Up for Debate

Inside Gasson Hall’s historic Room 305, there are 133 names hand-painted on a large trompe l’oeil plaque on the wall. Lindsay Marquis ’28 will soon become the 134th.  

In April, Marquis won the most recent Fulton Prize Debate, the annual student competition of the Fulton Debating Society of Boston College. The society is nearly as old as the University itself. In fact, when BC moved from the South End to Chestnut Hill in 1913, the first building constructed on the new campus, University Hall (which would later become Gasson), included a room designed with an auditorium for the society. Jesuit Brother Francis Schroen, a renowned painter, graced the arched ceiling panels of what is today Gasson 305 with quotes by figures such as Cicero, Saint Paul, and Demosthenes about the importance of oratory. Schroen also created numbered slots on the trompe l’oeil plaque to record each year’s winner of the Fulton Prize Debate, all the way through to 2104.     

The form of competitive debate practiced by the society is known as policy debate. It emphasizes rigorous advance research on a topic and the technical delivery of logical arguments, making it different from parliamentary debate, which rewards the ability to spar cleverly over topics issued on the spot. In an era when informed and civil public dialogue sometimes seems in short supply, policy debate is a craft that can teach us all a lot, said Marquis, who is double majoring in marketing and philosophy on a pre-law track. “In this form of debate, you have to become as well-versed as possible in a topic and then argue it from both sides. It requires you to see different points of view,” she said. She won the Fulton Prize for her debate performance arguing the affirmative side of the question of whether to allow the formation of labor unions in prisons.

The Fulton Prize Debate, in which BC students compete against each other, is just a small part of the society’s activities. Most of their debates are at weekend-long tournaments where they challenge multiple schools. During the just-concluded academic year, for instance, BC debaters traveled to host universities in states including Texas, West Virginia, and Georgia to take on students from around the country in debates focused on this year’s topic, labor rights for incarcerated people. Every year, a different policy-related debate topic is determined by vote of an intercollegiate committee. The students score points based on their debate strategy, reasoning, research, and delivery. Along the way, they also practice sportsmanship, something Marquis said is missing from a lot of civic discourse lately. “As soon as the debate is over, you’re shaking hands, chatting and laughing,” she said. “Having argumentative conversations does not mean developing hatred toward people.”

John Katsulas, the longtime director of the Fulton Debating Society, said that competitive policy debate develops a wide range of skills that serve students well, whatever their major and wherever they take their careers. “The methods that go into debate apply to real-word decision-making,” Katsulas said, pointing to skills such as organization, research, and the construction of a persuasive argument. In the foyer just outside Katsulas’s office in St. Mary’s Hall, which houses the University’s communication department, is a glass case lined with trophies earned by Boston College’s debating team over the decades. Katsulas showed them off like any proud coach. All in all, he said, the 2025–2026 debate season was a good one for the team, which placed second at the annual ACC Debate Championship, hosted this year by Southern Methodist University.

Katsulas, who started as a debate coach at BC in 1987 and became director of debate in 1994, has announced that he will retire next year. Whoever succeeds him will join a storied program. Debate began as an activity at BC in 1868 with a society formed by the University’s first academic dean, Robert Fulton, SJ, who later twice became president of Boston College. (The society’s first debate topic: “Is the art of printing productive of more good than evil?”) Students voted to name the society in Fulton’s honor in 1890, the same year the Fulton Prize Debate was introduced. Five years later, BC hosted its first head-to-head debate, against Georgetown University. In the decades that followed, the society continued to challenge other universities on campus as well as in public. One legendary example came in 1928, when BC debaters defeated Harvard in front of a crowd of thousands at Symphony Hall in Boston, successfully arguing that New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major US political party, was “eminently qualified” for the Oval Office. As time went on, intercollegiate debate in the US evolved into the tournament format practiced today. Boston College emerged as a formidable force, particularly during the sixties and seventies, when the University regularly qualified for elite national tournaments.

It is believed that there are more than five hundred living alumni of the Fulton Debating Society. “It was such an exciting activity,” said Wenyu Ho Blanchard ’95, JD’99, who today is general counsel for the workwear retail giant Duluth Trading Company. “It felt like your brain was in overdrive all the time, because you’d be talking at breakneck speed to really intelligent, clever people.” Blanchard won the Fulton Prize Debate in 1994 and was separately inducted into the society’s Hall of Fame for her victories at national tournaments. She said her debating experiences at BC taught her how to approach an issue with dispassionate logic, consider it from every conceivable angle, and put her ego aside when a better argument is made, all of which are critical in her professional life.

Equally formative, she said, was the camaraderie she built with her teammates and her mentors, Katsulas and the late Dale Herbeck, an esteemed national expert in communication law who preceded Katsulas as director of the society. “Dale loved country music,” Blanchard recalled, “so there’d be ten of us in a van, driving for hours to a tournament, singing along to ‘Friends in Low Places.’ Then we’d be sleeping four to a room in a hotel. Between the intellectual and social aspects, the society was probably the most important part of my experience at BC.”

Blanchard described Katsulas as an extraordinarily dedicated steward of the society. “He’s upheld tremendous academic excellence and success and built a strong community of society alumni,” she said. “I don’t know how they’ll replace him.”

Katsulas said a search for his successor will begin in the fall. One relationship he said he’s particularly proud of, and hopes to see continue, is the partnership he forged in 2016 between the society and what would eventually become the National Prison Debate League (NPDL). It started when Katsulas received a letter from Daniel Throop, a man incarcerated at the Massachusetts prison MCI-Norfolk, challenging BC students to take on the prison’s moribund debate society, which Throop was trying to revive. Katsulas accepted Throop’s invitation, intrigued by his idea of providing intellectual and social stimulation for people in isolating circumstances while simultaneously breaking down the stereotypes that students might have about incarcerated people. BC was the first university to accept a challenge to debate the prisoners, and was integral to the founding of the NPDL in 2022 as a nonprofit, Throop said. Since then, BC has debated prisoners at correctional facilities in Maine, Connecticut, Ohio, and Washington, DC.

Terrence King ’26, cocaptain of the Fulton Debating Society in 2025–2026, said the events at prisons were the experiences that most impacted him during his four years in the society. “Debate is an exercise that can help us lessen divides,” said King, who majored in operations management and math and has a post-graduation job lined up at an asset management firm in New York City. “Debate provides a really good space for building empathy, and for making sure that we’re not all talking past each other.” ◽