I’ve always felt that debate is something like another dimension, a fantasy world coexisting with life in the real world. For one thing, we move unseen into empty spaces when everyone else has gone away. When the final school bell rings on Friday afternoon, most people—both students and teachers—disappear quickly and never look back until Monday morning. If they did look back, it would be as if they were watching a haunted house. The place is supposed to be empty, but there’s a ghostly face in the window of a classroom on the second floor, there’s unexplained noises from an open window over on the left, there’s cars in the parking lot with out-of-state license plates. Yet there’s no game on the football field. The lights are out in the gymnasium. There’s no drama production tonight.
Most people who work all week take the weekend off. Debaters work all week, and then they go on to work all weekend. Given the average adolescent’s need for sleep and inability to wake up in the morning (even if they’ve been moving for hours from classroom to classroom), voluntarily giving up a Saturday to get up even earlier than usual and start performing at eight o’clock defies logic.
The adult presences are elusive. While a debate tournament might take over an entire school building, few of the adults are from that school, and little of the normal infrastructure of the school is in place while tournaments are happening. The adults present have responsibility only for their own small groups of students, and some of those adults are barely so, students themselves only slightly older than their charges.
We, the debate community, are like squatters, taking over abandoned spaces on the weekends and then disappearing when the proper inhabitants return. And as squatters, we have created a whole independent infrastructure of our own, replete with official organizations and unofficial organizations, expensive elite events and inexpensive open events, politics and politicians among the adults, stars and wannabes among the students. We bestow fame easily, fueled by the mechanisms of the internet. We do things we are proud of and wish that there was more light shining on us, and we do things we are not so proud of and we’re thankful for our shadow existence.
Because, in practical reality, we answer to no one, we create our own norms. We determine, as a community, the things you can and can’t do. Because we also live in the real world most of the time, or at least most of us do, our norms aren’t terribly different from acceptable real world norms. But when our norms are challenged, for whatever reason, because we don’t have the infrastructural underpinnings of the real world we start to see how shadowy our universe really is. How borderline anarchic. How tentative. When our community norms actually conflict with accepted norms in our broader outside community, our ad hoc squatters’ infrastructure faces its greatest threats.
Change in this sort of community is difficult. I don’t mean natural change, that is, the evolution over time of events and practices; that happens all on its own. I’m talking about enforced change, against the tide of evolution. If things evolve in such a way that the direction seems bad, trying to change direction is very difficult because no structures are in place to do so. All our structures are ad hoc; our infrastructure is ephemeral. Add to that the essential nature of the people involved: argumentative, libertarian, vocal, political, philosophical, independent, competitive, fiercely dedicated. Conflicting structuralist perceptions can make determining whether or not it’s Thursday a major discussion.
I want to make big changes in our activity. I already have made a bunch of changes, for better or worse. What I'm looking at now is not changing what we do, necessarily, but changing how we go about doing it. I want to normalize communications. I want a central, open broadcast network for opinions, viewpoints, case evaluation, tabulation, confrontation, disputes, conversation, acclamation, declamation, judge training, standards, best practices, education, analysis. I want to use that broadcast network to take this shadow organization and unify it in a meaningful way, not organizationally (we already have plenty of organizations) but spiritually. I want to bring it out into the light.
I’m a firm believer in engagement of issues. I’m a firm believer in openness. I’m a firm believer that free speech opens a pathway to truth.
I have serious doubts about how successful I’ll be at this. In fact, at the moment I’m already exhausted, having spent little more than a month at it—and a million emails—and gotten almost nowhere. Still, I’m going to hold to an immediate goal of having something to present for NDCA in a couple of weeks. I will, if nothing else, have a meaningful Tournament Director’s Toolkit published by the beginning of next season, with or without a real sponsor.
I’m not going out yet, but I will be going out eventually. The question is, with a bang or with a whimper?
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