In which we excoriate Emory

I was going to write a long essay about this, and actually started writing it yesterday afternoon. Then I realized that it wasn’t worth the verbiage. It’s just not that complicated. Emory changing its tournament date is simply one of the most boneheaded things I’ve heard in a long time. The debate calendar is not fungible. You can’t have reliable tournament management when you don’t have reliable tournaments. Say what you will about the TOC, for the people who are committed to the circuit with all the attendant needs of acquiring bids, moving any tournament, big or small, is a major undertaking. Moving a tournament with a national draw so that it conflicts with other tournaments with national draws, well, as I say, it’s boneheaded.

I have railed here before about how TOC has outsourced way too many of its bids to college venues, which have no stake whatsoever in high school debate outside of profiting from it. High school forensics is for high schools, but we have created a monster called “the circuit” with its own controversial nature of debate, a financial commitment that is frightening, and a political organizational structure that is no guarantee of good results. (I have been a part of that structure, so in saying that I am drawing on my own experiences.) The TOC itself, it should be noted, is run by a college. As I have also said many times, if the TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it.

But the point here is not the TOC. It is the hubris demonstrated by Emory. I mean, let’s face it: that’s the way they’ve always been. Back in the early days, you needed a “chair”—loosely translated as a history of showing up in the past—to even be able to enter any teams. And a tightly limited number of teams to boot. When all the chairs were accounted for, the riffraff could sign up. Good grief. And then for completely random reasons, no doubt mostly aligned with having shown up a lot, a coach could be dubbed a Key Coach and given a knickknack little key that opened I don’t know what. More chairs? Pomp and circumstance celebrating the coaches somehow seems to miss the point that it is the students doing the debating, while most of the key coaches spend most of their time making motel reservations and buying airline tickets and lining up college kids to do the real coaching. A lot of people buy into this nonsense, of course. Personally, I’d rather gargle the proverbial razor blades.

Emory: get over yourself. You’re just another debate tournament. ALL debate tournaments are just another debate tournament, including the TOC. I will go back to paraphrasing Sodikow: competition is the necessary evil we endure in order to provide debate to our students. If you are going to offer a tournament, it should be in aid of best serving those students. If you’re going to offer a national tournament, well, you should be best serving that national audience. Hawking up a giant size ball of hubris and ignoring the high school community that allows you, a college, to make a boatload of money by marking you as a bid-worthy institution? Not such a great idea, people.

Feh!

(And I guess this means they won't be asking me to tab any time soon.)