The problem with people like us (and if you’re reading this for any other reason than to remind yourself why you like to be pissed off at me, then you are one of us) is that we like to argue about everything, and as often as not don’t have terrifically grounded opinions, so we’re willing not only to listen to the opposition but to change our minds. I love throwing a few shots across the bow to see who salutes. Sometimes I wish to take no prisoners and go down in flames if necessary. At other times, well, we’ll see where the chips may fall. This is one of those times.
The thing is, I’m in a position of some authority when it comes to choice of resolutions. I’m the person who pushed for the Modest Novice, which has now been institutionalized in our circuit, where we start off novices with the same topic every year from Sept through Nov. The argument for this was primarily to guarantee an inherently good starter topic; additionally, over time, since upperclassmen would themselves have been trained on this topic, we would create a built-in legacy system. The chief objection at the time was that this meant multiple topics at tournaments, and somehow this would be unmanageable, but after the years we’ve been doing it, that has never been a problem. Keep in mind that the flow of LD judges to cover occasional PF rounds has become pretty regular, and on the judging end, complaints that there’s too many topics to follow just don’t come up. That would be like watching the news and complaining that it wasn’t all about Newt Gingrich. This world view has Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and even Ron Paul. That way, you can complain about all of them.
So when I wrote about the resolutions going every two months, I won’t say that it’s a do or die for me. Honestly, I think my logic (which was not really expressed in the article) was that we have a resolution every two months, so let’s just use it, unless somebody can explain why there’s a better way. Ryan Miller has decided that I’m talking through my hat, and posted his own ideas on the subject.
Here’s the link to Ryan’s article: http://buckinghaminquirer.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-praise-of-fewer-resolutions.html
So, let’s see…
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In Praise of Fewer Resolutions
Because Jim Menick is wrong on the internet, I feel compelled to respond. Jim seems to think that we should go back to prepping 5-7 resolutions a year in LD, because prepping resolutions has value and it makes bad resolutions go by more quickly. I'll answer on the line by line and then offer a counterplan with net benefits.
Well, really it’s 4 resolutions plus Nats, which is a little less than 7 but could be construed as 5, if you go to NatNats. Anyhow, I'm always right and I never lie, so let's get over this Jim Menick is wrong idea. Jeesh!
1a: If practicing resolutional prep is a good thing, then it can better be achieved by a single tournament of parliamentary/legislative debate or extemp than a whole season of old-school LD or even modern PF, so the status quo solves.
Only true if you somehow think all debate is the same. It shouldn't be. If LD and extemp and PF and parli are interchangeable in form, then we're misconstruing LD and extemp and PF and parli.
1b: There's less of a discontinuity between prepping new arguments on a resolution and prepping a new resolution than Jim thinks. Killing one to save many/vigilantes/civil disobedience/response to domestic abuse all have deeply overlapping ground--often moreso than various cases on the same topic, which are written precisely to avoid common objections and thus need to trace out new approaches. This might even be a turn since there's a time tradeoff between adapting old arguments to new resolutions (with observations and link evidence) and understanding new philosophical approaches (e.g. virtue ethics).
Well, what's your rush? More to the point, I think the great ethical questions facing humanity may be better understood by applying them to a lot of different things. Much of a muchness in our thinking here, though, I think.
1c: Frequently changing resolutions advantage those who can perfect truly generic ground like kritiks or micropolitics. They don't experience the disadvantage of new resolutions, and those who actually prepare for the new resolutions don't have enough time to write good answers to the generics.
You might have a point here. But there's always been a substratum of debaters who will do anything they can not to debate a topic. This is probably non-unique.
1d: Frequently changing resolutions was an adaptation to a world where absent a summer camp in a university library, finding new angles on an existing resolution was very difficult (note how evidence poor LD cases were in the nineties). The internet solves this.
I'd need to see your evidence on this. My guess is that it was a direct response to the annual nature of the policy rez, and an attempt to keep LD different. And anyhow, if this were true, why did the policy people all have 5 tubs? Merely because the resolution didn't change? Wedro used to bring evidence on everything from Kant to Shinola, for that matter.
