In which we continue discussing the future, if any, of PF

Kellams  is not the first person to warn that PF will probably go the way of Policy and LD, losing its accessibility in favor of arcana. CP claims that this is a law of nature, that anything that people can make more complicated they will make more complicated, or words to that effect. So the question is, Is PF doomed?

In Policy, whoever has more evidence wins (I know, oversimplification, but you know what I mean), hence we get speed and computers and teams that are evidence-producing machines and summer camps that process evidence and assistant coaches with no job other than to cut evidence, reaching to a point where if you don’t have all of those things, you can’t compete with the people who do. In PF, whoever has more evidence also wins (again, obvious oversimplification), but in Policy a topic is announced months in advance and lasts an entire season, whereas in PF a topic is announced every month, right before you’ve started debating the last topic. It is not inconceivable that you can create some sort of evidence-collecting machine, but there’s really no time for a team to process that evidence. Comparing the evidence in a PF round to the evidence in a Policy round is ludicrous. You have months and months to explore your evidence and go wherever it takes you in Policy; you’ve got about three hours to do that in PF. So I think we can safely say that, at least in this one area, PF will remain roughly where it is. I think PFers will start getting a little more sophisticated (or more accurately, a little less sloppy) with evidence in the future, especially with the new NSDA rules, but they are inherently limited by time from becoming truly like Policy in that area. If you don’t have a tub slash flashdrive slash cloud drive (pick your generation) of evidence to work with, speed doesn’t help you all that much, so you don’t get the ever-increasing pressure to get more said in the round. If the evidence collection pushed the need for speed, and I think it did, and if evidence collection in PF is limited, hence the need for speed itself is limited.

Of course, LD also got fast, and certainly some PF rounds I’ve heard have not exactly been pokey. A case will expand, probably, of its own nature. As you learn more about debate and get better at it, you have more you want to say. LD’s move to speed has been in line with its move to professional adjudicators, a trait it shared in its development with Policy. Speed, in a way, only works with professional adjudicators, i.e., people able, and willing, to deal with it. When I started in LD, there were a lot of parent judges out there. Today, the only parent judges are ringers teams bring in because they’re too cheap to hire professional adjudicators. You know as well as I do that in an MJP universe, parent judges spend the first three rounds reading War and Peace, and then get some 0-4 or 0-5 rounds after that. I think this is one of the saddest things that has happened because of LD’s complification (wow—a coinage that demonstrates itself), that it is no longer really open to parents.

These are just technical issues, though, and only part of the story. Yes, obviously speed drives out the slow, but there’s also content. I’ve talked about this a lot in the past. When your professional adjudicators are mostly college students, in their own academic universe, there is a tendency for them to believe that they know more than high school students (which is true) and that they can make the high school students better debaters by marginally instructing them in what they know (which is probably not true). College students are instructed by college professors, then the college students turn around and instruct their own high school students. Presumably the college professors are, as a general rule, knowledgeable educational professionals. Probably the college students aren’t. If they were re-teaching something objective, like, say, how to tie a knot, it wouldn’t matter, because the end result is either a knot or it isn’t. But they’re re-teaching things like Nietzsche (for a random example), which is about as objective as [fill in your own metaphor here for something way subjective, using your most relativistic Nietzschean-type aphorism]. In a world where most Nietzsche scholarship is contradictory explanations of what the man might have been saying, the last thing the world needs is some college kid who just read Zarathustra explaining to a high school student how to use it to write a kritik of socio-economics in 21st Century America. The bind moggles.

Which brings me to what I’ve always claimed is the not-so-secret weapon that will keep PF PFish. There is nothing intrinsically keeping PF from falling prey to a modernist or structuralist or postmodern or post-postmodern agenda due to the content of the event. The EILDR has demonstrated that the content of the round is meaningless if judges are perfectly content to let debaters debate whatever they choose. It’s the judges themselves that control the agenda of an event, and it is the use of professional adjudicators in high school debate—i.e., college students who should have something better to do with their weekends than to hang around high schools 40 weekends out of the year—that has made Policy and LD what they are today. It is the use of non-professional adjudicators, i.e., lay judges, i.e., parents and random community members, who are our great hope for keeping PF from going the same route.

This, then, becomes something of a challenge. Can lay judging can insure the continued accessibility of debate via Public Forum? At the moment, the starting investment for a school doing PF is minimal. Any reasonable teacher can figure out the resolutions. There's no arcana in the performances any more complicated than having a point or theme to underly the arguments (which most PFers don't bother with anyhow, and most likely that's the next generation of PF—"Now featuring frameworks," i.e., a reason to vote for a side other than evidence avoirdupois). Most tournaments offer PF, often at multiple levels (although not enough—what's the rationale for Novice LD and no Novice PF at the same tournament?). So starting friction for a new coach is minimal, as are the costs, in that you can probably find local contests. Starting friction is similarly minimal for the students, who only have to read up on the rez and find out the parts of an argument. The thing is, those things can change. PF could get arcane. It could get really hard to get into and understand. Rounds could be unintelligible to anyone without years of prior experience. But as long as the person in the back of the room was born yesterday, a parent helping the team, pitching in to help, a smart adult who knows the world in general and can understand the arguing of a resolution if it is indeed argued in an accessible oratorical style, all the arcana is self-destructive for the team trying to pick up a ballot. As I said above, it’s the judges themselves that control the agenda of an event. Given that virtually entire pools of judges of PF were born yesterday, that they wouldn't understand an RVI if it bit them on the butt, that their familiarity with the latest trendy pseudophilosophy is literally nil, and that they have no need whatsoever to prove themselves smarter than the 17-year-olds in the building, at least one of which they feed on a daily basis and have taught practically everything that kid knows, the not-so-secret weapon of parent judging is an irresistible force.

Parent judging was once common in LD. It got tossed aside. It can, presumably, get tossed aside in PF. But I don't see any signs of that happening. Every tournament I go to, there's a whole new bunch of faces in the pool who look at me like I'm nuts when I explain that speaker points are on a scale of 20 to 30. (It's not me that's nuts, it's the nut who came up with the pre-truncated 1 to 30 in the first place). People who feel as I do, that PF is the only accessible debate event, the one that the most kids can be brought into in a high school, and given that it can be the most popular academic forensic event, it is simple arithmetic that it will provide the most educational forensics benefit to the greatest number, that we are, in effect, obligated to keep it open and free. Those of us who run teams and tournaments need to keep an eye on it. We need to keep it light. Is there some horror in having debate lite when debate heavy is also available? No. Is there some horror in having a debate activity that you don't have to fly to every weekend, that isn't so heavily invested in competitive aggression that the same schools win over and over and over and over at $ircuit events, not because they're somehow bloody wonderful, but because they're the only ones who are really doing it? Do the supporters of elite debate, who no doubt bristle at being accused of elitism in any other aspect of their lives, not listen to themselves?

I don't ask much, only that those of us in a position to do so keep the faith. Debate for the greatest number. At the moment, that's PF. It's too late for LD. If PF does eventually go the path of LD and Policy, as many people predict, then we'll just have to come up with something else. Well, actually, you'll have to come up with something else. I'll be long gone from the activity by then.