"All we really have left that requires students to speak is the three speeches at commencement," Gomes says.

The result is a decline in the quality of speaking at Harvard and also throughout the nation.

"It's a great shame that we have no rhetoric requirement, for we are afflicted with nonsense all the time," says Gomes. "Rhetoric helps determine the difference between spin and substance and rhetorical truth from nonsense."

Hood, one of the Boylston contestants, faults the examples set by prominent public figures.

"There's nothing left of quick wit," Hood says. "There is eloquence lacking in public life. Just look at the presidential debates, for example."

And to Engell, the founder of the only rhetoric course at Harvard, the increasingly media-driven society has made rhetoric substantially more important in the past decades--a development that has not been reflected in Harvard's course requirements.

"There was a time when we thought we were going into a print culture in the late 19th and 20th century, but we are now ironically in an age of TV and electronic communication," Engell says.