About

The Debate Institutes at Dartmouth occupies a distinct position in the policy debate summer landscape: it is the only major debate institute run in direct operational partnership with an active, nationally elite college debate program. Dartmouth's Director of Debate John Turner — winner of the 2021 NDT Coach of the Year award and whose teams won the National Debate Tournament back-to-back in 2021 and 2022 — anchors the faculty alongside Assistant Director Anthony Trufanov, the 2019 NDT champion. The curriculum is not designed by visiting coaches who happen to be experienced; it is built by the same people who are actively competing at the highest level of collegiate policy debate, and it reflects that proximity to the current state of the activity.

For 2026, DDI's flagship offering is a new seven-week Georgetown-Dartmouth Debate Institute (GDDI) Fellows program, running from June 21 to August 1. The first three weeks are hosted at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., focused on intensive personalized skills development using a high-quality pre-built evidence set and access to D.C.'s public policy professionals as guest lecturers. The following four weeks move to Dartmouth in Hanover, where DDI's signature team-based lab model takes over: labs work collaboratively to build strategies against every other lab, test those strategies in practice debates, and culminate in a camp tournament. The standalone four-week DDI at Dartmouth remains available, as does the two-week DDIx for students seeking a skills-focused, practice-heavy option without the research curriculum.

The lab model is DDI's most distinctive structural feature. Rather than treating labs as groupings of individual students, DDI explicitly treats each lab as a team — every student contributes to the lab's research output, every student receives feedback calibrated to the lab's strategic needs, and the end-of-camp tournament pits labs against each other directly. In a 2022 survey, 100% of DDI students reported significantly improving their research skills — a metric that reflects the program's emphasis on evidence quality as a core competitive outcome.
DDI is not the right program for novice or intermediate debaters. The minimum of one full year of policy debate experience is enforced, rising juniors and seniors are prioritized in the application waves, and the curriculum assumes baseline fluency with policy debate's technical vocabulary and argumentation structures. For experienced policy debaters preparing for a high-stakes junior or senior season, the combination of Dartmouth's varsity coaching staff, the Georgetown D.C. policy environment, and DDI's evidence-production model makes it one of the most substantive summer options for serious debaters.