Who gets to decide the purposes of LD?

Scott poses a core question. It's worth looking at.

An activity like LD is created for a reason. We all seem to accept the mythology that LD was created to provide an alternative to policy, which had become too parochial. Certainly policy today bears no relationship to policy in the 60s, when I had a short debate career. We had a shoebox of index cards for evidence, and we talked like normal people. Nowadays, a shoebox of evidence and a normal speaking style will get you laughted out of Declamation! Policy had, obviously, evolved between when I did it at the point LD was created. Even removing a value judgment from the mix, it's easy to see that LD as proposed was different enough intrinsically from policy (one-person, underlying propositions of value) to distinguish the two activities.

Regardless of whether LD was created to "correct" policy or simply augment it as a choice on the forensics menu, it had a definition different from policy, in that the enactment of policy wasn't the point. Simple enough.

I was not in on LD at the beginning, but I have been in on LD for about half its lifespan. So I've seen whatever has happened, if anything, in the 90s and 00s. I am limited by my own experience, of course, but I have gotten around a bit, so I think I have a fairly decent sense of where we are. So let's get back to the question, who gets to decide the purposes of LD?

There are a number of forces involved in any academic activity like debate. There is the force of the educational goal of the activity, for one. There are educational goals in wrestling just like there are educational goals in LD; they are different goals, but they are presumably good and reasonable ones, or else we would eliminate the activity from the school menu. The educational goals of LD are tied into forensics in general: teaching students public speaking, of course, mastering the preparation of materials, doing research, etc. These will shift a bit depending on which forensic activity we're talking about;there's a lot more research in Policy than in Duo, but a lot more emphasis on presentation in Duo than in Policy. But wherever the emphasis, the educational goals of any forensic activity are relatively clearcut.

Another force involved is the force of competitiveness. When competition is thrown into the mix, it has an effect. And it has different effects on different people. Students actually in the competition probably want to win, and focus on winning. Coaches may or may not focus on winning; they certainly have more choice in the matter than students. Some coaches may have pressure from their schools to present a winning record or a wall of trophies, and there may be career self-preservation involved, or at the very least, team preservation. That gets complicated.

Another force is the students themselves as the entity on the ground. Unless an activity is absolutely rigidly defined, and LD certainly isn't, definitions become what you want to use as definitions. You make them up as you go along. What I mean is, at some point the students doing the debating pick and choose what they like and don't like, for whatever reasons, and as a group they make the activity into that thing by pursuing that thing. LD, for instance, and I think this is true of all forensics, is remarkably social. Everyone from all the teams not only knows everyone else, but they all hang out together. Something tells me that when the Hen Hud football team is scheduled against the Scarsdale football team, they don't ride together on the same bus, eat at the same restaurant, and hang out together during halftime. Forensics doesn't have to be social; it could be much more competition-based, us versus them.But it isn't. I, for one, like that.

There are other forces as well. The force of authority, for instance. If you make rules of any sort, and people follow them, you have that force. NFL has a strong force of authority. CFL does too. TOC does, but for different reasons than NFL or CFL. Even regional leagues like MHL have some force of authority. For that matter, anyone running an individual tournament has the force of authority over that tournament. How any of these authorities use that force determines to a great degree that authority's success or failure. If I create some cockamamie tournament that no one comes to, my authority over it was complete, but my effect on LD was a bust. If I create a tournament that is attractive to a large number of people, the reverse is true. How I mold Bump, in other words, is a measure of what I like or don't like in debate, and attendance is the measure of how well I've chosen among those likes and dislikes. I didn't offer MJP, but I did offer strikes. I hired as large a pool of extra judges as I could. I went to six rounds. I was making specific choices about the nature of LD with each of those decisions I made. Those choices, and Bump itself, would have a lot smaller effect than the choices made by NFL, obviously. But still, a team chooses which tournaments to attend by how the tournament makes those choices. Anyone running a tournament plays into the dialectic of what debate is or should be.

Other forces, without going into any detail, are the coaches, the judges, the parents, the school administrations, etc., that is, anyone who touches this activity, with varying degrees of effect.

