TOC & the Legion of Doom

There’s an interesting discussion happening on the Legion of Doom listserver. Everybody is all het up about TOCs, which does seem to concentrate the Legionnaire mind. It’s worth talking about.

The TOC, as it stands today, is—to paraphrase Aaron T, who I think is still a member of the TOC advisory board—the central culmination of the year for a certain circuit of debaters. It is not the national event, but simply the national event for this group. That is true, although I disagree with Aaron that NatNats is in fact the national event, if for no other reason than that New York’s leading debaters are handicapped in their ability to participate because of Regents exams. But that is neither here nor there. That TOCs caters to a specific community is the first premise to be accepted.

I gather that there have been various approaches over the years to the issue of how admittance of entrants to TOC should be handled. As there is no main administrating body with a dedicated functioning bureaucracy (like the centrally organized NFL, or the regionally oriented CFL), the use of organizationally defined qualifiers isn’t really feasible. So instead, TOC draws on the skein of existing tournaments to provide its qualifiers. The question is, how to evaluate these existing tournaments to insure that the debaters they send forth are, indeed, “qualified.” And that is a tricky question. There seem to be no specific criteria for making the evaluation. Once upon a time the number of entrants plus the number of states represented was apparently the key, but that is no longer true because it didn’t work all that well. Now the criteria are fluid, determined by a small but geographically diverse group of advisors, comprising professional coaches of a uniform high level of prestige and experience (although some are old-timers, and some are young-timers, which is as it should be), and ultimately adjudicated by the TOC Tournament Director. All the advisors are players in the game of TOC debate, fielding competitors on the TOC circuit. Even if you might think this or that individual on the committee is a stinker, you have to admire the rest. So there is no reason to impugn this group on the basis of their skills or intentions. As far as I know, no one really ever does, except in the vaguest sense of TOC as a whole being up to no good.

While there is much griping from various quarters that the TOC bids are not fair, mostly those gripes claim that this or that geographical area is underrepresented, and that is certainly an issue that the advisers always discuss (I know, because I have been one of them). They do indeed attempt to provide an evenly tucked-in blanket over the country’s LDers, but they simply can’t pluck some tournament out of thin air and say that its debaters are bid-worthy simply because they’re in the right location. The tournament itself has to exist, which is not always the case as large geographic areas simply don’t have events, and it has to be predictably capable of producing bid-worthy qualifiers. This latter is something of a Catch-22, unfortunately, because bid people only want to go to bid tournaments but tournaments can’t become bid tournaments unless bid people go to them. (One of the side issues being discussed by the Legion was this problem of bid tournaments having the right odor and non-bid tournaments being unworthy of a debater’s time, even when that debater’s chance of ever earning a bid anywhere is virtually nil. We’ll discuss that later.)

One has to wonder if a strict numerical evaluation of tournaments would be meaningful. Having committee members who were participants at all the tournaments is meaningful, if the participants honestly report the nature of the events. For instance, I could have 120 people at a tournament, but 60 of them could be from 3 schools; is that the same as Hendrick’s Hudson’s 120 people, where we set a 6-person cap per school? I don’t think so, but if you’re not intimate with a tournament’s details, how can you tell the difference?

So I, for one, while not necessarily always agreeing with the final spread of bids the TOC declares, feel that the process of deciding these bids is about as good as it can be, and I can’t imagine any process that would make them different in any meaningful way. The declaration of some TOC criteria (the need for 5 or 6 prelim rounds, the need for a certain number of elim rounds, any judging requirements), on the other hand, should be clearly posted. If there is some mechanical reason why a bid is not being given to a school, at least if the school has a list of all these reasons it can address the problems, if it is inclined to do so. As for those geographic areas that feel slighted, simply tell TOC what tournaments you feel should be getting the recognition; you’d be doing the committee a favor. And frankly, the problem is that these tournaments mostly don’t exist. But in your griping, be realistic. To claim that Harvard is a northeast tournament is to claim that Glenbrooks is an Illinois tournament or Emory is a Georgia tournament. Look at everything but the octos tournaments if you really want to understand the business at hand.

So, issue one that the Legion was kicking around, that the TOC needs clear criteria of its bid system, is true to some extent. At least give the general outline of what a tournament needs to do. Give a general outline of the procedure for a tournament that wants to be considered for bids. Make this process transparent. This won’t change the process so much as allow people to understand it. That would be a good thing.

Second, and the issue that started this Legionnaire thread, was the question of TOC judging. Aaron sent a message urging everyone at TOC to judge instead of sitting around doing whatever it is they do when they’re not judging, which brought plenty of moans about lack of use of judges, preference for digressive judges, etc. I posted to this issue. I gather that there is now a one judge per debater requirement. If that is true, then the average judge will judge 1.5 prelim rounds; the math is simple. The pool would have to shrink dramatically before you’d get anywhere near judging roughly half the rounds. This is pure arithmetic, and no bias on anyone’s part. I simply can’t imagine the gentlemen who are usually in tab cooking the assignments. Why would they? They’ve got judges to burn. Aside from perhaps seeing that judges who haven’t been assigned yet get a round here and there, which is hardly cooking the assignments, they are on tabroom easy street, and have no rationale from venturing off it. The problem is the vast number of judges. No amount of strikes will solve a 1 to 1 situation. 1 to 1 means you are spending a lot of time sitting on the old dufferoo, my friend.

