The issue of conflicts has concerned me for a while, and recent experiences have demonstrated that it is an area of, at the very least, confusion. Simply going by the dictionary definition of the word conflict, it is obvious that where conflicts exist between students and judges, there is the potential for biased adjudication. Since it is inarguable that tournaments must be run fairly, it is important that conflicts are clearly defined, understood and implemented. I polled a few of my local coaches, who offered opinions on the subject, and have followed some discussions taking place online. I’ll be incorporating some of that here in aid of suggesting a set of best practices, as well as raising some questions that go beyond the scope of implementing clearly defined conflicts at our tournaments. (Since some of this material is sensitive and acquired through private discussions, I will presume that those I communicated with would prefer I maintain their privacy.)
First of all, I offer this overarching definition of a judge conflict: Conflicts are situations where debaters are given an unfair advantage by their judge.
Here are two examples of conflict statements from tournaments this season, aimed at coaches:
• Judges with whom you or your student have a close personal relationship, judges whose students regularly share in the cost of travel with your team or individual debaters, judges who are a significant other or a relative, and judges whose students share prep with your students.
• Former students who are judging for another school; B) Former coaches, if there are still team members they coached present on the squad; C) College directors/coaches who are recruiting a student from your program: D) Coaches or College Students you've hired to do work for your school or collaborated with to do work, even if it’s been at only one tournament (Work includes direct coaching or argument/card cutting); E) Most importantly the judges/coaches who are currently working with your program.
The NDCA goes at it from the other direction, telling the judges rather than the coaches whom to conflict, listing the following exhaustive set of examples:
You should mark as a conflict any student:
• whose high school you attended in recent years;
• to whom you are related;
• who attends a school with whom you have had a coaching or judging relationship, paid or unpaid, during the past two school years (does not apply if your only relationship to a school was as a hired judged at that school’s tournament);
• who attends a school that has offered to hire you to coach or judge in the future;
• for whom you have ever had primary instructional responsibility as, e.g., a school coach or a personal coach
• with whom you have or have in the past had personal friendships or romantic relationships, or with whom you socialize in non-debate settings;
• who personally has provided your transportation or housing at this tournament, or who attends a school that has provided your transportation or housing at this tournament;
• who has been hired by, or who has an outstanding explicit or implicit offer from, a debate business (e.g., workshop or brief company) to which you have financial ties.
• if your current, or in the past two years, coach of record is currently coaching the student.
• If you coach or debate for a college/university, any student that is debating for your program next year or whom your school is still actively recruiting.
• with whose coach(es) you have or have in the past had romantic relationships.
• to whom you bear any other relationship that might reasonably be thought to compromise your impartiality as a judge. To determine whether a relationship meets this test, you might ask yourself, “If I were a competing student and knew nothing about my judge except that he or she bore the relationship in question to my competitor or my competitors coach, would I have any doubts about his or her impartiality?” If the answer is “yes,” you should mark students to whom you bear that relationship as conflicts.
From these three examples, we can easily draw the conclusion that the potential conflicts that are being avoided are those where a judge would possibly be seen as being prejudiced in favor of a debater. This is not to necessarily assume that they will always be so prejudiced, but even the appearance of favoritism should be avoided in a fair competition. This supports our definition, Conflicts are situations where debaters are given an unfair advantage by their judge.
Second, tournaments need to publish statements explaining the nature of conflicts. Given the fact that people can interpret even a straightforward definition a variety of ways, the statement about the nature of conflicts should be as clear as possible. I would suggest the overarching definition above, followed by the descriptive list from the NDCA, edited as below to be read from either the competitors’ or the judges’ perspective.
A judge conflict exists with a student:
• whose high school the judge attended in recent years;
• to whom the judge is related;
• who attends a school with whom the judge has had a coaching or judging relationship, paid or unpaid, during the past two school years (does not apply if the only relationship to a school was as a hired judged at that school’s tournament);
• who attends a school that has offered to hire the judge to coach or judge for the team in the future;
• for whom the judge has ever had primary instructional responsibility as, e.g., a school coach or a personal coach
• with whom the judge has or has had in the past personal friendships or romantic relationships, or with whom the judges socializes in non-debate settings;
• who personally has provided a judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament, or who attends a school that has provided the judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament;
• who has been hired by, or who has an outstanding explicit or implicit offer from, a debate business (e.g., workshop or brief company) to which the judge has financial ties.
• if the judge’s current, or in the past two years, coach of record is currently coaching the student.
• If the judge coaches or debates for a college/university, any student that is debating for the judge’s program next year or whom the judge’s school is still actively recruiting.
• with whose coach(es) the judge has or had in the past had romantic relationships.
• to whom the judge bears any other relationship that might reasonably be thought to compromise the judge’s impartiality as a judge. To determine whether a relationship meets this test, the judge might ask, “If I were a competing student and knew nothing about my judge except that he or she bore the relationship in question to my competitor or my competitors coach, would I have any doubts about his or her impartiality?” If the answer is “yes,” that is a conflict.
Third, tournaments need to provide a mechanism for both the teams and the judges to declare their conflicts.
