Disclosure final summary (or at least I'll bet the VCA hopes it's final)

I’ll say this. We are definitely in an era of multiple LD universes. Not merely the multiplicity of newbies and veterans, but the multiplicity of interpretations of what, exactly, the activity actually is, much less what it ought to be. True, like everything else, it has been changing since the day it was born, so this is nothing new. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Legion of Doom was predicting the end of life on the planet as we know it, thanks entirely to the existence of debate camps and their facilitators, who made Lucifer look like SpongeBob Squarepants. Not long ago we argued about MJP. Now we’re discussing disclosure. Who knows what it will be tomorrow? But one thing becomes clear. There are different perceptions of different events, and different people doing different things, and it is good to remind ourselves of this once in a while.

What different events, different people, different things? Well, first of all, we need to remember that the national circuit, or as I always refer to it for essentialist reasons, the $ircuit, is a small part of the activity. Most LDers do not participate in many tournaments with TOC bids, while tournaments with TOC bids are attended by many of the same students who travel freely around the country to attend them, especially as the bid gets more generous. The bid-getters at octos tournaments tend to be about the same 24 people in a given year, mixed around a bit, over and over. The field at Greenhill = the field at Bronx = the field at Glenbrooks, etc., with some seasoning to taste. It costs money to habituate the national circuit, so the teams that go are well funded one way or the other. And that funding is probably dependent on results. If the Millard Fillmore HS LD team wants to travel around the country to all the octos tournaments, they’d better do damned well at those tournaments, or the funding will go to the Millard Fillmore HS tiddly-winks team. So the Millards hire some aggressive young assistant coaches, etc., etc. It doesn’t matter if the money is official or not. If the money is coming from the parents’ pockets, the parents will stop paying if they believe that it’s for nothing, that little Janie or Johnny is as likely to do well at these tournaments as, well, SpongeBob Squarepants. What has happened as a result of breathing this mix of results-based, high-priced, travel-intensive (when do some of these kids ever go to school?) atmosphere, the octos tournaments, and some of the quarters, have become a unique universe. The stakes are high. People are heavily invested in succeeding. And the nature of the players is such that certain things can be expected: the participation of large, solidly talented squads, very small coach-to-team ratio, high coach participation, prioritization of competitive success over general forensics benefits (although those benefits are still there). Considerations like MJP, as we’ve discussed, makes a lot of sense in this universe. Disclosure may or may not make sense, but I would venture that we are only talking about it in this particular universe, at least now; unless some absolute benefits are proven that are applicable to all the other universes of debate, which certainly was not true of MJP, I can’t see it become the norm no matter what. Hell, as AT says, it’s not even the norm at the octos tournaments in policy, where in fact it is the norm in the activity at much lower levels. Go figure.

I would venture a guess that there are about 150 to 200 at most people living in this $ircuit universe, if for no other reason than that most high schools can’t afford it, in this or any economy. How many high school activities require traveling around the country every couple of weeks, and missing almost as much school as you attend? So it’s a small universe to begin with, and one I don’t think is replicated anywhere else in high school curricula.

So maybe there’s thousands of other LDers in the country. Sure, they know about TOC and would love to qualify, but their chances are slim because their opportunities to attend bid tournaments are few. So it goes. So are these debaters lesser debaters, or are they debating some different way? The answers are, not intrinsically, and not necessarily. But they are debating in a different universe, and breathing a different atmosphere. It is a universe comprising mostly local participants, including local judges. They are not debating in front of someone who just taught theory at VBI, in other words. There’s probably less speed involved. There may not be as much time and effort spent by the debaters (missing all that school and doing all that debate work, intensive training with virtually private coaches), so their sword will have a less sharp edge, even if there’s no intelligence difference between our local debater and our TOC debater. You don’t have to be a TOC debater to be smart; there’s a whole other bunch of factors involved.

