TOC 2011 Part 6

By the time we get to TOC, this is the situation. Big Debate, having established TOC as its ultimate goal, has invested many, many thousands of dollars in getting there. Students have virtually given up their lives to become what is uniquely a TOC debater. Any residual ideas that debate is about the content—that debate is about instilling ideals into students, that it is a special educational opportunity—are suspended as debate becomes about one thing and one thing only, the competition.

There is nothing inherently wrong with competition for competition’s sake, but it is rather hollow. Think of game playing. I love game playing, and when I play a game, I give it a lot of effort. I want to win, because that’s the point of most games. But of course games also have motivating factors like socialization or brain stretching or that sort of thing, and I think we would look askance at someone who did nothing but play games all day, or who had started to confuse games with reality. This is a reasonable analogy to what has happened to debate at TOC. Because of all the money and time invested, the TOC has been drained of its lifeblood. It is a debate zombie.

At TOC, when people are not debating they are in their war room working on debating. Teams regularly travel with entourages beyond the coach and the debaters, so much so that the TOC has rules about the entourages: to wit, you can’t keep them secret like Ahab’s unearthly special harpooners on the Pequod, although apparently some people tried to. All this applies to Policy and LD both, although I don’t think PF is there yet. Scouting is common, and (theoretical) grownups are doing research and establishing positions and writing cases for debaters. When I have my first meeting with parents of novices, I tell them that their kids will learn to research, write cases and speak in public. At TOC, they will have entourages to do their research for them and to write their cases for them. As for public speaking, well, they will learn to speak in public but how well is a matter of opinion. What do the Big Debate schools tell their novice parents the first year? That their kids will become…what? I do not doubt that the lead debaters of Big Debate are smart and clever and capable of manipulating all the data that is thrown their way, but I’m unsure of the value of this as compared to the value of, well, doing your own research and writing your own cases and adapting to a variety of audiences beyond the speed-capable and argument-adept preferred $ircuit judge.

You can take or leave all of what I’ve said, if you’re a firm believer that this level of debate is valuable on a personal level. But the underlying atmosphere—of distrust, of cutthroat competition, of a tournament that is absolutely no fun whatsoever, where some of the best coaches in the country are relegated to the boondocks because of prefs, where the cost of not simply getting there but competing on the level of everyone else as Big Debate unleashes its minions is prohibitive to most programs—is not so easy to dismiss. I spent the weekend tabbing PF, and Tim and Kaz and I had a perfectly fine time among ourselves, but even there, by the time brackets had sorted themselves out and then into the elimination rounds, we never simply placed the judges without someone coming in complaining that so-and-so had it in for whosits, or shouldn’t be allowed to judge whatshisname because their camp has declared war on the other camp, etc., etc., etc. My recommendation to TOC was that next year they put strikes into PF and divide the pool by geography to bypass some of the inherent bad feeling that seems to underlie much of the activity. This is PF, remember. It’s just starting to wear long pants. There is little question in my mind that five years from now it will have prefs, scouts and assistants and be indistinguishable from its cousins across the UK campus.

What can be done about all of this? I don’t really know. I mean, relieving the operation of its veil of secrecy is a step in the right direction, but that won’t make the fact that this is an unhappy and rather spirit-crushing event any less true. At the point where anyone puts this many eggs in a single basket, that basket becomes rather problematic. Let’s face it: as I said earlier, it’s the same schools there year after year for the most part, so Big Debate has already bought into this paradigm, and they’ve gotten what they’ve paid for. I doubt if they’re going to change that. I doubt that the Big Debate schools went into TOC thinking that it was antithetical to the goals of the activity, and maybe it really isn’t. But it certainly doesn’t celebrate those goals. It celebrates a certain brand of competitive success that is, quite honestly, not within the reach of most schools. Short of schools running kritiks that would demonstrate this fact, and having those kritiks win, and then gaining admittance to an event that they’ve spent their entire careers vilifying, it is a closed arena. And as such, it is not so much going to affect the Big Debate operations if the tournament remains closed as it will those of us not a part of Big Debate. In the past, I’ve looked on TOC as a nice goal for some of my students. After this year, I’m obviously having serious second thoughts about that. I am unlikely to encourage students to aim for TOC because, unless they’re a superstar like the Panivore who has the personal resources, both intellectual and financial, to become a private Big Debate concern all on her own, the result of pursuing a TOC path for a Sailor will result in, at best, admission to the TOC and a seriously disappointing, unenjoyable, resource-deficient weekend. While everyone else is in their war room, my Sailor will be hanging out with me trying to find a decent restaurant open on a Sunday night, which we will attend alone because everyone else is in their war rooms.

As usual, I’m not really looking to discuss this here beyond what I’ve already said. That is, I have neither the time nor the inclination to argue specific points in the comments or anything like that. You can agree with me, or not, as you like. The thing is, it’s not as if I’m particularly perturbed by any of this. The TOC is entirely an optional event in the debate universe, and one can ignore its existence completely and still do great things in the activity. Unlike the NFL which institutionally demands inclusion while inherently throwing up obstacles to participation to certain regions, there is no internal contradiction to TOC. Like it or lump it, it will happily go on without you. So be it. For all I know, I’ll be back there tabbing again next year because I like tabbing. Who knows? I’m neither part of the problem nor part of the solution. As for you, you’ll have to make up your mind for yourself. If you are going to consider TOC the goal of debate, then you will have to account for its problems, or overcome them. If you are not going to consider TOC the goal of debate, then you can ignore those problems completely and spend the first weekend of May at home planting your tomato seeds. The choice is up to you.