Students walk through the Harvard Law School area on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.(Photo: 2002 photo by Chitose Suzuki, AP)
(NEWSER)<span style="color: Red;">*</span>– Next up, a debate with the parole board? The Ivy League's finest debate team was defeated by a team of prisoners from a maximum-security prison in New York state. The three-man Eastern New York Correctional Facility team was declared the winner on Sept. 18 after debating for an hour with Harvard's team, which won the national title this year, the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
AP<span style="color: Red;">*</span>reports. In a<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
Facebook post, the Harvard undergraduates said they were proud to lose to the "phenomenally intelligent and articulate team" of inmates. The prison team—which wasn't allowed to use the Internet for research—made the case against allowing undocumented children into public schools, a position with which they personally disagreed.
The three inmates, who are all serving time in Napanoch, N.Y., for violent crimes, have been studying as part of an initiative led by nearby Bard College. Before last month's Harvard debate, they had already scored victories against West Point and a University of Vermont team, reports the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
Wall Street Journal, which notes that very few of the inmates who've earned degrees under the nearly 15-year-old Bard program have ended up back behind bars. "Debating has changed our lives and this confirmed how powerful a tool education and debating can be," the president of the Harvard College Debating Union tells<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
Boston.com. Harvard didn't go easy on the inmates because that would have been "incredibly disrespectful of their talent and work," he adds. (The<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
biggest-ever mass release of federal prisoners<span style="color: Red;">*</span>will happen later this month.)
This story originally appeared on Newser:
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The Ivy League's Best Debate Team Got Schooled by a Prison Team
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Newser<span style="color: Red;">*</span>is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
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