Even in my region in the northeast, which has plenty of debaters, and a number of TOC types, there’s a vast difference from one contest to the next. Mostly we have events judged heavily by the alums of the host school, with fields comprising sophomores up to seniors, where everybody pretty much started debating one another back as noobs, and their common shared values are as much SpongeBob Squarepants as the PICs in the nuclear neg. We also have the NYC Invitational, which while in our region is far from regional and is wall-to-wall $ircuiteers. And we have maybe a dozen or so MHL/CFL events for the new debaters who couldn’t find a banana at a United Fruit convention. [You know I’m writing a serious article when I provide my own metaphors!]

The thing we need to remember is what we’re talking about for whom, and what we’re asking of whom, and what we’re bringing to the different universes. For our newbies, we brought the Modest Novice, to train them better, with a beautifully clean and philosophical civil disobedience topic. For our regional invitationals, we provide community rankings that are meaningful in their region. For $ircuit folk, we render unto them the things that are $ircuitous. All of these are different, and they all co-exist fine, for the most part. The goal of high school forensics—all of it—is the education of students in certain ways of thinking and speaking and writing and researching and communicating. Most of the time, we are very much working to achieve that goal.

There is something else that we need to remember, however. If you are going to move from one of these universes to another, you are going to have to live off the atmosphere of that universe. You are going to have to play by the rules of the polity. If you go to octos tournaments, well, suck it up, Sailors, or whoever, because they are going to be filled with big, powerful teams with war rooms pumping out evidence like Sarah Palin pumping out incoherent gobbledygook on her Twitter account. You may be a small team. That is tough. You’re in a big team world. Adapt. Adjust. Deal with it. Find your way to succeed despite it. Whatever. It is that world. It is what it is. Don’t like it? Don’t go.

The same holds true at the regional tournaments. Oh, you just went to Greenhill, Bronx, Apple Valley and Glenbrooks, and now you’re here at the SpongeBob Squarepants Invitational in the town of Resume Speed somewhere in upstate New York a couple of miles north of Montreal? Well, don’t whine in your $ircuitous way about the crappy local judging and how everyone here is a rube from the burbs and why am I wasting my time here anyhow, I belong at bid tournaments, I’m too good for this! Yeah, right. I’ve got two words for you: Bronx Science. Cruz has set a standard for his team of participation at all events, up and down the line, that could be the standard for everyone. Your team is too good to attend such-and-such a tournament? Screw you! If you were all that good, you’d be making it a better tournament, but your belief in your own goodness pretty much guarantees that, well, good you ain’t.

We need to honor all of us. We don’t need to agree with, love or act like all of us, but we have a big pool of players, and I don’t know anyone on my side of it that isn’t trying to do their best for the education of as many students as possible. So they’re hard-edged competitors? Well, they’re in hard-edged competitive situations. They don’t understand the latest hot-college-coach-generated arguments? Well, their school just laid off ten percent of their teachers, and this isn’t exactly a high income neighborhood we’re talking about. I’ve always personally believed, and I’ve pointed this out here, that I am proudest of what I have done for my least talented students. If a student is a natural debater, I’m mostly a travel agent. But for students with a little curiosity and a need to develop some thinking/reading/speaking/researching/writing skills, I have something to offer that is the reason I do this in the first place.

I have loved this discussion of disclosure, which, as I say, is a $ircuit issue. I’ve learned a lot, and expect to learn more in the forge of the Bronx experiment. But it is an isolated issue, and it doesn’t directly relate to most of my debate year. Indirectly, however, it may have some effects. I’m curious too to learn what those effects might be. What is the point of this posting? Well, just to remind people of the parochial nature of what we’ve been saying, for one thing, and to remind people that, as I said above, the rules of the house are the rules of the house, and if you don’t like them, don’t visit the house. If you don’t like what the $ircuit is up to, don’t bother with it. Plenty of people thrive in LD without giving two peeps to the $ircuit and $ircuit tournaments, and it doesn’t bother them in the least. Nor should it. On the other hand, I love discussion! I love hearing people’s opinions expressed intelligently, and I thank everyone who has done so here over the last couple of weeks. This has been some of the most fun I have had on the blog in a while.

But for now, well, I’m going to Disney World.