TOC 2011 Part 5

Don’t forget to add some costs to maintaining a debate school beyond just debaters and their coach traveling far and wide. There are also assistant coaches, or whatever you wish to call them. For the most part college students with high school debate roots, these folks do not participate in debate out of the goodness of their hearts. And they also have travel expenses in addition to their fees. Debate schools do not travel light.

It has been suggested that I don’t value so-called high level debate, and this is not true. I have no difficulties recognizing the sophistication of thinking that goes into the endeavor. But it is rather limited in scope. What is the number of serious participants in this sort of debate across the country? A few hundred? Not many, no matter what the number. Most students in high school simply don’t have the time for it, nor, as I’ve said, the resources. If I could take all the money that goes into high level debate and spread it around to provide debate to more people who have none, I would do it in an instant. I would also like to feed three square meals a day to everyone in developing nations and, while I’m at it, establish world peace. In other words, I would make a great beauty contest contestant, at least when it comes to the Q&A part of the event. (Not so good, maybe, in the swim suit event.) As I said earlier, if schools have the resources, there’s nothing wrong in them expending them. That is the way the world is.

Debate schools and their debate students point themselves toward the TOC. One curious aspect of the TOC is that admission is controlled by those very debate schools, or at the very least by an oligarchy comparable to the debate schools. I have in my day sat on the LD advisory committee, and I would love to report that it was a fine, altruistic experience, where knowledgeable coaches pooled their resources to determine what the best tests of debate were around the country in aid of setting up entry points to the TOC. But that would only be partially true. There was also brazen self-interest, mind-boggling politics and out-and-out mendacity. I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but damn it, it was true. It wasn’t universal, but I saw people point blank defend the tournaments they had some reason to defend and attack the tournaments they had some reason to attack without the least bit of rationale other than self-interest and politics, and the main tool was mendacity. (If you don’t like hearing that, I can live with it. You wouldn’t be the first person/organization to consider me the devil incarnate. It hasn’t stopped me yet.)

My first-hand knowledge of the committee was a long time ago, and I would expect that the mendacity is not there anymore. In this day and age, with easy access to data, I doubt if anyone is able to pull off inflation of a tournament’s numbers (or deflation) by fifty percent, because anyone can simply call up the numbers from a results page. But the system, even if it’s been cleaned up, can’t claim neutrality because too many people who are cogs in the system have a vested interest in their own part of it. There is the simple idea that more bids should be in my region than in your region because yadda yadda yadda [I will cite ten reasons why your region doesn’t deserve bids but in reality I don’t know your region from a hole in the ground and I just want bids in my region so my kids will have easier access to them]. If bids are determined by committee, and that committee comprises the people with the greatest vested interest in bids, at best the distribution of bids will be to the advantage of those with the greatest vested interest in bids, neutralized by the regional representation of the committee; at worst, it will devolve into politics and self-interest. It is a system without checks and balances, except that perhaps some of the committee is more pure of heart than others. I don’t think they do a bad job, to tell you the truth, considering their position as debate schools. But they don’t do a great job. There is no set of criteria explaining why a school has a certain bid that I’m aware of; we spend a lot of time on TVFT arguing the meaning of bids, their usefulness and their distribution, and if criteria were set somewhere, that would be a discussion about changing things, but instead it’s a discussion about defining things, a different business altogether.

The recent brouhaha in LD brought out the worst in an awful lot of people, and one thing was clear: the LD debate community has little or no real understanding of the committee (or, in general, the operations of TOC), and given perceived provocation, immediately and thoroughly ascribed to the TOC and the committee the worst of intentions. A closed committee with no particular explanation of how one becomes a member, that meets without publishing its minutes, that determines its decisions according to unknown criteria—any wonder that the community is, at best, ill at ease with such a group?

I have some of my best friends sitting on that committee. Let me underline this: I do not believe that the committee is evil and mendacious (although it was undoubtedly the latter in my day). I don’t even know who most of the committee is these days, aside from my buddies and one or two others. That is not my point. My point is that a committee that is a virtual secret society of the powerful is almost inevitably going to be perceived as being up to no good. It’s human nature. And at the point where all those committee members do represent Big Debate, when every week of their lives is pointed in the direction set by Big Debate, when their very careers are measured by their success in the realm of Big Debate, it is not a great leap for me to assume that their decisions will, if nothing else, further the cause of Big Debate. TOC is the expressed goal of Big Debate. The committee stands as gatekeepers to that goal. They determine which schools get which bids, and they evaluate the at-large applications. They are the Captains of Big Debate, if you will.

And that phrase, Big Debate, does sum up the universe I’m talking about, maybe even better than the $ircuit. Big Debate. I like that. Anyhow, everything I’ve said about the committee here is fixable almost entirely by publicizing every single aspect of it. There’s no reason why it needs to be even semi-secret. This is a high school extracurricular activity. It should be open to the same scrutiny as every other high school extracurricular activity. Any argument that says otherwise is suspect. You could say that if I don’t like it, I shouldn’t bother with it, but that doesn’t warrant its secrecy, that just reevaluates the importance of Big Debate to people who are not a part of it.

This year’s TOC, in LD, was arrived at in a storm of bitterness, accusations, bad behavior, abuse of speech, abusive speech—you name it. An activity that ostensibly teaches justice and ethics and morality, that is informed by the principles of open discourse, proved that it knew no more of those things than your average bunch of dropout thugs on the local street corner. Why? I don’t really know. But I would suggest that the stress of Big Debate, the endless struggle for bids and victories, the money invested, the time students put in on debate that equals or even surpasses the time they put in on the entire rest of their lives, the pressure to succeed that is only measured by admittance to (and later, success at) the TOC, has created a world that is fragile and perhaps unhealthy. If I were writing this about high school football, you would probably agree that students spending half their entire lives on nothing but football is not a great thing. Why is it great if it’s debate? Because it’s their brains and not their bodies? I don’t think so.

I’ll try to wrap this up next time, but I don’t know if I can.