I will spend the next few days recovering from the Gem of Harlem…
My history with Columbia goes back to the days when they used to run against Newark. They were, in fact, the operation that launched one of my earliest diatribes against outsourcing TOC bids. High school debate, in my experience, usually has something mostly to do with high schools. Colleges see an opportunity to support their college debate teams by lending the names of their prestigious institutes of higher learning to a fund-raiser of a high school tournament. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, and if you are a debate coach and are given the choice to either buy each member of your team a new iPod nano or send them to Harvard, it’s your budget, so do what you want. But at the point where there’s a conflict between high school and college venues, then in my mind there’s no conflict at all. In the olden days, on the Newark weekend, my team went to Newark. Columbia was banned.
Because there is a limited number of weekends to run a debate tournament, it is almost impossible to launch a new one in the busy northeast. We have a lot of debaters, and we have a lot of tournaments. We are lucky to have schools that are capable of managing annual events with good consistency. Most of these events, by the way, have nothing to do with TOC bids, so don’t go hiking your pants and furling your brow and spouting all that nonsense again. This full schedule (which includes invitationals of both TOC and non-TOC qualification status, MHLs and CFLs) means that if someone new comes along, there really isn’t anywhere for them to go. Over the years a handful of schools have tried to find a weekend, but haven’t been able to do so. Brandeis, Vassar, Brown and MIT come to mind, and I can speak to the first two as being driven by the best of motives (I simply have no idea about the latter two), but still, where are they supposed to go? They were stuck with either head-to-head or going before or after the major bulk of the season. Neither works, and needless to say, none of these are on the team schedule these days. Going forward, UPenn is apparently going up on Manchester weekend in 2008, which is also our CFL weekend. Long term forecast? Havoc. I’m sending UPenn my diatribe on the tragedy of the commons as soon as I write it.
But back to Columbia. For a number of years, as I say, they ran against Newark. No contest. Then they managed to find an open weekend somehow, because occasionally calendars open up, and probably the movement of Lakeland out of January was a factor, but at this point, they was already off my rotation. But some of the Sailors started going, because I certainly no longer banned them. When they were no longer in competition with the high school community, they could be given an opportunity to become honorary members of that community, as far as I could see. And keep in mind another factor undermining some college events, which is the lack of unified management year after year. Kids graduate, and new kids come along. There’s no real institutional memory, and chaotic problems apparently solved last year are entirely new albeit identical chaotic problems this year. And I’m not talking about tabbing here, I’m just generally talking tournament management, i.e., food, rooms, amenities, happy teams, happy judges, happy coaches, useful host students doing what needs to be done, etc. CP has taken on this function for both Yale and Columbia, and the benefits show. He is the theoretical adult on staff that the college students can look to for institutional memory (and I mean that he is theoretically on staff, not theoretically an adult). And this year, Columbia ran on the Emory weekend. If you ask me, this was a stroke of brilliance. Emory at best takes two of a school’s top LDers. That can leave an awful lot of good competition around the country not going to Emory. (Of course, if your team is absolutely crappy, and you have a chair, you will send your top two to Emory and they will perform quite crappily, so just going to Emory doesn’t make you necessarily good, although it is unquestionably a worthy octos bid year after year, so don’t get me wrong on that). And a lot of that good non-Emory competition was at Columbia. Maybe some of them were shopping for an easier bid. At finals? Good luck. When I printed the list of the top ten speakers I could see right there an impressive group of students, any of which would perform well at TOC (and most of them already have at least one bid). In other words, Columbia, in the best of ways, was a bloodbath; that is, the field was highly competitive. The choice of weekend was exactly right.
The other thing that is true of Columbia now is that their student management is both solid and built on growth. Matt, Caitlin, Alli—there’s a lot of experience and a lot of years of potential going forward with students who grew up in the high school environment and understand it and love it. There are no pirates here, no parasites on the high school community. And they understand that one thing that builds a good tournament is a good judging field, and the group of hireds this weekend was excellent. One of the great joys of tabbing is being able to put an A judge in every single bracketed round where someone is down one or two, which I was able to do, plus I even mostly (and once or twice completely) gave As to the undefeateds. Whew!
So, in the space of maybe five or six years, Columbia has gone from my banned list to my whole-hearted support list. Stay on the Emory weekend, keep CP running tab and registration, keep being managed by committed former high school debaters, keep getting those great judges, and they now deserve their own (well, their shared) weekend. In other words, Columbia is now officially back on the Sailors schedule.
I’ll talk about the weekend itself tomorrow. Suffice it to say that it was not without incident.
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