Get your pipe and slippers; this is a long one.

.
The question everybody was discussing: is LD going to hell in a handbasket?

Prior to TOCs, the discussion was on whether there was a progressive movement in LD. Was the activity somehow changing, and was the change, as the “progressives” would have it, some real sort of progress? Was this progress in conflict with a conservative traditionalism that may be limiting the activity? It is nice to think that you are part of a new wave, the vanguard of change, the latest synthesis in a teleological dialectic. But curiously enough, it wasn’t just a small vocal minority voicing the idea that the activity is changing. At TOCs, which is something of a forensics summit conference, everyone was talking about it. And it’s a tripartite conference: the most aggressive and successful debaters in the country, a cadre of college students who to some extent set an agenda for the activity by actively promoting certain styles and case positions (either as short-term coaches or as adjudicators), and established long-time coaches. These groups probably exchanged few ideas outside of their own boundaries, except in the actual performance of the tournament. That is, high school mavericks didn’t meet with dinosaur coaches to compare notes on the subject, but at some point the debaters debated and the judgments were cast. But one serious question that arose was whether the performance was rigged. Had the Mutual Judge Preference acted to promote a single “progressive” concept of LD over some other concept by limiting the adjudication to judges predisposed to the idea of the progressive?

These are great questions. And I think there are some interesting answers.

There is no question that LD has evolved. Everything evolves. Policy has evolved, Public Forum is evolving, probably even Declamation has evolved. A clear trend of the last decade has been that the LD topics are more specific than general (the general no government vs bad government as compared to the specific separation of church and state, as one random example), and the argumentation of these topics is comparably more specific. In the early 90s you could master a handful of classical ethics ideas and apply them to just about everything. As the topics changed, these applications really didn’t work anymore, or at least weren’t sufficient of themselves. I remember the capital punishment topic. Sooner or later everyone had to argue the moral rightness or wrongness of executing wrong-doers, but before we ever reached that part of the argument we had to debate recidivists vs. the innocents. That is, every round had to point out that sometimes we executed innocent people, which would moot out against the fact that sometimes we don’t execute guilty people who kill again. Real numbers were tossed around, some small percentages of the whole death-row population, which were roughly equivalent. In effect, half of every round addressed body count. Then, and only then, if we actually got that far, could we directly address the values/ethics aspects of capital punishment.

Topics continued to move away from the general. We still get a general now and then, but on the present list, we have judicial activism, SOCAS, jury nullification, gov regulation of business, community/national stds, immigrant rights, progressive taxation, and regulation of sexually explicit material – all specific – and scientific knowledge for the common good, which is, perhaps, old-fashioned (at least, I could see it on the list 10 years ago). None of these specific topics will respond to Locke and Rousseau, or any other philosophers, for that matter, because they’re not philosophical. They are questions regarding very specific applications of ethics, germane only in that area of application. That is, you’d be hard-pressed to develop a categorical rule that applies equally, and clearly, to judicial activism and progressive taxation. They are apples and road apples. Different rules apply.

Why have the topics changed? I don’t know. Maybe we all got tired of Locke and Rousseau and Mill. To my perception, the choice of topic through the NFL process is generally reflective of the LD community as a whole, and while we may all have different particular preferences, and some of the resolutions really don’t work too well because of the wording or because the subject proves to be not all that interesting or debatable, I can’t say that the selection process itself seems unbalanced or unfair. We get what we deserve, in other words, because we are all equal in the creation of the topics and the selection on the topics.

The next big question is, has LD style evolved? That is, has the presentation changed? Has the style of argumentation changed? And you want to know something, I think the answer here is, not really.

There has been speed as long as I can remember. And it’s been regarded similarly in that time. First of all, speed only works if the audience is capable of handling it. Secondly, pedagogically speaking, speed is antithetical to oratory or, more quaintly, public speaking. I’m a firm believer that LD is intended to include learning to be a good public speaker, that learning to be a good public speaker is a valuable skill, and that blazing speed ain’t it. And third, most debaters, if they are speedy, aren’t necessarily better debaters for it. Often speed is in aid of spreading more material around in multiple arguments rather than developing one or two arguments more deeply. And, if it only works if the audience is capable of handling it, speed is self-defeating if you face a parent judge or a coach whose paradigm is anti-speed. No debater with half a brain will attempt speed in those situations. So I don’t think we’re developing a new model where speed is ramped up across the board. Nor has speed shown itself to be any more valuable in 2005 than it was in 1995. Or more prevalent. It’s an old story that, as long as there are poky paradigms and parent judges and debaters with more than half a brain, will stay in the same corner of the activity that it has inhabited for ages.

