Senior Profile: Drew Latimer

Graduating senior Drew Latimer may be a Greek and Latin major, but he has also been taking many different courses outside of the Department of Classics. Having been a member of the Tufts Debate Society since his first year, Latimer has worked to broaden his knowledge base while in college through both the wide variety of courses he has taken and his participation in debates.

Most college students don’t do readings for classes they aren’t enrolled in. But Latimer knew that his friends’ political science and economics readings contained material that could help him in his next debate.

“I would do a lot of the readings that my friends were doing to try to keep up and really just suck out the things that would be useful for debate,” he said.

Latimer, who grew up on a former pickle farm in rural North Carolina, has participated in 78 debates over his four years at Tufts. He helped Tufts win the United States Universities Debate Association Championship last year for the first time in history, which he points to as one of his proudest accomplishments.

Another one of Latimer’s debate highlights happened earlier this year, when he got the chance to debate alongside his younger brother at a tournament at Northeastern University.

“My brother goes to [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill and there's a tournament where one partner on the team has to be a freshman and one partner is older, and he and I won that tournament together this year,” he said. “That was really cool.”

Latimer also serves as chair of the Equal Opportunity Facilitator Committee for the American Parliamentary Debate Association and served as an equity officer for the Association last year. In these roles, Latimer has worked to make debate more accessible for people of all backgrounds.

“We made it a norm [in] the league for people to put their gender pronouns up next to their name … giving briefings before tournaments, reminding people to be sensitive when they talk about touchy issues … [and] giving people anonymous complaint forms to fill out if they've experienced a bias incident,” he said.

Latimer said that one of his favorite parts of the debate team is training new debaters each year.

“It's kind of like Pokémon a little bit, where you meet them, try to see what they're good at and what they need help with and then … train them to get good at certain things,” he said. “You make really great friendships with some of the younger people on the team doing that.”

Latimer is thankful for the people he has met through debate, both at Tufts and at other schools in the area.

“The debate community, especially among the schools in Boston … has became really important for me,” he said.

Upon graduation, Latimer will enroll in UCLA’s Ph.D. program for classics, where he will be living with a fellow debater who is graduating from Brandeis. A member of the honorary society for classical studies Eta Sigma Phi, Latimer said that he was drawn to UCLA’s classics program because of its emphasis on digital humanities, which he sees as a major component of the field's future.

He cited computational linguistics, which looks at languages from a computational perspective, as one of the new directions that the field is taking.

“I think that the future of classics is ... answering questions that can't be answered by people poring over books, because that's pretty much been done by this point. The books haven't changed,” Latimer said. “And UCLA is a really forward-looking place.”