Stop the presses! Menick agrees with Bietz. Again.

I would have to agree with Bietz on Yale, and on college tournaments in general.

Here’s the problem. Colleges have debate teams, doing collegiate debate things, which may or may not bear any resemblance to high school debate, peopled by students who may or may not have participated in some form of high school debate. It’s not really apples and oranges; it’s more like poodles and pit bulls. But, still, there’s more of a disconnect than not between the two universes, especially Parliamentary debate versus LD. They’re concerned with different things, in different ways. And the problem is that, because the college debate universe is different from the high school debate universe, and concerned with different things than the high school debate universe, for all practical purposes the two universes are separate. Their spiritual intersection, such as it is, is tangential at best.

The first issue that arises is judging. For good or bad, LD has a history of being accessible to the average intelligent adult adjudicator. One would be hard-pressed to make the claim that all of these Pups and Princetonians and Harvardians and the like are not fairly representative of average intelligent adjudication. But in fact, LD is not nor has it ever been intended to be accessible to the average intelligent adult adjudicator who never heard of it before you handed that person the ballot. As a proponent of parent judging—if for no other reason than that someone has to chaperone, and there is a finite number of “professional” judges available, which means that parents are going to be thrown in there and you’re going to have to deal with it—I qualify my advocacy by saying that I am a proponent of trained parent judging. They should know what a ballot is, what speaker points are, how the round is constructed, what some of the arguments they might hear are. They should speak English. They need not be up-to-date on the latest Ks, but that is in their favor as human beings. Anyhow, the colleges often operate on a principle that, because they consider themselves geniuses, they can judge a round of anything, anywhere, regardless of their inexperience with, nay, their total ignorance of, that activity. To be honest, I do not feel that the Pups are the worst offender in this, and of course, we can separate wheat from chaff in tab. But what most colleges don’t do—although I will point out that the Pups did do this—is hire neutrals to create a good pool. A good tournament MUST hire neutral judges of a caliber deemed high by the general debate community. It doesn’t matter if it’s a high school or college tournament, a good judging pool is a requirement. A bad judging pool brings a tournament down. Quite honestly, I have been in too many tab rooms that sell non-existent judges, that hope things will work out mathematically, that make no effort to acquire spares. One reason I ultimately dropped policy from Bump is my lack of connection to the policy judging universe; as I could not guarantee good judging, I could not guarantee a good tournament. To offset this, I created a judge ratio that put the burden on the participating teams. But that’s not a great solution, merely a matter of expediency.

So, the first thing a college has to do is hire real judges and not assume that their own geniuses actually know their asses from their elbows.

Secondly, you’ve got to treat people nicely. At high school tournaments, I think what usually happens is that the parents end up seeing to the niceties of judge lounges and mealtimes. Because they have a vested interest in hospitality, they let you eat dessert without having to eat your vegetables, and everybody’s happy. Occasionally it seems as if the students are getting short shrift on their food while the judges are living like royalty, and I don’t think that’s good, but I do think the solution is treating the students better, not treating the judges worse. It is not easy being a judge. It’s heavy-duty hour-and-a-half shifts of having to pay close attention to every word spoken at top speed. You need a good break from that. It behooves a tournament doing the first thing, above, i.e., hiring real judges, to provide a good experience for them. Plus, there is, as Bietz points out, a sense of reciprocity as we travel from week to week to each other’s events. We want to match one another’s hospitality.

College tournaments, however, do seem to be immune from this sense of hospitality. They are certainly off the path of reciprocity, and I think the result is that, if your tournament is run by ex-high school folk, there will probably be good hospitality, and if not, you take your chances. The thing is, the colleges that conduct tournaments are pretty much all colleges that every student wants to go to. Not their tournaments, but their campuses. They want to matriculate. A tournament at an Ivy is going to draw a lot more than a tournament at, say, Donald Trump University of Lower Hoboken. Because the colleges offer the sizzle of their name, they might not necessarily feel the need to offer any steak. This is especially seen in the abusively high prices of some of these venues’ registration. At times matriculation would seem a better choice, or at least a cheaper choice. Since the colleges get away with it year after year, they keep doing it. In my opinion, Yale fares pretty well on the hospitality issue. They can’t compete with just about any high school, but they hold their own against the other colleges.

So, the second thing colleges should do is make you comfortable and welcome. While they won’t convince students not to come, colleges that don’t regularly provide a good atmosphere for the coaches/judges will ultimately convince them not to come. Not to mention any names, but I haven’t gone to [insert name of large Ivy League school in Cambridge, Massachusetts] in years because it’s too damned expensive and its venue is hellish and their judging is sketchy because of the size of the pool, so if Sailors want to go, they can get their parents to bring them, since for all practical purposes it’s merely an expensive and uncomfortable campus tour masquerading as a high school tournament. (Look at the registration fees and do the math, and tell me why they run out of potato chips in the judges lounge long before the tournament is over.)

My third beef against colleges is my strongest, and that is when college tournaments are scheduled against high school tournaments. The idea that anyone would support some college in it entirely for the money, over some high school in it entirely because they’re in it body and soul week after week, is appalling to me. If your college runs against a high school, I’m not going, and I’ll probably bar my students from going as well. Of course, a college’s level of venality is at least understandable. But how do I explain the high school programs that prefer a college event to a high school event? This is a high school community, and I’m happy to say it’s a fairly strong and healthy one, regardless of what part of the community you happen to be in. Forensics seems to be pretty strong, overall, at least in the northeast. But money is scarce. Those of us who run tournaments don’t make a lot of money out of it, but we make some. We make enough to maybe go a little distance with the whole squad, to put up a few judges at the EconoLodge when we get there and cover all the registrations and judge fees. That’s about the sum total of the profits from your average high school tournament. Most of running a tournament is reflective of being part of the community, of giving back to that group of which you are a member. To blow off a high school tournament because you want the éclat (if that’s the reason) of attending a competing college tournament is, simply, bad form. Colleges are only tangentially part of our community, because we have allowed them to become so, because we like the odor of saying, I’ll be going up to X this weekend. Well lah-di-flippin-da. Or, as Clarence Thomas might say, hoopdy-damned-do.

So this is number three. To colleges I say, if you want us to show up, make sure you’re not hurting my friends on your weekend. (And, if you can, keep in mind numbers one and two and make it a pleasant experience for me, and make it a well adjudicated tournament.) And to high schools I say, it is no choice at all to decide whether to attend a high school or college tournament on a competing weekend. Absolutely. No. Choice. At. All.