On the team registration side, this is done online easily enough in advance, at least on tabroom.com, and I don’t think we need anything further (aside from clearer explanations of conflicts). But on the judge side, this is not easy, and it is not done as well as it should be, if it is done at all. On-site tournament registrations tend to be confused affairs even under the best of circumstances. There may or may not be a separate judge check-in, and there may or may not be an attempt to get conflicts from judges on-site. Polling judges for their conflicts beforehand doesn’t necessarily work because there are no accepted mechanisms in place to do so. I have requested that tabroom.com add a feature where judges attending a tournament can, in advance, see the debater list and mark themselves as conflicts. Meanwhile, I would suggest that all tournaments have a separate check-in for all judges, independent or accompanying a team, at which is obtained their phone numbers and email addresses (for the tab room to locate them if they wander off), and at which they mark a sheet with all of their conflicts.
Fourth, strict penalties need to be applied to abuses.
Most unfortunately, on the team registration side, a separate system for noting conflicts does not prevent students from either not conflicting obvious conflicts—examples have been cited of teams not only not marking clear-cut conflicts, but actually putting in those conflicts as their top prefs—or from adding to their legitimate strikes and/or preferences as many “conflicts” as they wish that are actually not conflicts at all, as defined above, but simply judges they do not wish to be judged by. The first of these is clearly an ethical violation, and can be addressed as such with a punishment depending on the decision of the tournament director and the severity of the violation, ranging from at the minimum the removal of all the offending team’s prefs up to disqualification from the competition for that team or that team’s entire school. Judges found guilty of such ethical violations on their end should be summarily removed from the tournament; if they are tournament hires they should forfeit any payment they would have received.
The second example in the paragraph above was, in fact, what led me to my belief that a clear and universal definition of conflict is sorely needed, insofar as at one tournament recently two schools were discovered to be independently conflating their (unlimited) conflicts with their (limited) strikes, something we only learned about by happenstance and for all we know may not have been restricted to only those schools. Neither school was attempting to break the rules; both were honestly addressing real areas of concern, blocking judges they felt could not objectively judge their students. But the lack of judge objectivity was not because of favoritism, which is now our definition of debate conflict establish above, but because of potential prejudice against their students.
Before diving into this, remember that some tournaments offer simple strikes, some offer preferencing that includes strikes, and some offer nothing at all to bar judges from seeing students. And the same tournament can offer well-structured MJP in some divisions and no strikes at all in another (usually PF). Tournament directors need to think about how they’re running their events, and if they’re best serving the teams that attend their competitions. An event with absolutely no strikes and no way to bar a judge is open to more problematic situations than an event that offers full-fledged MJP. I have already strongly come out in favor of MJP in varsity LD at the high school level (and by extension, high school varsity policy); I am similarly in favor of a reasonable number of strikes (but not MJP) in varsity PF. At least some of what I’m about to discuss can be avoided by a reasonable set of preventatives. Some of it, however, requires stronger solutions outside of the subject of strikes and conflicts.
Fifth: There needs to be a clear delineation between conflicts and strikes. I offer the following overarching statement: Situations where you feel a judge is prejudiced against any of your students, for any reason, should be handled by strikes, and not by conflicts.
Because I knew about the strike/conflict situation before I polled that handful of my colleagues I mentioned earlier, I proposed the following example of what would, to my mind, be a strike: A tournament that allows both strikes and conflicts is offering PF and announces that it is using prominent community judges. One of these judges is an elected official on the record as vigorously opposed to gay marriage; this same official has, also on the record, claimed that “the Bible is definitive against homosexuality, which is wrong in the eyes of God.” A PF team attending the tournament comprises two acknowledged gay males, activists in their school’s GLBT organization, running a case that is gay-rights based. They do not want this elected official to judge them. There is nothing in any of our descriptions of conflict that makes this official a conflict. Therefore they must use one of their strikes.
One could easily claim that this should be a conflict, since the judge in question would be undoubtedly prejudiced against those debaters, but as we’ve said, conflicts are for when a judge is prejudiced in favor of your debaters. Further, while it is easy to provide a list of concrete situations where a conflict as we’ve defined it can be determined objectively, prejudices against debaters do not so easy fit limited, objective criteria. “This judge is a racist and my students are African-American,” or “This judge is a sexist and my students are young women,” or “This judge is a homophobe and my students are gay,” require that we make a subjective value judgment about a judge’s character, whereas, “This judge is paid to coach my student,” is a statement of fact. Strike the one, conflict the other. If we allow schools to mark as conflicts people they perceive of as prejudiced against their students, it is impossible for us to draw any line limiting that definition of prejudice, and there is nothing to stop a school from conflicting virtually every judge that might potentially drop them.
(And it is beside the point—my interest here is practical tournament management—to go into some of the ramifications of the political currents running through debate today, on which I am not particularly knowledgeable, but I will point out that these statements of potential judge bias are not only provocative, but potentially slanderous. Is the judge a sexist because he didn’t pick up a feminist kritik, or because he assaulted a girl on the stairway? There’s a big difference between a ballot and real life.)
I’m publishing a condensed version of the above, with the recommendations but not the explanations, for tournament directors to take under advisement as they see fit. The version for teams is http://www.jimmenick.com/vault/conflicts_teams.pdf; the version for judges is http://www.jimmenick.com/vault/conflicts_judges.pdf. These can, of course, be adjusted for specific tournaments.
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But I see more to it than that. I am also publishing a separate document discussing a different aspect of this issue.
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