2a: Bad resolutions might go by more quickly, but if those resolutions are the chosen ones for States/TOC/NFL/CFL, they have just as much impact.
The impact of these 4 examples are radically different. A state topic is local and affects only some in that state. The impact of TOC is fairly toxic in a variety of ways, and is overwhelming in convincing people that they have to do certain things to debate at the "top" level. This presumes TOC style debate is the top. Whatever, but the influence of the event is overwhelming. The NFL influence is passive aggressive at best in that they create all the topics but not everyone believes in the organization as a standard setter. And the effect of the CFL topic is usually limited to Catholics, who on hearing the resolution for a given year, start to consider once again if they wouldn't be better off if they converted to Lutheranism. Anyhow, if all these groups just went with the NFL topics in the first place, the point is moot.
2b: Resolutional quality isn't endogenous to resolutional quantity. The wording committee only has so much time to work, and proposal quality would also go up if there were fewer proposals needed (see: policy). This turns the argument.
No. The quality of the resolutions is not in question. This is a separate issue altogether. That's why I don't want to conflate the particular Jan-Feb with this discussion. Whether NFL can do a better job of creating resolutions stands whether there's one of a hundred.
2c: More resolutions advantage large squads and those with large budgets. Small squads with poor connections to the alumni coaching network need to attend a circuit tournament before they even know what is going to be run on a resolution, and with the resolution changing every two months that means they need to attend one every month. For resolutions that are basically only run once, such squads get completely blindsided by those who can do a lot of brainstorming and scrimmages.
That seems true to me, but at the same time, what doesn't advantage the large squad over the small? Your point above about generic kritik responses sound to me like the small squad circuit debater's response to this. Anyhow, I'm not advocating running anything once; that was mere reminiscing. Two months is pretty long in debate years.
Counterplan: LD should have two resolutions a year, one released August fifteenth and the other December first. Resolutions should be drawn from a very long list which has five added to it every June by the topic committee. Advantages:
1. The list can grow very long (a hundred?), thus making current prep on the entire list infeasible for even very large teams, and lowering the edge provided by going to a summer camp which luckily picked an important topic (and the resentment from paying a lot of money to a camp which failed to do so). This also means that resolutions will tend to spend a long time on the list before being picked, allowing campaigns against those with poor or offensive wording.
I like the idea of giving people an opportunity to think about things over a long term. We essentially agreed to that on TVFT. We move too fast, and over the summer, no less. Not good.
1b. This basically sets LD up as a logistically constrained version of policy, which has all the advantages of policy debate theory, but without the semi-mandatory camp and evidence burden and requirement for a partner. As I've argued previously, affirmative parametrics will solve for negative win skew. This is analogous to off-season-practice rules for sports, but without the enforcement hassles.
Could be...
2. Gets rid of the most important driver for modest novice (that novices can't be expected to debate a new resolution on their second or third tournament) without triggering the harms of modest novice (small squads and those on the edge of the service area are burdened with prepping yet another resolution).
True enough, but actually the biggest MN driver was avoiding giving novices a random (and crappy) resolution that was not beneficial for novitiate training.
3. Debate quality improves for the Glenbrooks, Blake, Apple Valley, and Princeton just as it has for TOC vs NFL and CFL. The quality of debate has gone up tremendously since the nineties, except for those tournaments which insist on vanity resolutions and random judging. This is not random.
I see no proof of this in-case. Pure assertion. (I love saying that.)
All of that said, I am nonetheless rather intrigued by the idea of two topics, especially given the long brooding process. One of my chief objections to certain topics over the years has been that one or two words in the rez make it unacceptable or hard to debate, and time would heal that wound. In the modern world, we essentially only have 3 topics a year anyhow—Sept-Oct, Nov-Dec, and Jan-TOC. And there is privileging via camps that could be addressed. Of course, how do you do anything about this? Well, perhaps some November tournaments simply run Sept-Oct and do it de facto if not de NFLo. I don't know.
We'll probably end up discussing this on TVFT.
