In which we talk about independent entries

There's been lots of bad craziness in certain quarters having nothing to do with forensics, so I won’t bother you with that. We'll just get down to our own craziness.

I have to admit that I’m amused by the so-called arguments in favor of independent entries. I mean, we’ve had independent entries for as long as I can remember, starting back usually with an eager LDer accompanied by a long-suffering parent. Some of our favorite judges (and people) were those parents, because they were usually pretty smart people who understood the activity and listened to the arguments and made relatively clear decisions based on easy to understand criteria. One wishes one could say that about all judges. Anyhow, as far as I know, no one is trying to eliminate such entries from the field. There are certain aspects of such entries, for instance, a presumed privilege set, given that it’s their own money, but they carry the benign agreement of their schools that they do what they’re doing. I’ve seen some arguments about liability and such with parents, but at the core I wonder if anyone is really worried about that. I guess when something horrible happens, that attitude will change, but at the moment, that’s all really beside the point.

The other independent entries I have experience of is paid-for programs that teach debate. Without exception, every one of these I have dealt with has caused unacceptable problems. They've lied, created bogus schools, flouted judge obligations, and turned all sorts of tricks wreaking amazing havoc in the tab room when their shenanigans are eventually uncovered. The idea that these folks are white knights fighting for a universal right to debate who deserve a chance runs counter to the experiences we’ve had in the time that we have given them the chance. They have uniformly behaved badly. To suggest that some of what they do is non-unique does not address the fact that, if a school does it, I have recourse to that school’s administration (recourse which we have taken) but when one of these programs does it, and you go to find the adult supervisor and there isn’t one, and when you fall back on email and the registrant was actually the student with a secondary email, well, you’ve gotten nowhere.

I’m certainly in favor of more debate for more people. I’m in favor of schools doing a lot of good things for more people. I also understand that education dollars are limited (which I feel is one of the great failings of our society). But let’s face it. Families are spending a lot of money to get their kids independent debate training. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if they want to participate in organized high school debate, they need to be part of the high school debate organization. They obviously have the money to put into that effort, and the paid-for programs have the incentive to funnel their protégés into organized programs, so let them do that. But meanwhile, I hate to say it, but years of unacceptable behavior are pretty hard to ignore, and are also not worth arguing about, which is why I haven’t gotten involved in any “forums” on the subject. All of these programs have given me good reasons not to have anything to do with them: a lot of talk about how wonderful they are is extremely unlikely to make me forget those bad experiences.