Smilin’ J just pointed the assembled Legionnaires, through the listserver, to the comments on Eric’s interview. The thread is pretty much dead, but it’s interesting enough. Mostly, I’m struck by the apparent need of some of us to work through, in writing, the ideas of LD, regardless of our positions on those ideas. In a way, WTF and the Legion, with their various modes of communication, certainly do aim at some (extremely distant) intersection point, at least as far as the airing of views is concerned. The more views that are aired, and the more often views are aired, no matter what they are, can only result in a betterment of LD, at least for those of us who trade regularly in (what we believe is) the marketplace of ideas, or any comparable sort of Hegelian dialectic approach.
One of the biggest issues the existence of the Legion engenders, and it’s a hardy perennial, is that of the educational value of LD. There’s a lot of pieces to this issue. How much say do the educated get to have in the process? How much do we let the competitive aspect of the activity drive the nature of the activity? How do we deal with the fact that the lifers in the activity tend to get removed from active regular in-round participation? All of these, and more, are raised one way or another in the comments to Eric’s jabfest with OC. There is even a question about whether debate is, indeed, educational, and theoretical questions posed about whether we could somehow evaluate the worldly success of former debaters twenty years later.
Something that gets lost in this verbiage, at least on WTF (the Legion is too young to show its inherent flaws yet), is what we can call the split level of LD. Those who actively comment on issues on the various Victory Brief sites are a handful of members of what is called the National Circuit (usually referred to here as the National $ircuit, for self-evident reasons). The National Circuit, as far as debaters are concerned, is a small community of mostly top-level students and their coaches who can afford to seek out the toughest competition in the country. Their number is small enough and their inherent resources (intellectual and financial) powerful enough that, for all practical purposes, the NC is a tribal community of like-minded souls who control a certain arena of the activity, to wit, those tournaments that become recognized as National Circuit tournaments. To some extent, each of the NC tournaments is populated by the same members of the NC week after week. Pick a number: 20 or 30 NC folks pretty much dominate the dozen or so NC tournaments (and big finals) of any given year. They debate each other, adjudicated by their own or aspirationally like-minded judges, and they set a particular standard of debate that is, regardless of what one wishes to say about it, intellectually challenging at a very high level. It is also unique to the NC, which is a semi-closed system operating on its own dynamic, good or bad.
In the past I have sent cannon shots across the bow of VB for over-celebrating this small number, and to the credit of OC and company, they have agreed, and presently the NC is much more a part of a whole rather than the almost sole focus (although NC folk still tend to dominate VB discussions). The thing is, there is that other tier of LD, that other level. And honestly, this level is vast compared to the NC. If nothing else, this level is the first- and second-year debaters on those NC teams, the ones who don’t go to Glenbrooks but stay home and go instead to The Boondocks Memorial Potluck Invitational the weekend before Thanksgiving. Add to that the number of not just schools but entire states who take no part in any NC business but have enormous interest in forensics. They seldom see NC debates (even at Nats, where the NC folk tend to adapt to a presumed non-NC paradigm). They don’t argue kritiks. They don’t teach Zisek to their 14-year-olds. And they are, simply, the core of the activity, or at least they’re the core if you go by simply numbers alone.
And there’s the problem. A vocal minority of NC folk presume to speak for the entire community of LDers, whereas in fact, they have no idea about the needs or concerns about the vast majority of LDers around the country.
Neither do I.
Although I can certainly speak to the educational differences between my varsity and my first- and second-year folk (which is why we don’t always meet together, although I do think it is important that the older debaters mentor and lead the younger ones as often as possible), I couldn’t tell you what’s happening in Kansas. And my fear is that the Legion’s bbd will become simply a bizarre mirror of WTF’s discussions, where a handful of people with post-itis take over and attempt to set ground rules for the teeming masses, with no idea what the needs are of those masses. Or more to the point, are we gearing for a coaches-in-tab vs weisenheimer Circuiteers dialogue, missing the really important input of the rank and file of the LD universe?
It’s an interesting question. And I have no idea how it will be answered. But I do know that, even if we firmly believe that students should have a say in the nature of LD, it can’t only be the tiny number of students from the National Circuit, who represent only themselves, and not LD as a whole. And I do believe that students should have some say, that the activity needs new ideas and new concepts, if for no other reason than to keep it fresh and interesting, so I certainly don’t want the dinosaurs in tab (like me) calling the shots either. But as we keep moving forward in opening our lines of communication, my hope is that, as I say, we’ll all somehow intersect, for the betterment of everybody. I am, at heart, an optimist.
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