So has the style of argumentation changed? Are people somehow debating better these days? I don’t think so. Put all the TOC champions since day one into a new tournament and set them loose on each other, and the results, I think, would be random. The concept of a good argument hasn’t changed all that much since Aristotle, although maybe we can articulate the concepts of argumentation better. There’s no new logic that I’m aware of that makes more sense than the old logic.

One thing that is new to LD is the use of critiques/kritiks. It’s rather amusing to see LDers acting as if they’ve gone to the edge of the envelope with Ks, when in reality, Ks are rather old-hat in the policy world. And about as well accepted there as in LD. My understanding is that in policy the teams that run Ks often do so because they do not have the resources to compete with big powerhouse teams. If you have fifty novices cutting cards, as compared to three freshman sharing two teeth between them, you are definitely at a tactical disadvantage; the K is a strategic move to neutralize that disadvantage. Presumably there’s other reasons for running Ks in policy, but there is certainly no comparable resource disparity in LD. So people only run Ks in LD for strategic advantage absent a disadvantaged starting position.

A kritik in LD usually does not directly address the content of a resolution in the fashion in which it was meant to be addressed. For instance, in the separation of church and state resolution, a kritik would not argue simply whether there should or should not be separation of church and state. The issue would not arise in that constructive argument. The case would be about something else entirely (for instance, a commentary on the presuppositions of the SOCAS phrase itself through a Foucaultian analysis leading to an indictment of the NFL power structure—that Billy Tate is the Mussolini of his day, I guess). There are two aspects to this that ought to be clear to anyone why traditional educators are mostly not supporters of K approaches. First, most educators highly value all the background work that goes into understanding a topic. I spent a lot of time with the team talking about the pros and cons of separation of church and state. In our country, at this time, I perceive this as an extremely important issue. I believe it should be addressed head-on; it defines the world we live in, not necessarily in ways we wish it to be defined. It also helps us understand what is happening in Pakistan, say, which is your great example of no SOCAS, or in the mind of Bill Frist (shudder!). Where else do we have that discussion in high schools? Secondly, many forensics folks believe that kritiks are merely a competitive trick designed to put your opponent at a disadvantage: if you’re not arguing the topic, you could be arguing virtually anything, and how does your opponent prepare a defense against virtually anything? In this model, the K runner values competitive advantage over education. And while most forensics dinosaurs love to see their students win trophies, few of them value the competition over the education, and certainly none of them value the competition in and of itself. The K seems to be of that leaning, valuing the competition in a vacuum (and valuing winning that competition). It is no great insight that the competition is merely a means to an end in debate. We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t competition, but the competition is merely a necessary evil. (This is true of any school-related pursuit where there’s competition, including sports.) The competition is a means to the end of augmenting traditional education. And at the point where the competition is valued higher than traditional education, there is a grave parting of the ways. Since there seems to be a small group of debaters who do indeed value competition removed from education, and this group seems to love all the gamesmanship of kritiks and speed, we get a perceived split between this group and the traditional educators. But, as with speed, kritiks are limited by the audience’s willingness to accept them. A parent judge will look at you as if you have a hole in your head, and a known coach will clearly identify in his or her paradigm an opinion on kritiks. So I think that this aspect of the activity, while more prevalent than in the past, can only go so far, unless the educators in the activity begin to disregard the content of topics and the value of teaching that content. I simply can’t see that happening.

The next big question is, are there new tools—new philosophers or philosophies—that make more sense than our classic approaches? More specifically, is critical theory taking over the values side of LD?

This is one of the most interesting thoughts being kicked around. Let’s face it, I’m writing Caveman to address the themes of critical theory that are extant in the LD universe, so obviously I believe that this material has worked its way into our community consciousness. But what does this mean for the activity as a whole?

This may be where we have the broadest split between the various camps. From the perspective of many debaters and many college students, critical theory (by which I mean everything from semiotics to Foucault to Derrida to actual CT, and yes, I know I’m being sloppy by being so all-inclusive, but you do want this essay to end at some time, don’t you?) is fascinating. It’s a whole new way of thinking, it’s modern, it’s (deceptively) fashionable (it’s sort of passé in many academic circles at this point), and it’s certainly a new way to approach LD material. Most high school teachers look at it differently: it is, at worst, a lot of incoherent nonsense, and at best, a body of thought that is beyond the skill set of the average high school student. And here’s where we start getting into an important distinction. There’s certainly nothing wrong with an intelligent high school student taking on any area of study and attempting to apply it to debate. I would hope we would encourage this sort of cutting-edge use of brainpower. But the debate teacher does not have a student with 2400 on his or her SATs (2400???) and a 4.0 GPA. The debate teacher has twenty freshmen who don’t yet know an SAT from and SST, and if the teacher is a true educator, the teacher doesn’t care. Now, I don’t think CT is really all that prevalent in debate (it’s sort of the intellectual equivalent of speed, if you get my drift), but what I’m saying here points to the crux of the rantfest. The debate teachers consider LD to be a combination of reading/research, writing and public speaking. The debate teachers have a responsibility to teach that combination to a broad base of students over a broad spread of time. They need to teach material that is accessible to their students, and which fits in with the rest of the curriculum. They need to maintain a program where the students are able to engage in meaningful competition, which usually means that they will need to enlist the aid of parent judges. And they need to maintain the support of school administrations who must see benefits in the student body gained through the activity.

