LD=Policy?

I don’t agree with this, from TD’s comment: i do not think that the best solution is to have all the money + power types play one game and everyone else play a game that is qualitatively different (and deficient in some serious regards). in fact, i would say that i am strongly against this…at the end of the day, are we seriously happy with a system that takes real world inequalities and brutally plays them out with the end result of emotional trauma for the weak and a renewed sense of entitlement and power for the strong. I don’t think it’s a matter that the moneyed schools are getting something that the non-moneyed schools aren’t getting, aside from the obvious bigger pile of money. No one has yet demonstrated, anywhere, that $ircuit debate is better than local debate, in any context. No one has demonstrated that it’s more educational (the prioritized value), better as debate (the essentialist value) or even more fun (and given the amount of time spent on airplanes, you’ve got to wonder about that one). I stick by it’s just being different. Would I prefer to have all the money in the world for my team? Sure. But I have to point out that some of the most traveling teams out there are not funded by rich school boards, but by teams’ sweat equity of fund-raising, either on their own or working their alums. That’s not privilege in my book. But even if it were, it wouldn’t matter because, as I say, I can’t make a value assessment on that non-$ircuit is “deficient.” If it is, then let’s fix it. But that’s a different subject.

One issue that has floated close to the surface in all these discussions is the idea of LD as Policy manqué. Or, as John Updike once put it, manqué see, manqué do. Claire’s comment sort of brought this home to me (at the end of this post), although she only briefly alludes to it. Others have been more direct, pointing ot that our reliance on “evidence” is making us more policy-like, as does speed, various sorts of argumentation, disclosure, etc. (I put evidence in quotes because, in the real world, evidence is the presentation of fact, or what is presumed as fact, albeit often subject to interpretation, whereas in debate, evidence is often just some schmoe’s opinion on something, a point made more eloquently than you could have made it, alluded to to enhance your position by the magic of contagion rather than by the support of true warrant, i.e., the facts to back it up. But, alas, that is as true of policy as it is of LD.) I have long seen, and it has long been commented on, that often what is happening in LD that people are particularly getting their knickers in a twist over, is some sort of bastardized or bad policy. Do LDers want to be policy debaters when they grow up, in other words? Policy people like to think so but then again, how many philosophical arguments have we developed that they’ve co-opted? It’s a two-way street.

There is no question that all activities can look at other activities and borrow from them in aid of improvement. Policy debate, coming first chronologically, spent years integrating classical ideas of rhetoric and argument into the activity, ideas that LD originally either pooh-poohed or was unaware of. Lately one trend in LD is to argue alone more classical lines, labeling arguments (at least on the back end, if not in the rounds) with the technical understanding and demands of classical rhetoric. This is all to the good. What we did intuitively in the 90s we now do confidently, putting a name on it with the aid of thousands of years of rhetorical study behind us. Much of so-called theory is nothing more than dispensing of rhetorical nonsense with rhetorical orthodoxy. (Of course, much of so-called theory is also just more rhetorical nonsense, which I guess we have to meet with more rhetorical orthodoxy. So it goes.) The use of evidence on the other hand, is problematic, because it is so entangled in the chickeny egg of the resolutions: which comes first, the resolution that requires factual evidence or a normative of evidence use that demands factual resolutions? Which is why I sort of like no-nukes, because although one must dangle plenty of facts in front of one’s judge, one ultimately must fall back on a philosophical rationale of right and wrong that no fact can warrant. Anyhow, the issue of speed is also one of LD not necessarily imitating policy, but finding (independently?) that if you have a resolution that requires evidence, the more evidence the better (maybe), and the faster you go, the more evidence you can enter into the record, until you reach a point where the only way anyone can evaluate what you’ve said is to read the case when no one is speaking (which is why some policy rounds take forever, because they’re decided by judges after the round is over, when they finally get a chance to find out what everyone was arguing). There is a direct result of all of this, which is the creation of a cadre of judges who are capable of handling it. No one can handle intense speed without practice; I used to be pretty good at it, and now I suck because I don’t judge enough. I still judge as well or as poorly as I always did, but then I did it quicker. In a round conducted at moderate speed, I’m fine, but to many that makes me a bad judge because their cases require entering more material onto the floor than I’m capable of handling. As we create this cadre of judges capable of handling speed, with, presumably, the understanding of rhetoric at a high level, we do exactly what policy did, which is to limit the market of who can judge, which has the effect eventually of limiting the numbers of people who can debate. Policy is fairly moribund in the northeast these days as far as invitationals is concerned, with the handful of schools with policy teams mostly forced to find these varsity opportunities outside of the region. When I offered policy at Bump I was always stymied by my inability to provide judging beyond what the teams brought, and most of them couldn’t bring enough, hence the cycle of diminishing participation.

So the question is not, is LD becoming more like policy, and will disclosure intensify this process, because that seems to be pretty much a given, at least at the $ircuit level. The bigger question is whether the policification of LD will eventually turn it into a similar niche event on the extracurricular level. (In states where debate is taught and policy is a norm, it hasn’t gone away or gotten out of control, but it stays where it is, for the most part.) My thing is, I like the moving around that we get from debate, the going away for a weekend, the mixing with other schools on a very intimate level, and the growth opportunities that offers to students, opportunities that I strongly believe are educational. Compare this to speech around here, which is entirely one-day events except at the colleges, and hence much more insular, with some friendships of course but mostly teams sticking to themselves for no other reason than the nature of the event: you’re there, you compete, you go home, compared to you’re there FOREVER, you compete, you eat, you sleep, etc.

I have no answers to any of that. All I can suggest is that, when you’re thinking of topics to send to NFL for consideration, or when you’re voting on the topics of the year, if you want to move LD from evidence-based case constructions, then act accordingly. That is entirely where the action is on deciding the future of LD. All this other stuff, a little bit. The resolutions? The main event. Everything else stems from that.