Harvard debate team defeated by prison inmates

Harvard College was defeated by a group of prison inmates in a debate last month after winning a national title just several months prior and the story is now going viral.

According to CNN, inmates from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility defeated the prestigious Harvard debate team in mid-September as part of the Bard Prison Initiative, a program run by Bard College to provide college education to qualifying prisoners.

Harvard is not the first prestigious school this prison debate club has defeated. Others include the University of Vermont and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

CBS reported that those who help the inmates at Bard are not particularly surprised by the club's success and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative Max Kenner stated “students in the prison are held to the exact same standards, levels of rigor and expectation as students on Bard's main campus. Those students are serious. They are not condescended to by their faculty.”

According to Kenner, the goal of the initiative is to provide inmates with a liberal arts education so they can find meaningful work when they leave prison and are far less likely to return.

The Bard team had to argue that public schools should be allowed to deny enrollment to undocumented students, a view which the Harvard team opposed. Harvard students later congratulated the Bard team on their Facebook page.