Additionally, the debate teachers have seen the recession of policy over the years. Policy is an activity comprising only specialists, whereas LD depends to a great extent on generalists (i.e., enlists the use of—I would hoped trained, English-speaking—parents). At the point at which LD comprises only specialists—that is, at the point where only specialized judges can adjudicate the rounds because of either the content or the presentation—LD is on the same road to (near-) extinction as policy.

It would be tempting to underplay the value of parents as judges. I mean, no one really wants most parents at the back of the room. Even the most dedicated and intelligent parent isn’t as up to snuff as a coach or college regular. But I tab an awful lot of tournaments, and here’s the deal. None of these tournaments, zero, zilch, ixnay on the ournamentay, would happen without parents. Usually there’s about 25% parents in a judging pool. But if there’s mostly great judges and few parents (as at, say, Manchester), that’s because that weekend I’m back in NYC at a CFL for novices and intermediates which is being judged about 75% by parents; we’re all connected here, folks, and those varsity debate oaks all grow from novice acorns. Not to mention the parental commitment to aiding the running of tournaments (providing food, housing and general all-round succor). But the average tournament does use parents at the back of the room. And at the point at which I can not enlist parent judges, I will lose at least 25% of my tournament population. And the point at which I cannot enlist parents is the point at which bizarre and/or too speedy argumentation becomes the norm.

And that’s one awful big reason, ladies and gentlemen, to protect the norm, even if you're from the progressive side of things. Reduce the size of your tournaments, and you reduce the number of your TOC bids. Sure, there will still be a handful of unbelievable venues like Lexington or Emory or Apple Valley, but after that, do you really want to put your bid status in the hands of the Princeton/Columbia/Yale parli team? And even the Lexingtons and Emorys and Apple Valleys require adults to get kids there, to chaperone, whatever. Remove parents from the equation, and every program is thence required to support itself entirely from its program resources. Buy all its judges. Chaperone all its students (according to the rulings of all the individual administrations, some of which are Dotheboys in spades, if you get my Nickleby drift). I have historically sent students to three tournaments in three different states on the same weekend. Think I could do that without parents? It’s all well and good that a handful of mavericks travel the country on their own dime, but most debaters don’t, and wouldn’t, and couldn’t. And LD is not about satisfying a tiny minority out of the mainstream of academic concerns. It is about keeping the activity alive and vibrant for the whole community, including that minority. It’s not about right or wrong (and although I maintain there’s nothing particularly wrong with a “classical” approach to LD, I’m not really attempting to make value claims here), it’s about preserving the activity for the greatest number over the long term.

It’s that educational thing I was talking about before.

Which leads me to what was the disturbing thing of the TOC weekend. It was explained to me brilliantly in the advisory meeting. TOCs is certainly a fulcrum event for the activity. What happens there resonates throughout the activity. And if the elements of the activity such as speed veiling thinly spread arguments, kritiks bypassing resolutional conflicts, and postmodernist analysis generally considered inappropriate to the high school curriculum, are actually seen as winning, then that will resonate throughout the activity. Students will want to emulate the TOC style, whatever it is. And if it’s speed, Ks and pomo, that’s what they’ll emulate. And as I think I’ve made clear, if those elements were to become endemic, they could threaten the very existence of the activity.

There was a personal side to this, too. For all practical purposes, the members of the advisory committee, and for that matter almost every long-term dedicated adult debate coach in attendance, were blocked out of judging the tournament, either as low preferences or strikes. I have mixed feelings about Mutual Judge Preference, but frankly I feel that is not the issue here; it was simply harder for two debaters to agree on an adult coach as a one or a two than on a college student. But since all the adult coaches are the people responsible for keeping the activity alive (all of the students and all of the college kids will be long gone while we dinosaurs are still chomping on the ferns and vines), they were rather miffed that they had been cast aside as useless, and were saying as much to each other. Also, I gather there were comments made at DOA that were not exactly kind, and people were paraphrasing them rather liberally. (Contrary to popular perception, I seldom bother reading anything on the site except substantive discussions like Bietz’s column, about theory and practice; I really don’t give a rat’s patoot about much else, and I certainly have little interest in getting involved in long posting duels, given that the one time I did post I was immediately attacked—did you ever feel like Gulliver in Lilliput?).

