So in a world where people are paying attention to such things, no tournament director in his or her right mind will accept unchaperoned entries, for the simple reason that by doing so responsibility for those entries defaults to the tournament director, and the hassles that might arise can be anything from a suddenly sick child who needs to be sent home, somehow, to a seriously sick child who needs to be sent to the hospital, representing a continuum of situations most TDs do not wish to spend time adjudicating during their tournaments. There are enough problems as it is. Why take on these problems as well? Add to that the admittedly minor possibility that an unaffiliated entry could be attending your tournament in direct violation of school regulations, and you have an untenable position. (One could argue that because some TDs do accept such entries, others should as well. But that is a bad argument. The handful of tournaments I know of that do not pay attention to who’s showing up and what happens to them are demonstrating bad judgment, not setting a precedent of good behavior for others. The fact that some people do a thing, no matter who those people are, is no warrant for others doing it. If that were the case, we could have all easily refuted our mothers when they asked, if all our friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would we do so too.)
But the curious thing is, the essay in Rostrum misses all the obvious issues I’ve talked about, which are real and preemptive. The writers instead attack the Legion of Doom on the question of liability, and claim that the legion’s position, being specious, is therefore discriminatory. And you know something? On these they may be right.
First, liability. Liability for what? Challenged by whom? I mean, I’m certainly willing to accept that if something were to happen to an unchaperoned child at my tournament, someone might hold me legally accountable, but that is an extreme possibility. What would be the basis of the liability, aside from proximity? And realistically, would that ever really come to pass? Has it ever? The argument in the article here is reasonable. The writers go on to say that this claim of liability in the Legion’s policy statement (which has the legal weight of a tuna melt) is in fact an attempt to discriminate against independent entries.
Yeah. They're right.
The goal of the Legion is to mold, or limit, or contain—however you want to refer to it—LD according to certain standards which are claimed as educational. But the Legion very much believes that one of the gravest threats to those standards is students without coaches, who are therefore unrestricted by, not merely adult supervision at a tournament, but adult supervision in forming their approach to debate. Another perceived threat is the college student judge/coach with a so-called progressive agenda, pressuring debaters to adapt to their agendas of speed, source literature and digressive theories of debate structure. While these unaffiliated debaters are not always linked with these digressive judges, they often are, for the simple reason that when you have no coach, you hire whom you can. Of course, the Legion also takes TDs to task for hiring these digressive judges, but the connection remains. If you’re accepting a debater or team without an adult but with a judge, the likelihood is you’re accepting a digressive judge (I like that term) into your judging pool.
So as it turns out, the good reason for barring the unchaperoned/unaffiliated—all of my examples of the sick debater—is bypassed by the Legion in favor of an obscurant policy claiming liability issues. And, probably, there are liability issues at stake, but the real issue is keeping out bad influences. So, all right, this is not really discriminatory, but it is weighted. Is it wrong?
You’d have to make your own decision on that. I’ve spoken to the issue of the digressive judges in the past, at great length, and while I don’t ban them, I don’t seek them out (and they know who I am, and when they or their wards have the opportunity to strike me, they do, so we’re even there). And do I love the unaffiliated/independent/unchaperoned children out there? Let’s see. I think the term I use is National $ircuit, given that these independents all seem to turn up quite far away from home despite the Rostrum article's claims that they have no funds. If you say so... The idea put forth in the article regarding behavior or unchaperoned independents being modified by the community at large, by the way, is simply silly: it's non-unique (all behavior in groups is group-modified to some extent) and it's no guarantee of correct behavior (unless the group we're talking about is akin to Nazi Storm Troopers).
Still, there is the issue of what is a student to do if there is no debate in their area? Shouldn’t they be able to find it elsewhere? Aren't they entitled to Lincoln-Douglas by virtue of birth? OF COURSE THEY ARE!!! IT’S PLANK #328 OF THE UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS!!!
(That, in case you missed it, was irony. In caps.)
I mean, jeesh, I love debate (obviously) and value it highly enough to devote, shall we say, some spare time to it, but there are probably other ways of learning things in high school. I support finding funding for debate where it doesn’t exist: not funding for the handful of top debaters to travel seven states away to bid tournaments, but funding for schools to augment the salaries of their underpaid teachers to create and coach in local events, to urge them to seek help from the NFL, all that sort of thing. Aside from getting to TOCs (if that is a real benefit of debate, and that is arguable), all the benefits of debate would pretty much be available if it were no more than bi-weekly scrimmages between the theoretical East Side HS and the West Side HS for a couple of hours after school. There are people out there, productive members of society—doctors, lawyers, truant officers, circus acrobats, CEOs—none of whom debated in high school. They have survived. There is no right to debate. There is no right to specific extracurricular activities. We are privileged to have debate, or to have the wherewithal to seek it out. We love it. And we should be thankful for it. Demand it as our due? No. It just doesn’t work like that.
Anyhow, I’m surprised the NFL would print an article that is so counter to their own rules. Have you ever tried to send a kid to NatNats without their coach along? Look that one up some time. If there’s any real hypocrisy here, it’s on the part of NFL, not the independents or the Legion, whose points of view are at least single-minded. Unless NatNats is going to start letting people in without 38 separate letters notarized by every household saint within an 80-mile radius of the local school board, they shouldn’t even pretend to support such a position.
No wonder I run a Red Light District.
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