Whither the Pfffters?

Judging a bunch of rounds of PF at Districts was illuminating. The competitors were a mix of folks from various other denominations; none of them were, to my knowledge, PF-Firsters, so to speak. So my conclusions may be skewed, but at least insofar as the local area is concerned, absent Regis, we don’t have a lot of PF-Firsters, although some of the larger schools are in the process of developing a few. Of course, I have judged Regis Pfffters in the past, and I wasn’t thinking then what I’m thinking now, so maybe it’s just a result of watching visitors dip their toes in, but whatever the case, some things were pretty clear.

The topic at hand, about No Child’s Left Be-Hind, is not a terrible one. The issue of NCLB and its success or failure is real. Anything having to do with improving education in this country, especially in trying economic times, is real. There is no reason to think that one side in this debate has any advantage over the other, unlike with some other topics. So, going into the round, it’s anyone’s to win.

The first step seems to be the establishing of the facts. These may be statistical, or they may be analytical, but they are, reasonably, facts. You’ve got your statistics, I’ve got my statistics. They disagree. Then what?

Here is where PF has, from what I have seen, not yet found its footing. In Policy, we obviously have dueling facts, but to a purpose. The aff is proposing a change in the status quo, and the neg is arguing that the aff’s proposal should not be accepted. We have evolved a variety of approaches for the neg. They can argue that the aff’s plan won’t solve, or that the aff’s interpretation of the status quo is wrong. They can argue that there is a better plan. All of this falls under the stock issues of Harms, Inherency, Topicality and Solvency, and there are a lot of permutations, but you get the general drift. Because aff proposes change, we know what the format of the round is. We know why we have negative presumption. The framework of the whole thing is pretty clear.

In LD, on the other hand, neither side is, theoretically, granted presumption. Each side needs to prove a general application of their arguments to the issue at hand. Because this is so wide open, the concepts of value and criterion have been accepted as the mediation devices for application of general philosophical approaches. That is, a good round will demonstrate the achievement of a highly ephemeral value, like justice, through a meaningful weighing mechanism, like lives saved (although it’s hardly ever so simple as that: when an LD round fails to click it fails because the framework and the content of the arguments are either not jelling themselves, or they aren’t jelling between the two sides).

With PF, unlike Policy and to a lesser extent LD (I mean, how many people out there persist in disbelieving the lack of negative presumption in LD, after all?), there are no standards for adjudicating the round. There are no mechanisms for determining who were the best debaters and therefore the winners. The published PF paradigm of who the judge believed the most falls pretty quickly because there are no objective standards for believability at the point where, for instance, no one has verifiable evidence. They all dress up nicely and speak well, so they are, potentially and often actually, equally creditable. In the rounds I watched (okay, a couple of guys were dressed like bums, I admit it), what was happening over and over was that the teams comprising debaters from other persuasions argued rings around their non-debatecentric opponents at levels that their opponents didn’t even recognize. I talked with one non-debate team about this after a round, and they readily admitted that they didn’t understand a lot of what had been going on. But they had won anyhow. In fact, they were the top qualifier. How could that be, if they were being run rings around in the literal arguments? My theory is that the debaters, although they have the skill set to argue anything, any time, are missing the toolkit to apply that skill set to PF (nice metaphor, eh?). They know how to do it, but they don’t know what to do, and nothing about the ballot instructions or the (short) legacy of the activity provides any insight. So a team of non-debaters can, somehow, instinctively win numerous ballots over teams of top LDers who keep trying to find the there there, if there is one.

I curious to see if my experience at Catnats in Albany will support these thoughts.

My understanding is that Rippin’ is going to be addressing PF this year as they have addressed LD recently in the past, and I hope this is true. I like PF for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that it offers an activity of broad benefit (research, speaking, writing) that requires less commitment (at the moment, at least) for success than the other debate activities, the reason being the quick turnaround of topics. In this neck of the woods, if you want to be good at LD or Policy, you’ve got to make it your top extracurricular activity, you’ve got to do it almost every week, you’ve got to go to institute during the summer, and you’ve got to eat, drink and breathe debate. I like the idea that someone could do well in forensics in a debate activity without giving every waking moment to it. Don’t get me wrong. I love debaters who have it in their blood. But I also have a fondness for the benefits of debate going out to people who aren’t born to it. PF can be that activity.

Let’s hope that it moves in the direction of something solid.