The Louisville Project is a project by the University of Louisville's policy debate team (the University of Louisville Debate Society or UDLS) to increase meaningful minority participation in debate, which started in 2000.
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Mission
Led by coach Ede Warner, Louisville eschewed traditional forms of debating like speed reading, debating the resolution, and presenting traditional forms of evidence. Louisville instead uses hip hop music, personal experiences, and other media to present their arguments. They argue that many elements of policy debate are exclusionary and ask the judge to cast their ballot to sign onto their project to increase diversity in debate.
In 2005, Louisville started a "take it to the streets" initiative in which they offered to debate the topic normally if the judge was replaced with a lay person. Because of the time required to find a new critic, the rounds were to take place with reduced speech times, approximately equivalent to those of Lincoln-Douglas debate. Most teams accepted the agreement and Louisville lost the vast majority of those debates.
The end of the project
In November 2005, Ede Warner announced, on the collegiate debate message board eDebate, his resignation as the Cross Examination Debate Association 2nd vice president, canceled the University of Louisville's debate tournament (the "Super Bowl of Debate"), and announced his plans to stop recruiting debaters and retire in 5 years. This is regarded by many in the debate community as the beginning of the end of the Louisville Project.
The MPOWER Movement
Louisville has continued "The Project" through the 2006-2007 season and has now become self-titled as the MPOWER (Multi-cultural policy organizing with emancipatory rhetoric) Movement. The MPOWER Movement seeks to implement policies into the debate community that will enhance multi-cultural education in collegiate debate. Louisville advocates a 10-demand plan which was distributed to the debate community during the 2006-07 season at competitions. The team uses these points to support their argument that collegiate debate is currently exclusive of minority groups based on race, economics, gender, sexuality and communicative differences. The success of the Louisville team fluctuated during the 2006-07 season. In the end, two teams qualified for elimination rounds at CEDA Nationals where two members also received speaking awards.