So we have all these forces at work, all of them forging what the activity will be. The thing is, however, I don't think that all these forces are of equal merit. This is not a marketplace where the forces of, shall we say, LD economics work however they work, and the end result is whatever those forces make it. But I have seen an argument of this sort made, that LD should become whatever the LDers decide it should be, some combination of the students and the competition and the judges, and if it evolves into a fairly complex and swift competition addressing cutting edge theory, that is what it should be because that is what those forces have made it. I would agree if we were talking about, say, scientific progress. I would like to think that science is the result of trial and error and scientists testing things and what scientists say is science fact is, indeed, science fact. The marketplace of ideas applies to science, in other words, is I guess is what I'm saying. I believe in the dialectic applied to a lot of things. Throw all the ideas into the hopper and may the best idea win. There's plenty of places where that makes sense.

But I don't believe that an academic activity, or at least this academic activity, ought to be allowed to evolve via the design, intentional or unintentional, of the students. I don't necessarily believe that the educators will always make the best decisions, or that they can't be patently wrong, but nevertheless, as LD is an academic activity, taught at schools, by schools, for schools, paid for by schools, put down on resumes by students at schools (i.e., high schools) trying to get into other schools (i.e., colleges), educators should hold all the trump cards. It's a poor educator indeed who doesn't have an ear to the ground to know that there's good new stuff always out there that ought to be incorporated into the activity (e.g., that certain modern theorists have something to offer high school students who need not be locked into Locke or ground down by the same old Mill-stone in all their cases), but I would leave it to the educators to ultimately make that decision. They are just better able to do it than the students. Any of us who have actually lived through university study of postmodernism, to use a relevant line of analysis, are probably better equipped to discuss it than some high school junior who saw "Simulacra and Simulation" flash by in "The Matrix" and who suddenly thinks it holds the key to the universe. (Although as I've said many times, my biggest beef with LD isn't with pomo per se, because I think pomo falls on its own lack of merit when debated.)

So teachers ought to get to choose the curriculum, in other words. That's what we train them to do, and what we pay them to do. We should no more allow the students to determine the curriculum in LD than we would in mathematics. Good educators need to listen to the students, especially in a forensics activity devoted to communication, but ultimately, yeah, educators get to decide the purposes of LD. And if they choose wrongly? Personally, I think all the forces at work will correct for that. What I see as the problems now are caused by the educators NOT taking control where they should. I don't blame one student, or one college kid who just read Derrida. I see the educators shaking their heads and tut-tutting, but I don't see them doing anything, even in areas where there's virtually universal agreement. Some seem more willing to dump the activity and try something else like PF than to stand and fight for LD (which I personally think is the best version of debate we have). And what a lot of people in the community (and here I'm talking about some of the students and college folk) seem to miss is that, in our present economy, forensics is hanging by the proverbial thread. Without strong support of parents and administrations, programs just die, simple as that. We need to keep the activity relevant (if you'll allow me a value-packed word) if we wish to keep it alive. We need to keep parents involved in it if we wish them to drive and judge and chaperone. We need to have demo rounds that our principals can walk away from with a spring in their step rather than rock in their craw. We need to have an activity that colleges look at as having molded great potential students and not a bunch of isolated intellectuals. We need to have an activity I can teach to novices, for pete's sake! After all, there are thousands of novices in the activity every year, versus about 27 national circuit folk. Why would the styles and content of the 27 dictate the needs of the thousands?

The one argument that concerned educators who have been in this activity for a long time continue to make is that LD is becoming policy, not in its intrinsic styles and content, but in its support from the schools, and in its potential for the future. In the northeast, policy continues to die the death. Aside from the UDL community, every year we have fewer schools with policy competitors, few trained policy coaches, and fewer people showing up at policy tournaments. I await the demise of policy at 3 schools within 30 miles of me over the next couple of years, and I'd be happy to put money on all three of them. And once they're gone, they won't come back. The argument of the LD coaches comparing policy to LD is that LD will, soon enough, follow these policy teams into oblivion, and that there was a time when the policy coaches could have grabbed control and brought policy back and saved it. They didn't. And it's a shame. With great power comes great responsibility. If the power of authority rests with the educators, so does the responsibility for saving the activity. I am, despite my hare-brained portfolio, one of the educators. It is my responsibility to do what I can, while I can. If I fail, so be it. If I don't act, I deserve the consequences.

So, in a word, it's people like me, rightly or wrongly, who get to decide the purposes of LD.

And ain't that a kick in the head?