After an unforgettable aberration in 2016, the normal sights and sounds of October have returned to our campus, in Farmville, Va. Basketball shoes are back squeaking on the floor of the Longwood University gym, which last year was transformed into a television stage where Mike Pence and Tim Kaine faced off in the lone vice-presidential debate of the election. Gone are all the satellite trucks, the cable-news broadcast sets, the hordes of journalists, Secret Service agents, and frenzied campaign operatives.
For the four college campuses chosen by the Commission on Presidential Debates to host general-election debates (three presidential, one vice presidential) every four years, the jolt back to normalcy is remarkably abrupt. The debates are typically just a week or 10 days apart. Moments after the final handshake, an army of laborers is breaking down the set; by sunrise, it’s en route to the next location.
Now that a year has passed, we’ve had time to reflect. And with the selection process for 2020 not that far way, we are starting to get questions about the experience: “Was it worthwhile?” “Should we throw our hat in the ring to host?”
My answer: Generally, a presidential debate is not something I would advise your college to take on — unless you can answer a confident “yes” to these four questions.
1. Do you have adequate personnel, and are they up for a challenge?
It’s difficult to overstate the logistical complexity of hosting a debate — particularly if, as in our case, the venue is right in the middle of the campus. A number of colleges hosted primary-election debates in early 2016. But once the nominees are chosen, the security considerations and personnel involved are orders of magnitude higher. Thousands of law-enforcement officers, guests, vendors, and others will descend — all needing to be fed, transported, and accommodated while negotiating a tight security cordon through the heart of the campus.
Thousands of law-enforcement officers, guests, vendors, and others will descend — all needing to be fed, transported, and accommodated.
Our debate-leadership team, assembled from across the university, had roughly 25 members. In some cases, preparing for the debate was a major part of their job for nearly a year. Preparing to host devours extraordinary energy and focus from your technology and facilities staff members, along with those in communications, public safety, and other parts of the university. For the smallest institutions, I suspect it would be hard to pull off.
Yet the surprise takeaway for us was that what matters as much as manpower is attitude and approach. If the people leading the effort see the work as a burden on top of their regular duties, it will never coalesce. You need to communicate clearly how the event advances the college’s mission how it’s an extension of what those people already do.
It also helps if they see the experience as a unique professional opportunity, which it genuinely is. For the campus police, media relations, IT, and many other departments, the variety, intensity, and importance of the work are opportunities both to learn and to push themselves in their careers.
2. Is your campus fully committed?
Hosting a general-election debate is not something your political-science department, or even your event-services office, can pull off. It requires engagement from across the university. Not every faculty member will be on board, and it’s theoretically possible to hold a debate without engaging the academic side of the institution. But in the end, our faculty proved essential to the energy of the event, creating or redesigning more than 30 courses around the debate, hosting visiting speakers, and giving lectures themselves around Debate Day.
Also crucial are your student-affairs staff members. Can they help rally the student body to participate, particularly as volunteers? If not, you’ll struggle to succeed, and the television audience will see a lifeless, disengaged campus — the very opposite of what you want, both in perception and in reality.
3. Do you have the financial resources to pull this off?
Don’t host a debate unless you’re in strong shape financially. The cost is considerable: close to $2 million in production fees to the Commission on Presidential Debates, and an additional $4 million to $7 million, depending on your logistical situation and your level of programming in the days around the debate. We invested aggressively on the programming — lectures, alumni events, a festival for students. If we were going to the trouble of hosting a debate, we wanted it to be memorable and successful. If national television networks were going to broadcast live from our quad, we certainly weren’t going scrimp on banners (and we went to almost comical extremes to make sure that Longwood banners were well-positioned in their shots).
How we paid for all this was crucial. We sought and landed sponsorships but did not depend on them, and we did not reallocate from other budget lines. Instead we set aside money from cash reserves as an investment, designed to produce a return for the university in terms of morale, reputation, student experience, alumni pride, enrollment, and retention. Those of us planning the debate did not have carte blanche, but we were spared constant anxiety and bureaucratic obstacles related to finding funds.
4. Can you clearly articulate your goals for hosting — and do they go beyond just getting your name out there?
Clear goals involve how your faculty and staff members and students will see the connection between the work for the debate and the college’s mission. Goals are also essential for empowering people along the entire chain of command to make the thousands of decisions they’ll face during the months of preparation. Longwood’s goals were to share our name and story with a wider audience, to engage and make proud our campus community, and to leave a legacy with both our programming and our infrastructure investments.
Most people assume that the first goal — telling our story — was the dominant focus, and we certainly put considerable energy into doing so. The media coverage was positive; after the debate, we calculated the earned-media value at north of $80 million. Though we’ve been careful not to attribute our momentum to any one factor, this fall we had one of our strongest freshman classes on record, and the year of the debate was our strongest ever for fund raising.
But looking back, I think many of us would conclude (to our surprise) that it was with the second goal that we got the greatest lift — in engaging those who already knew us rather than those hearing our name for the first time. There were 30 new courses, 700 student volunteers, and 142 alumni watch parties around the country. The camaraderie and confidence that emerged among our staff members carries forward. Best of all, despite the small size of our venue, more than 150 of our students were able to watch the debate in person.
So that was our experience: a challenge that strengthened us and that we remember with pride. The recipe for success is a universitywide commitment, a natural symbiosis with an existing mission, flexibility and patience, and a vision of what you hope to achieve.
If all of those things are in place, you may want to try for 2020. Here are two reasons why you should consider hosting. The first is public service. As educational institutions at a time when our entire enterprise is under skepticism and assault, we should be doing everything we can to remind the country of our essential role of instilling the habits of democracy in each generation. If college campuses ever stopped being the go-to places to host debates, a valuable and highly visible reminder of that role would be lost.
And the second reason? Yeah, there were some tough moments, and a lot of sleepless nights. But looking back, it really was a lot of fun.
Justin Pope is a vice president and chief of staff at Longwood University.