11 comments:
0. Yes, I don't really think more tournaments deciding not to use the NFL topic is a good thing or all that feasible. So given that the NFL has no interest in listening to either of us, we're probably agreed on the thing we actually have control over. So much for war.
1a. Assertion I won't defend here: only policy and parli can be meaningfully different. Extemp is just parli with only one speech.
1b. I think I believe in systematics more than you do (I am Catholic, after all). So I tend to think that the particular context is less interesting than the theory. But much of a muchness, yes.
1c. May not be offense, but at minimum it minimizes the advantage of switching topics.
1d. Judge a whole season of local policy. Cry a lot. Then talk to me. I've no idea why Wedro carried all that evidence. The thing about philosophy is that the argument is the argument, regardless of who says it.
2a. So your moving-target advocacy does somewhat de-link this, but I still think it's a good reason for NFL and CFL nationals to stop using private resolutions.
2b. This is my offense, and I'm questioning it. I think that one of the primary reasons for having fewer rather than more resolutions is that we want good ones. That's separate from anything particular on this Jan/Feb rez.
2c. I'm actually going to call privilege on this one. For you, two months is a long time in debate years. For Dallastown debaters, it's an eyeblink. They just don't get to that many circuit tournaments.
1. First you say it's war, then you agree with me. Hrmph.
2. This kinda links to my previous point about fewer resolutions leading to higher quality resolutions, no?
3. You may not like the style of contemporary debate, but flow one of those NFL rounds from the nineties available on video. Both the breadth and depth of argumentation was way lower then.
But yes, if I ever have uncapped internet again, I'll look forward to listening to TVFT on the subject.
I want to chime in on the debate is better today than it was in the 90's. Im sorry but there is no way that is true. LD debate in the 90's was accessible to all, public speaking skills still counted for something, and you didnt have to go to a camp to suceed.....
I was speaking purely about breadth *and depth* of arguments. If you want accessible speaking, you have to give up on tabula rasa judging--that's just the way it is. Academic article on that tradeoff currently under review. That's why I think we should get rid of LD, PF, and Congress in favor of British Parli (more elaborate blogpost on that also forthcoming).
I would have to disagree. Many of the arguments run today are obscure and stretch the topic to it's limits. I write this as a someone who debated in the 1990s and then returned as a volunteer coach recently. I was very excited to have to coach ld debate, until I saw what ld debate has evolved into. I'm not the only one who thinks this. Menick has posted about his thoughts on this, making his varsity debaters go into pf. I've done the same just put them in congress. I long for the return of true Lincoln Douglas debate- substantive arguments about philosophy presented with conversational delivery, accessible to all.
Anon,
We can disagree on the aesthetic merits of "pushing a topic to its limits" but that is exactly what happens in any debate event with tabula rasa judging--look at where PF is rapidly heading. If you don't want policy, then you want legislative debate--Congress is fluffy because it has so many students per session, so I prefer the British Parli format.
Tournaments, of course, can run whatever topic they feel like. Still can. In addition to the list Jim posted , Harvard and Manchester used to have their own LD topics as well.
I can’t really read Ryan’s post right now, because I can’t connect to his server. Later I likely won’t have the time- I’ll throw my cents in anyway.
I suspect that more resolutions don’t automatically favor large squads- That is only true with the shift of LD towards a much more technical style. My experience is that even with the shift away from philisophical arguments, debaters run pretty much the same arguments every round. The difference now is that those arguments have much more specialized and narrow warrants than even a few years ago.
In full disclosure, I don't think that LD Debate, as currently practiced, is 'better' than it formerly was. The Final round at NFLs (or any big tournament, really) is rarely a model of the best current practices then in vogue for all sorts of reasons.
True, currently a set of debaters with TOC aspirations DO debate far more technically than before, but that is a different question. I think more resolutions would tend to make it harder for debaters to specialize.
While judging the current topic, including a fair number of debaters who did quite well, I was struck by the sameness of the evidence being read. Not just the same arguments, the sameness of the authors themselves. So whatever else is happening, developing research skills is clearly not currently a prized skill.And this is WITH the current topic selection format. Which I suppose WOULD be a reason to substitute Parli for LD.