Of course, if you’ve paid all that money to get to Kentucky, especially if you’ve got multiple entries, you’re going to feel wasted. It would seem to me that a 1 to 2 ratio is more than enough. It would average 3 rounds per person. Not bad.

Bringing up judging at TOC, however, brings up other issues. Or at least bringing up judging at TOC acts as a red cape waved at all the Legion bulls: Too many strikes (I agree), too many young judges ruining LD for the ages (probably not true). As for the strikes, pulling the few stinkers who always drop you because they don’t like your looks is a good thing, but 5 strikes is quite enough. Anything more, and it’s Mutual Judge Preference in everything but name. I’ve always maintained that random judging, if a judge understands how an LD round works, is what keeps the activity honest; nothing revolutionary there. As for young judges ruining LD, as Ryan H (who isn’t all that young anymore [smile]) pointed out, all young people are not ruinous by default (although I would point out that by the same token all old people are not hiding out in tab, and honestly, if one does tab well and enjoys it, well, that’s hardly a mortal crime). Lots of Legionnaires do simply blame everything on the young, though, and if the truth be told, it is college students who should move along from their high school lives who are a serious contributing cause of much that is wrong with LD, but all young people are not these people. All of us ought to understand our syllogisms better than that. Some young people are problematic. Ryan is (almost) young. Ryan may or may not be problematic. Assume nothing! Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if, on the Legion of Progressive Debate listserver, the young ‘uns are similarly complaining that they don’t judge enough rounds. My guess is that the math works about the same for them, although with the scales tipped slightly due to strikes. If I’m wrong, then it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Balancing assignments in tab, i.e., using everyone as equally as possible, is a simple solution to that.

I am with those who want to ban first-year-outs, simply because they may have psychological ponies still in the race and not because they are digressively evil by nature. I have taken a strong position against MJP in the past and continue to hold that position. And strikes should be no more than 5. And as I say, tab should neutrally balance the judging across the pool, which should be smaller than one to one. That’s where I stand on that.

Probably the most interesting stuff that keeps coming up with the Legion is the stuff that is the least quantifiable, and that is the effect of TOC on LD in general. To some extent, TOC is an easy target because there is a good representation of digressive debaters in the pack, for whatever reason. The event is glorified on WTF (although lately, just about every event is glorified on WTF, so TOC gets a lot more lost in the pack than it used to). And no matter how you slice it, a lot of coaches continue to send their kids to tournaments that qual for TOC with the expressed purpose of getting those quals, and to treat TOC as an end-all be-all for competition. Debaters do likewise, often merely reflecting trends rather than setting them. Bro J pointed out a classic problem of getting kids to non-qualifying tournaments, even at a school where no one goes to TOC because of exam conflicts! The TOC qual is some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, which is fine, but once again, if we remember our basic syllogistic logic, just because a tournament doesn’t earn quals doesn’t make it bad. I do admit I’ve internalized this with the Sailors to some degree. The team is large enough to split around. We have bid tournaments and non-bid tournaments, and there’s a right tournament and a wrong tournament for everyone, and part of my job is placing people at the right places for the right reasons. I will ban anyone making blanket statements that such-and-such a tournament is not good. Not good if you already have 5 bids? Maybe, but it’s just right for sophomores. Conversely, Glenbrooks isn’t any good for my novices. It’s a matter of fit, not fashion. One Legionnaire applauded Emory (of all places) for its stance as a tournament on its own and not merely a qualifier for some other tournament (i.e., TOC). Soddy used to say the same thing, and it was true then and it’s true now, regardless of what tournament we’re talking about. Apparently there was a short period when people stopped their tournaments once the bid round had transpired. I don’t think this was common practice, and I don’t think it marks any trend. I used to stop Bump all the time, not for TOC purposes but because it was too late at night: says I, Shoo! Go home! Stop this nonsense! I don’t believe that debate after the first 14 hours in a day amounts to much, and in fact, I feel it could be harmful. In any case, around here, tournaments last until they’re over, and that is as it should be. And they should run as their own entities, and not satellites of the TOC.

Still, the Legion continues to see the TOC as the arbiter, whether directly or indirectly, of LD, either in the tournaments it selects as qualifiers or in the messages it sends abroad when digressive debaters thrive or digressive young judges are seen to determine policy. From my own experience I’m beginning to wonder if, in fact, the whole digressive issue might not be settling down a bit, including at TOC, but that’s just me. The key thing is, will the Legion just bloviate among themselves as they always do, or come to some sort of consensus and make a definitive statement to the TOC? The latter is the only thing that will matter, and there are substantive areas they can address that would have at least some effect on TOC’s cynosure position in the activity.

But I’ll tell you something. The redirection of WTF parenthetically mentioned above is perhaps just as powerful. At the point where TOC really is just the final for one particular circuit, and not the center of the universe, then things are very much as they should be. It is not so much up to the TOC but up to the rest of us to decide how the universe is structured and what TOC’s place in it is. TOC is fun, and I like going. And if I have no qualifiers in a given year? All tournaments are fun, and I like going to all of them. Spread this attitude around, and the world will be a better place.