So what’s the bottom line to all of this? Well, first, for all the commentary among debaters that there is a vanguard in LD setting up a phenomenal new beachhead of theory and practice that will mark the dawn of a new day, most of what is happening in LD has happened before and seems to be happening in roughly the same proportion as always. Of course, there may be some new ideas feeding into the system that will be of use to the community as a whole: I can see presenting an overview of pomo to my team to apprise them of some of these ideas, and if this material is applied to analyzing topics (as compared to ducking them), there’s nothing wrong with that. But then, there are always new ideas feeding into the system. Rawls had his day, for instance, and now there’s not much direct use for him, but no debater was ever harmed by reading one of the most important ethicists of the 20th century, and now his work is a basic element known to and available to all in the activity, if they are so inclined. (It’s also nice to read Rawls’s wonderfully accessible prose as some sort of evidence that decent prose can be written in aid of philosophical ideas, with logic applied the way it ought to be applied by a philosopher trying to make a complex argument.) And the nice thing about the outcome of TOCs this year was that the 16 finalists included strong representation of a traditional approach to LD. A Derridean K spread at lightning speed did not win the day. Which means that the indirect bully pulpit of the TOC, that fear that the fulcrum would provide leverage for the “bad” aspects of LD, enabled co-conspiratorially by sympathetic college students through MJP, didn’t come to pass. No negative message was sent to the world at large, directly or indirectly.

But there is nonetheless a hit to mindsets. The coaches are worried about what is happening to the activity. What they’re worried about may not be happening, but any pomo will tell you that, if you believe it, it’s true. The VB website aggravates this hit. There is indeed power in something like VB, not in providing a platform for what any vocal minority wishes to bloviate on, but in deciding what is and isn’t important. Inflating the importance of competition only acts to imbalance the goals of the community. Granted that VB is a money-making concern predicated on its personal profit motive, its site has outgrown its intent (selling cases and camps and, lately, its tournament). It must recognize this, and act accordingly. It has, purposefully or not, taken on a position of centrality in the community that I’ve never seen before. With great power comes great responsibility. I don’t see them understanding this yet.

Also, it is important that coaches, like me, remain open to new stuff. At the point where we summarily dismiss anything that we don’t like just because we don’t like it, we run the risk of fulfilling the prophecy the vanguardistas are making, that we are dinosaurs about to be melted into Sinclair oil. We need to address issues as intelligently as we want our opponents to address them. Dialogue is necessary, and presumably a teleological dialectic will result.

And lastly, it behooves students to remember that there is more to competition than meets the eye. There are school districts and budgets and buses and chaperones. Few schools permit students to travel as random unaffiliated teams wherever and whenever they wish to go (and few schools could afford it even if they were willing to do it). Schools have responsibilities to their entire student bodies that usually are prioritized over individual desires, especially in the extracurricular area. But more importantly, LD is an academic activity (often literally taught in the classroom) intended to introduce high school students in a meaningful way to the concepts of values/ethics, to enhance their research and writing skills, and to train them as speakers to make cogent arguments in front of a broad spectrum of adjudicators. The goal of the educators is to balance all these elements. If you wish to remove one of them, for example, limiting the audience of adjudicators to a select specialized few, you challenge the entire enterprise. Even if you are correct in what you are saying, promoting vanguardista ways, what you are saying undermines the community. If you succeed in making LD very fast and very selective and very difficult for the general community, you will re-invent policy, and the growth of LD will dissipate. The venues for LD will disappear because the schools will seek other activities that provide what LD was providing. LD as accessible debate will be a distant memory. And perhaps you will have set up Public Forum as the wave of the future to replace it (because PF, as LD once used to be, is a meaningful way to address the concepts of values/ethics, to enhance research and writing skills, and to train speakers to make cogent arguments in front of a broad spectrum of adjudicators).

I don’t think any of this is going to happen, though. I think we will self-correct what small problems we have, and blithely succeed for the foreseeable future. But we’ll only do it together, not as combatants. If you really want to change LD for what you see as positive reasons, you’d better work with the coaches and teachers you have. There really aren’t any others waiting in the wings to take their place. When they’re gone, the future of LD is gone with them.