Another area which is particularly a problem is in the attempts of some LD debaters to ape the practices of policy debate.
I happen to think that TEAM policy debate is highly educational. When I say LD Debate should not mirror policy, I don't mean that policy debate is bad. I mean that the structure of LD Debate mean that quality policy debate in LD will almost never happen. it is doomed to be JV Policy Debate at best. My evidence IS anecdotal. But it is taken from observing late elim rounds between debaters with many many bids at TOC level tournaments. And frankly, I believe they would have been hard pressed to reach the equvalent round in JV Policy.
As for Parlit, the problem with Parli debate is that, as practiced in the United States, in round information is largely limited to that which is held by an average educated person. No specialized knowledge. Not to be rude, but I don't want to judge or coach students when they are limited to knowledge held by the average educated person. Doesn’t have to be that way, but it could be, and often is that way.
I am with Robert Heinlein in believing that specialization is for insect, and I do believe that having multiple topics would reduce specialization and the hyper technical style currently in vogue.
Anyway- that was a quick dash off....
PJ
PJ,
Thanks for your thoughts.
1. Odd since Jim and I are both hosted on blogspot. Whims of the internet, I suppose.
2. We must see very different debate rounds (with MJP, plausibly true). I judged a PA local, Big Lex, and the Lex RR on this topic. At the local, it was the same arguments as in 1996. At Big Lex, there were an incredible variety of interesting and well-researched positions. At the RR, it was all terrible theory debates (of course, I judged with Craig Gilbert for most rounds, who loves theory, so, adaptation).
3. I think you're largely right that LD-policy is bad policy. That might warrant a blog post in itself, but obvious reasons are the shorter total speech time, much less time to prep the resolution, and more disparate community norms about such arguments so that debaters spend more time worrying about "plans bad" theory and less about case hits.
4. The point about parli may be fair--though in PA HS parli has both prepared and impromptu rounds. My point is a broader one, which is that if you want rhetoric, legislative debate is the right model, not tinkering with LD. I don't pretend to have enough expertise on exactly how that legislative debate should be structured, other than that Student Congress is pretty low grade.
BP might be interesting if it were 2 on 2, but 4 vs. 4 BP is absolutely awful for any number of reasons. Mainly, the rounds are way too long with minimal incentive to pay attention/learn once your portion of the debate is finished beyond paying the bare minimum amount of attention to make periodic POI's. 2 on 2 BP might be better, but at that point, you might as well do American Parliamentary debate (which is sort of practiced in Connecticut on the HS level I believe). AP would be an excellent high school activity since it lets students select issues that they care about and are interested in (and culturally relevant pedagogy is generally considered a good thing), especially since the minimal prep allows students to compete in AP if they don't like the topic in LD, Policy, or PF.
Congress has a whole host of problems that I won't get into, but suffice it to say, I would be pretty ok with the elimination of Congress as an event.
Anon,
PA does World Schools-style parli, which is also alright, and has some pre-announced-topic rounds too, which is a nice mix. I guess I thought since Congress is probably too far gone to be worth saving, BP might redeem some of its strategic features--and I have some college friends who really like it. But I haven't really seen enough parli of any type to have strong opinions.
Ryan,
I'm actually an ex-PA debater currently in college competing on APDA (American Parliamentary Debate Association). I've competed in one BP tournament as well. If you're describing BP as practiced at States (where it was, if I'm remembering correctly, 3 vs. 3) that isn't worlds style though (which is 4 vs. 4). I never did Parli at states though, so I can't speak to the merits of that particular style.
If you'd have any interest in discussing the relative merits of Congress, APDA, and BP as they apply to HS debate in person, I'll be at Pennsbury judging for Upper Dublin next weekend and am almost always up for discussing debate.
-Nate
Nate,
I wasn't at Pennsbury, but I'd love to chat at some point--shoot me an email or look me up on FB or something. In any case, you'll find that PHSSL parli intentionally apes the "World Schools" (for high school students) rules, which are very different than the BP/World Universities style. But I'd love to talk about the tradeoffs in various types of parli.
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