Tying it up

From Ryan:

1. It's certainly true that *my* aesthetic preference is for NDT over parli/PF, but I also recognize that many people have a different aesthetic preference, which doesn't go away, and hence keep creating these events when their former events turn into NDT-style debate.

2. Ever-shrinking-policy: part of this is the high-overhead environment, and part of it is presumably resultant from the splintering of events. If your aesthetic preference is policy, policy may accommodate that best, but LD can do it without the hassle of a partner and until recently the necessity to fly tubs. That becomes self-reinforcing as smaller communities have to fly more. Also, the sortof kids and schools who now do PF used to do local-traditional policy, and thus be counted in the policy numbers and sometimes developed their own pathways to the circuit. In other words, think of creating new lower-overhead debate events as a kind of redistribution, with some efficiency cost.

3. So what does that look like? First, I want to be clear about my rhetoric: some redistribution is worth doing, if it keeps the peace and increases overall engagement. Second, while my comments about parli may have been somewhat disparaging, I don't think it's value-less, and PF with adults doing the judging and tamping down the drinking may be rather more so. The trick is how to avoid bifurcation, with the kids who want to put in more effort going to camp, then pushing the bounds of high-overhead debate and pushing for judges who let them do that. If those kids don't get those judges, they're cranky. If they do, their opponents are cranky. PF is already seeing these tensions.

Well, the high school debate event that has totally avoided the NDT-track is congress. Why? Well, topics change constantly, so camps focus more on general speaking and research ability than 'winning' debates, judge intervention is institutionalized and expected (your speech will rate lower if you say dumb things, even if no later speech addresses this) and perhaps most fundamentally it's ranked rather than win/lose, which makes the intervention more appropriate and less galling. The trouble with congress is that (like college parli) the students write the topics which are often poor and long chains of unaffiliated debaters have little incentive to engage the topics deeply, so debates are terminally boring.

Proposal: British parli, with extemp topics, and no limits on outside resources (like extemp). Debaters and teams are ranked, like congress, with similar judging norms. Topics change by the round, so camps are out of the picture. Eight speeches per debate, rather than 38, make debates more tractable, focused, and interesting, with defined speaker responsibilities. Also, if congress and PF can both be folded in, and extempers feel free to join occasionally, we get some of that natural strength in numbers, with real local/regional circuits. The educational value of an extemp-debate hybrid should be clear.

I know proposing a whole new/consolidated event seems like a difficult/expensive solution to an event's internal problems, but I really think PFD is headed right down the same rails as LD and Policy before it. Even those who share that aesthetic preference, like me, should resist that because it further segments those who want to do NDT-style debate and locks out those who don't.

There's not much more to say on this, I think. The real issue at the end, following Ryan's thinking, is Parli in HS forensics (an event about which I know virtually nothing). They offer it at Yale, and I've looked at getting it into Princeton, but at almost any existing venue, space limitations rule the roost, and short of dropping an existing activity, there's nowhere to put a new one. And that's just the beginning of the problems with seriously supporting a new activity.

I wonder if it could ever really happen.