LONDON: On one side of the stage were three of the brightest students from one of America's top Ivy League universities.
On the other side of the high-profile debate, sitting just yards away, were three men convicted of violent crimes such as manslaughter who are serving sentences at a maximum-security jail.
And, despite arguing for a motion that they firmly disagreed with, the prisoners defied the odds and beat their Harvard opponents - to loud cheers from the audience.
The three inmates from Eastern New York Correctional Facility - Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco - are part of a debating club which was set up at Bard College under an educational initiative two years ago.
Since it began, the prisoners have beaten teams from the US Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont. But, in what has been described as "like something from a film written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck", the Harvard victory is the biggest of them all.
The inmates had to argue that public schools should be allowed to turn away pupils whose parents had entered the US illegally.
The prisoners, who were quick to establish after their victory that they would never want to bar a child from school, were not allowed to use the internet to study for the debate.
They came up with arguments that the Harvard team had not considered. They argued that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children anyway.
"They caught us off guard," Anais Carell, a 20-year-old Harvard student, told the Wall Street Journal, adding how impressed the university students had been by their opponents.
Max Kenner, executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative, which operates in six New York prisons, insisted that students from the prison "are held to the exact same standards, levels of rigour and expectation as students on Bard's main campus".
Polanco, a 31-year-old from Queens, New York, who is in prison for manslaughter, said: "We have been graced with opportunity. They make us believe in ourselves."
The Harvard team wrote on their Facebook page: "There are few teams we are prouder of having lost a debate to than the phenomenally intelligent and articulate team we faced this weekend." Dhruva Bhat, president of the Harvard College Debating Union, said that the Harvard team had "definitely not" gone easy on the inmates, which would have been "disrespectful".
Alex Hall, a 31-year-old from Manhattan convicted of manslaughter who is another member of the prison debating team, said: "We might not be as naturally rhetorically gifted, but we work really hard."