I’ve just come to something of a bleak realization. My ceasing Policy at Bump, coupled with NFA’s ceasing, well, NFA, eliminates two major fall tournaments for the Policians in the region. It becomes very difficult to separate cause and effect, but this can’t be too helpful for those schools with strong, active Policy programs. As local opportunities disappear, one is forced to travel, if one can afford it, but budgets are limited and benefits must be weighed against costs. Policy, in effect, gets squeezed out, and teams either shrink or migrate to other activities. Undoubtedly there remain strong programs in the NY and NJ UDLs, but there is no arguing that policy in the northeast is not what it once was. And it probably won’t ever be that again. One wonders why.
I can’t speak to policy on a national level. I have no idea what its relative strength is today compared to the past. Obviously once upon a time debate was policy, period, but when LD was invented, debate was one or the other, and now with Pffft, debate is one or the other or yet the other still. I have always been agnostic about the benefits of one aspect of forensics compared to others; I have always felt that all the activities are beneficial, only in different ways. I value OO as highly as Extemp as highly as LD. I value all of them. One gains differently from each, but undoubtedly one gains.
Still, policy is fading from my region, no matter how you slice it. And as I said, one has to wonder why. Because if an activity comes and goes after being very popular, or at the very least if it loses its popularity, we need to realize that the same thing could happen to any other specific activity. Any one of them could fade away. But if we believe in the value of that activity—because, as I say, they are all valuable but in different ways, and those differences can be important on the level of the individual student—then we want to protect it. We need to know if there was something about the one that did fade away that could have been prevented. That is, is there a lesson to be learned from it? If so, we’d better learn it and apply it to other activities before they fade away too.
What lessons can we learn from policy’s fading in the region? I speak only from my own perspective, as the director of a tournament that hosted 70-80 policy teams a year in two divisions and has eliminated those divisions. What informed my decision? Did I see problems inherent to the activity? Frankly, the answer is yes. And are they problems that could affect anyone, in any activity? Yes.
Coaches/leadership is the first problem. The number of policy teams registering for Bump without benefit of coach is what originally led me to my tournament policy of no unchaperoned entries (although LD was eventually also flouting this unacceptable independence). Whether these teams had or didn’t have coaches notwithstanding, they were traveling alone, to an overnight destination, no doubt to the deception of someone somewhere back home. Were there not enough coaches/parents to go around? Needless to say, the technical nature of policy can preclude parent involvement to a great extent. It is moot whether that should be the case vis-à-vis the activity per se, but the need for parent involvement with the team is not moot. If parents cannot judge, they can and must chaperone. If an activity becomes entirely high school kids competing in front of college kids, so be it, perhaps, but all of these people are kids, and that’s a problem. Age does not guarantee maturity but lack of age does guarantee lack of adult supervision, and unsupervised kids do things they shouldn’t do. They did them at Bump, and they did/do them elsewhere, mischievous acts ranging from simple thefts to malicious destruction of property. Would adult supervision guarantee these wouldn’t have happened? Of course not. Would adult supervision act as a deterrent? Of course. Feel free to argue about this, but not with me. To paraphrase Ethel Merman, call me Mr. Birdseye because I am frozen on this.
Lessening standards of protocol is a second problem. One dresses in a businesslike manner for a variety of reasons when making a presentation. At most tournaments nowadays, everyone is dressed in a businesslike manner except for the Policians, who are dressed for nothing more exacting than a day at the mall (I’m being kind here). Most professional actors will tell you that the wardrobe for a character goes a long way in dictating that character’s actions. If you dress in a tuxedo, you will act as if you are in a tuxedo. A business suit, you will act as if you are in a business suit. Gang colors, and you will act as if you are in a gang. My point is that the unprofessional appearance of most policy debaters can be said to lead to unprofessional behavior. Even absent this, when you’re trying to convince your principal to open his doors to 400 or so students from the outside world, when they look like little lawyers you are in much better stead than when they look like little criminals. Of course, I go further and suggest that the little criminal attire leads to little criminal behavior.
There are other reasons why I dropped policy that have nothing to do specifically with the behaviors of Policians. But these two are major. At the point where I have vague numbers of unchaperoned students I do not know who show, at least in their appearance, no interest in suitable tournament behavior, or at least what we tend to accept as the normal sense of suitable tournament behavior judging by every other activity, and I have incident after incident of misbehavior, what other decision can I make? One could make all sorts of arguments about policy getting too parochial and showing how that has affected its popularity, and they may be true, and they may apply to other activities as well (most notoriously, these days, LD), but if these two issues (or more specifically, their lack)—adult supervision (coach or parental) and professional physical appearance—hit any activity the way they have hit local policy, the results will be the same. No one will want those students in their buildings.
(There is one marginal argument that can be made about appearance, that some teams may not be able to afford the outfits, the business suits. Not true. All teams can afford ties and dress shirts. Anyone can afford a decent pair of shoes that don’t have a sport attached to them. You don’t have to suit up at Armani, in other words, to look good. You need to be neat, hatless, tucked in and scrubbed up a bit, and you’re 90% of the way there and 100% acceptable.)
The bottom line here is that it is coaches who have allowed policy to become its own little universe of funk in a universe otherwise comprising little lawyers. Funk is as funk does. Allow LDers to look funky, and LD will get funky. One wonders if the funk is an offshoot of some sort of arrogance, but honestly, arrogance is not unique to policy. Or debate. Or forensics. Yet if arrogance is allowed to prosper, or if appearances foster that arrogance, nothing good will come of it. In other words, whatever line you’re in forensics-wise, be careful. If the responsible adults are not in charge, you may find that you’ve no longer got tournaments to go to every week.
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