 1,179-mile extension of the Keystone Pipeline, about half of which is already built.
The extension, which would diagonally bisect three western states and connect the pipeline to the Gulf Coast, is currently under review by the State Department. The future of the pipeline, however, remains unclear.
Both debaters who tackled the topic, Hans Leuders, FCRH ’16, of the Democrats, and Thomas Fink, FCRH ’16 of the Republicans, mirrored their respective party’s arguments for building, or, rather, not building the pipeline.
Not only would mining the sands be energy inefficient, Leuders noted, there would be, a great deal of dangerous materials released, including greenhouse gasses.
“Economically, it’s a cheap fix,” he admitted. “But why should we doom our futures to invest in a dying industry?”
Fink said Leuders was presenting a false dichotomy. “There’s a middle-ground,” he said. Constructing the pipeline, he said, does not mean that America cannot invest in alternative energy sources.
“We can have both,” Fink added.
Fink noted that TransCanada, the company leading the pipeline, “will remove this oil no matter what.”
Of all TransCanada’s options (shipping it abroad, moving it by train and using the pipeline) Fink maintained processing it on U.S. soil was the safest way of doing so.
“It can go out of the country, it can go by train cars or it can go through a pipeline to the gulf,” he said, “where we can process this as cleanly as possible.”
Leuters pivoted to the extreme situation: He asked Fink to consider the possibility of a spill, one that could threaten the lives of innocent Americans and pose serious ecological harms to the surrounding areas.
“It only takes one spill. Do we remember the Gulf spill, or the Kalamazoo spill? It takes one gigantic problem,” he warned.
The last topic concerned hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. Fracking was described as the extraction technique allowing for suitable extraction of natural gases through the cracks.
Tom Palumbo, FCRH ’17, of the Democrats, argued that the destructive effects of fracking are not worth the temporary economic benefits.
“What you are doing with fracking is destroying the area,” Palumbo said. “It destroys the shale and eventually you can only do that for so long.”
“Most wells can only be fracked 18 times and then it is gone. This is not a sustainable practice,” he added.
Tom Samuelson, FCRH ’16 of the Republicans, shifted the focus to job creation: “It will support more than 600,000 jobs, where the average wage is twice the national average,” he said.
Samuelson, however, was keen on beefing up the need to frack re- sponsibly. Adding that the ecological concerns of environmentalists can be minimized with further efforts to do so with caution.
Samuelson noted vertical drilling, monitoring of seismic “sweet spots” and other solutions that help clean up the process. “There are ton of people unemployed,” he said. “Fracking, if done properly, can provide a lot of jobs, and it’s helping the economy and helping the American people.”
Palumbo disagreed: “All of damages are just not going to be able to be fixed in the future, and the benefits are not worth the cost.”
“When it’s your backyard, your ecosystem and your drinking water,” he closed, “fracking is not worth the risk.”
Along with being a traditional event that engages the two clubs and varying political perspectives, the debate was also seen as an experiment in debate formatting and the use of social media in engaging audiences.
“It certainly opens up more opportunities,” said Leuters on the use of round-table debates. “Panels divided by policy have much more colorful arguments and add more information.”
Michael Bilotti, FCRH ’15 and president of the Democrats, added that it was a first experiment, and that the groups are hoping for feedback.
“The biggest reason is that we are trying to change perception,” he said following the debate. “There are areas that we agree and do not agree, but we enjoy doing these events.”
“We want to provide new ways to intake news in a captivating manner while providing professional analysis and accuracy,” noted DeVera, who moderated the panel on ISIS. “Audience interaction can determine how interesting a debate is, and that’s the dimension we want to work on for future events and guest speakers on campus.”
Jennifer Minerva, FCRH ’16, vice president of the College Republicans, commended all of the debaters and noted that the debates could have gone to either side. ”It wasn’t pure mudslinging like previous debates,” she said. “Both sides gave cogent arguments which made it difficult to choose a winner.”
