No question that spreading out replies here isn't the same as a thread on a bulletin board, but, well, this is what it is. I've collected all of Cruz's answers to questions that came before.
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Sorry about the delay in getting back to everyone. The conversation stopped on my end (and on the end of many of the folks posting) because things got very busy here at VBI.
So, to start with Chris...
Regarding the "privacy implications" of a student posting her work:
1. Case lists have been around for some time in Policy Debate, a community in which, like Lincoln-Douglas Debate, there are many attorneys who are active coaches. There have been no legal challenges regarding case lists.
2. While I hope an attorney will weigh in later, I believe the reason there hasn't been a legal challenge is because students aren't compelled to compete at tournaments with case lists, so there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when they volunteer to attend a tournament or provide information via case list.
Regarding tournament policy at octas bid tournaments:
I guess "danger" is a loaded term; I admitted in the letter that I think case lists are a good thing, though I do want to get feedback because I know I can be wrong about things.
But that aside, I think it makes the most sense to run a case list at a tournament where you have a large national draw and a true range of types of programs competing. The networks of power that I worry about are probably less in force at more regional tournaments because of the size of the pool and number of entries from each school in the pool. (I could be wrong about that, though.) I also think it's important to get a representative cross-section of coaching styles and approaches to debate, and I know I have that at my tournament.
Regarding national governance: that's probably correct, but, as you suggested, isn't the necessarily fault of anyone on either side of the case list debate. It's a good discussion to have, but perhaps one to have elsewhere. (LDDebate.org thread? :o))
"What impact, if any, will this experiment have on debaters who aren't connected to the tournament?"
LA Coach, thank you for your question. Two replies come to mind:
1. Assuming "LA" means Louisiana, I am not sure that it's true that you won't be debating folks who compete at the New York City Invitational. We have several schools from Louisiana and Alabama registered to compete. (On the other hand, we are one of the last tournaments on the topic, so perhaps you won't face them at any tournaments after mine.)
2. Case lists give teams a general idea of what arguments are out there on a topic, which helps in preparation both for casing (many great cases are inspired by arguments heard in rounds, and so case lists publicize arguments beyond the rounds in which folks were able to compete or judge) and for blocking. I think this is helpful both for preparation on the topic itself, particularly when teams don't have the resources to compete very often, but also for preparation on future topics that are similar.
To reply to PJ:
I think my reply to Chris's question about privacy implications covers your concerns, though I would love to hear some insight from some of the many trained lawyers or lawyers-in-training who coach debate in the community (Kevin Roberts, Wayne Tang, Victor Jih, Adam Torson, Josh Anderson, Anjan Choudhury, and so on and so forth).
Regarding the promotion of "bad JV Policy Debate" in LD -- something I agree would be bad, because bad debate is bad -- I think I'm a little unclear on what you're saying.
The narrowing judging pool has nothing to do with case lists; it has everything to do with folks, including many who publicly oppose case lists, debating in a manner that only appeals to certain kinds of judges while foregoing skills that would allow them to communicate to broader audiences. I think more tournaments would do well to hire a variety of types of hired judges (that is, judges with varied paradigms) and encourage more experienced head coaches to judge to combat this problem.
It does seem to me that if debaters are preparing well-researched answers to case positions, they are working hard, so I'm not sure how that means that the hardest workers would not rise to the top. (Would the smartest debaters rise to the top? I'd like to think so, but since the beginning of debate, I suspect, the smartest debaters are not always the winningest.)
What specifically about case lists do you think would promote this type of bad debate that both of us, I suspect, want to avoid?
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Sorry for the delay in getting back to earlier questions. I think I've now replied to basically everything posted, but if I've missed something, please let me know.
I visit this blog more than once a day, and have loved reading the thoughts of Menick from the days in which they were still posted an AOL page, but I am wondering if multiple comments spread out over multiple blog posts may make for an unwieldy conversation. (Not that I am trying to force traffic over to LDDebate.org. ;o))
In all seriousness, thank you for guiding and encouraging this conversation. I believe it is a truly important one for our community. As importantly, and perhaps even importantly, I think it's highlighting several other conversations our community really needs to be having. I hope that all of these conversations can happen in the civil manner on display in the comment threads here on Coachean Life.
1 comment:
Jon may well be correct. I am speculating here. I am concerned that POSSIBLY expanded case lists will lead to an explosion of, counterintuitively enough, more generic positions than at present. For this illustration, I will cite different narrow policy ones, but certainly it may apply to other approaches too.
I guess I am worried that 'bad DAs' or 'cheesy' theory positions - would be written against cases on the list. Schools with more resources may have more of these generic positions. Yes, that certainly happens without the case list. But with a case list, these generic positions may be 'close enough'(whereas before they were not) to being responsive that judges relunctantly vote for them.
There may indeed be so many positions (or variations of them- think Bach's 'Goldberg's variations') that it won't be the hardest working debaters who win- it will be those who come from programs where each debater writes five different ones. So a debater from a school with (say) eight debaters has forty positions to choose from, including eleven different versions of this DA and nine different versions of that DA and six versions of 'B' a priori argument. a debater from a school with two debaters does not.
Rather than working hard, a debater may simply choose from their menu of options...
If I'm correct (and I may not be) the 'narrowing of the judging pool' is relevant because it may reward this increase in the 'genericness' in the construction of these positions. If the judges one is likely to get are inclined to vote for position X under paradigm paradigm y, there would be an incentive to constructing these generic arguments. And now, those generic arguments will be 'close enough' to the actual, specific claims that judges may well vote for them more often than they would have before the case list- no matter how lousy 'JVish' they are. the old 'I hate to vote on this, but I have too because of 'X'...
LD different than CX in this
respect because of the time structure of the round. It may be easier to to successfully run these somewhat generic, partly responsive cases, as was pointed out earlier by smarter people than me. There is insufficent time to address the flaws, and fewer speeches in which debaters have to defend their position. So the flawed DA/a priori position sails through.
So while Jim is correct in the specific about prepping out, I just think that it may be the case that they won't have to do so.
But I could be wrong....
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