Gallaudet Debate Team members Brenna Freeman and Jevon Burns placed second at the St. Ignatius Dialogues, hosted by the University of San Francisco on October 9-10. Freeman, a first-year student from Florida, and Burns, a junior from New Mexico, defeated 14 other teams to reach the championship. Their opponents included Pepperdine University and the U.S. Air Force Academy. They lost the championship to the University of San Francisco on a split vote, and Freeman was voted as the tournament’s best speaker.
“It was thrilling to win Top Speaker and place 2nd overall,” says Freeman.
Burns, who grew up as an athlete, says it is a completely different feeling to get an award for his intellect. He says, “Being able to be creative, and wrestle with complicated topics and have people think you had one of the best ideas, felt so rewarding and really fun!”
Thinking on their feet
The Debate Team faced several challenging questions, including the final one, which Freeman says was their favorite: “How can we cultivate hope and human dignity in a world increasingly shaped by AI and robotics?”
“The one thing Brenna and I really identified was the need for action. People nowadays are losing their jobs, education and the economy are worsening, and we live in scary times. Right now, the ones who are developing AI have no reason to stop. They are making a lot of money, the technology has been advancing, and things are rapidly changing,” says Burns.
Freeman says their argument was all about about agency. “We don’t have to embrace this new technology fully when it is marketed by the powerful as inevitable. We have a choice as to what we support, what we reject, and what sort of future we are going to create. That is something that everyone in this generation, including Gallaudet students and faculty, should understand.”
Though only one debater has the floor at a time, the work is a team effort. “There were many times where Brenna and I felt a little lost, and we were able to ask some opinions from those on the team, which really helped us. Without everyone involved, Gallaudet as a team would not have been able to place second,” he says.
Gallaudet’s Debate Team, a project of Gallaudet’s Center for Democracy in Deaf America (CDDA), has been racking up wins in recent years, including four tournament championships and more than 30 speaker awards. During the 2024-25 school year, they won Gallaudet’s first-ever tournament championship at the Transatlantic Dialogues in Washington, D.C., and the Sierra Sustainability Summit at Yosemite National Park. In 2025-26, they celebrated a similar record, earning a novice championship trophy at the West Coast Transatlantic Dialogues and another win at the Sierra Sustainability Summit. Another CDDA project is their award-winning Youth Debate Bowl, bringing debate to deaf and hard of hearing middle and high school students across the country.
Gallaudet’s Center for Democracy in Deaf America’s mission is to develop healthy democratic skills and habits by fostering disagreement, debate, and civic engagement through American Sign Language and English. It launched its debate program in 2020 as the first to compete intercollegiately in sign language.
