The Topic Cycle

I’ve made my feelings known about Jan-Feb on TVFT, and to some extent here. I’m agin’ it. I measure the possibility of harm against the magnitude of the harm, and I find the math unacceptable. My job is to educate students about various ethical subjects against the backdrop of competitive debate; I am ill equipped to engage myself in handling the problems they may be encountering in their personal lives, and I certainly do not want, inadvertently or otherwise, to make any of those problems worse.

I’m less certain about how to handle it, though. We had this topic in the past and it flew right over my head, and the heads of most other forensicians. What has changed? Probably nothing, except that this time we saw the light (or dark) and that time we didn’t. So it goes. Because it got by us the first time doesn’t warrant using it the second time. As we agreed on TVFT, there is no blame for anyone here, from the committee to the community. (We distinguished this one from the hideous ill-informed Muslim center PF topic, which as a political wedge issue was beneath contempt as a subject for intelligent discussion, and worse, a direct harm to the Muslims in our community, who would have no choice but to defend a position claiming that their right of free speech ought to be abridged for no other reason than their religion. That one was dead on arrival. And the NFL should have known better.)

The solutions to handling the resolution have ranged, but one thing that has come up is the idea of not continuing to debate it past the theoretical normal end of its cycle. In other words, at the very least, let it go away on its expiration date. That is a proposal before the NDCA now for their national tournament, and one that I will put before the NYSDCA for our state event. But that raises another question, and while I have been separating that other question from the content discussion of this particular topic, I still think it’s worth thinking about. To wit, why the hell do we stop changing topics after the turn of the new year? I mean, I know the answer, but it’s a dumb one, and we should rethink this question, regardless of the content of any given topic, at the macro level.

Back when I started in this activity (during the Buchanan administration, if I remember correctly), we had a Sept-Oct topic, a Big Bronx topic, a Nov-Dec, a Jan-Feb, a Mar-Apr, a NY State Finals, a CFL Finals and an NFL Finals topic. I would regularly be prepping 6 topics, in other words, and occasionally 7 or 8. If there was something wrong with a topic, you waited a minute and there was the next one, and you moved along. All of which raises the question, was it a good thing to have this many topics? I think yes. Or at least I think it was mostly yes. The more parochial a topic would get, i.e., the smaller the group selecting it, the less likely it was really all that good, but by that standard the NFL topics, at least, were usually quite acceptable, and we had all voted on them straight up, and there you were.

If you followed the NFL exclusively, you debated probably 4 different topics over the space of a year, about two months per. You got as far as you could go in two months, and then you moved along. In policy, on the other hand, one topic lasts all year. One can qualitatively compare the nature of the two beasts by comparing the quantitative depth achievable over the different life spans. A policy topic has to be deep, and it has to have a year’s worth of analysis in it. Every day new research will bring up new stuff, and over the space of a year cases will come and go as the world changes and cases hit the public awareness and new blocks are developed, et cetera, et cetera. The same holds true in LD, but only for a couple of months. Then it starts all over again. (And keep in mind that some of the logic informing PF’s one-month span is precisely to restart the process every few weeks, to prevent the deep sea research diving and twisty-turny-theory arcs of a longer span.)

I like the change of topics. I like that students will get a new subject to dig into every couple of months. I can see the value of one topic dug into all year, but if that’s what you want to do, take up policy. The problem is, for reasons I do not know, but which I expect were predicated on the policy bias of the TOC folks at the time—which meant that here was a group of people raised on a year of a given topic who looked at LD and said, wouldn’t it be great if we just used the Jan-Feb topic, to get all the benefits of depth we know will ensue?—TOC instituted using Jan-Feb in May. Which is fine and dandy, but now, everybody does it. You can’t run a tournament in March or April and use anything but the Jan-Feb topic (aside, of course, from District tournaments and the odd CFL qualifier).

Does this make sense? Well, if we’re looking at every tournament in the universe after Jan 1 as prep for the TOC, it would, except I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of people who do LD after Jan 1 of a given year aren’t going to TOC. Another issue is that people believe that students don’t want to write cases on a new topic after March 1, so we say okay, and let them keep going with what they have, even in novice divisions. Of course novices don’t need experience writing cases on new resolutions; however could anyone have ever believed that? (This paragraph, by the way, is dripping with sarcasm. If you didn't realize that, you need to readjust your sarcasometer.)

What I think we need to do is look at the question on its own merits. Should we switch topics ever two months? If it makes sense in November and January, why doesn’t it make sense in March? Because TOC does it? If, as my mother used to say, TOC jumps off a bridge, are you going to do it too? Because it’s work? Are we saying that our poor little students shouldn’t have to write cases? That sort of presumes that all those TOC people write a case on Jan 1 and then stop, and, uh, that’s not true.

Changing topics regularly is good educationally. Not changing topics offers no educational benefit over changing topics (aside, perhaps, of allowing students to concentrate on class work rather than debate). We should seriously reevaluate what we’re doing with late season tournaments.