Claremont Summer

The Claremont Colleges, consisting of five extraordinarily prestigious and highly selective undergraduate colleges (Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, Pomona, Scripps) and two graduate schools (Claremont Graduate University and the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences), are located 35 miles east of Los Angeles in the City of Claremont. The Fiske Guide to Colleges noted that the Claremont Consortium constituted “a collection of intellectual resources unmatched in America.”

The Debate Union and Claremont Summer programs are centered at Claremont McKenna College (CMC). US News & World Report ranks CMC among the nation’s top ten liberal arts colleges (9th). The College Consensus, aggregated data from multiple rankings, lists CMC at fourth among liberal arts colleges. In an assessment by students, three of the Claremont Colleges ranked among the top 5 institutions – CMC, Pomona, and Harvey Mudd.

Claremont Summer students have the opportunity to use the outstanding facilities and resources of some of the nation’s top institutions of higher education during debate and leadership communication programming. Admissions officers make presentations to high school students; students receive ancillary essay writing instruction from college writing consultants.

It is the sole official summer program of the Middle School/High School Public Debate Program, arguably the largest debate network in the world, with more than 800,000 teacher and student participants in 36 countries. Although there are other summer programs that may offer instruction in middle school and high school debating in the Public Debate Program format (the popular 3-on-3 debate model), they rarely teach from the PDP textbook and other curricular materials, do not know the educational and professional communication foundations of the format (undermining instruction), have not examined the educational literature or assessment documents serving as the basis for the PDP design, and do not have the expertise to teach highly advanced argumentation and refutation techniques.

Civics in Action is the leadership and professional communication initiative led by John Meany. The program integrates best practices for public speaking, negotiation, interpersonal engagement, argumentation, organization management, and writing for academic and career success. The training has been used by businesses, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions in the US and other countries. Students attending the Middle School Scholars session or the High School Leadership and Professional Communication program will be able to take advantage of Claremont’s novel presentation curricular materials and techniques, as well as work with staff of Claremont McKenna’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse. Select students will be invited to participate in Civics in Action and other leadership projects during the following academic year. For example, students were able to participate at the 2016 Conference on Nuclear Politics. Summer students will be invited to attend Claremont’s 2025 Conference.

John Meany, Director of Forensics at Claremont McKenna College and the administrator of the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, coordinates summer debate programming. He has directed and taught more than 175 summer debate and leadership communication workshop sessions in the US and abroad. He directs Claremont’s Public Debate Program and Civics in Action outreach initiatives and other major educational outreach projects. He has coached five college national debate champions.

John Meany is the author or co-author of 10 debate textbooks and more than a score of teacher guides, research manuals and other debate instruction texts. He was a major sponsor of parliamentary debate formats (that is, debate formats featuring at least one element of parliamentary procedure, although parliamentary debate models may have no other common features) in the western US, establishing and hosting the first college, high school, and middle school parliamentary debate tournaments. His college teams have participated in the World Universities Debating Championship (international parliamentary debate model) since the 1980s; he established the US Universities Debate Championship (US championship in the international/WUDC parliamentary format, aka British Parliamentary Debate – now the largest national college debate championship) and hosted the first 3 US championship tournaments.

He developed secondary school national championships for US and international teams in the MSPDP, HSPDP, YPDP, WSDC, and WPD formats. The middle school championship is now one of the largest single-event competitive debate tournaments in the world with more than 1,300 participants after qualifying league events. He proposed and developed the California High School Speech Association (CHSSA) parliamentary debate format, arguably the most popular secondary school debate event in the state. He has written CHSSA parliamentary debate topics for the state championship for the past 4 years. He created the Civics in Action leadership program and sponsors its academic conference series. He is a communication and debate consultant for higher education institutions, businesses, and non-profit organizations.