In which, from the side, we comment on the latest

Next week—Saturday to be exact—the race will be on. Byram Hills, Yale and Big Bronx all open registration on 8/1. Fortunately for the sanity of the grownups among us, first-come first-served will not be an issue. No one will have to stay up till the weewee hours. No one will get shut out because they’re sunning in the tropics instead of hovering over their computers. Think of it as the Summer of Love. Or at least Like.

Meanwhile, over on Facebook there’s been an interesting discussion started by Chetan about problems with LD. Mostly good, smart thinking, and you might want to check it out. I don’t agree with all of it, but that’s beside the point. Even if you think LD is the bee’s knees, and the beesiest and kneesiest it’s ever been, you can’t be blind to its simmering controversies. That there is a circuit and a general population that are quite different seems to be clear. I gather that the gen pop is fairly similar to what one remembers from a couple of decades ago, at least insofar as they bother to find out what the resolution is every couple of months, while the circuit bears virtually no resemblance to what it used to be. The complaints, of course, are about the circuit.

Plaintive cries that no one argues the resolution are rife on Fb and Twitter (and there’s probably pictures of it on Instagram). This is not new—its roots are in the Pomo era—but I gather it’s now almost the norm. Much of the blame is placed on the unsupervised coaching by college students who push all kinds of nutty stuff, then go in and judge things based on their own scales of nuttiness. Members of the VCA are well aware of my opinion of recently graduated students, many of whom are great and valuable and some of whom ought to grow up and go to college. Oh, wait, they already do. That’s a tough problem. We need college students to judge, but college students need to be in college where they belong. All the half-baked Pomo stuff back in the day came from college students who were enamored of material that academia had already almost completely discounted. It was seductive, despite the fact that it was mostly useless in weighing the subjects of high school debate. Today it’s theory and pre-resolution arguments and anything but finding out about and debating the resolution.

But is that really all so terrible? I don’t know. I see it as just another step in the evolution of the event. I mean, once we buy into the idea that the event will evolve (and all events do, to some extent), we go where it takes us. Natural forces will guide it. And if those natural forces are college students, well, so be it. We’ve made our bed… Then again, these are the words of a coach who gave up on LD and switched his team to PF. What do I know?

On the other hand, there are those who blame the fall of LD squarely on MJP. Here I disagree. I’ve argued at great length that if everyone uses MJP, there is a muting of the effect of our wayward college judges. When people sneer at MJP and refuse to use it, and those people are inevitably traditionalists, then the result is that the circuit styles take over. More to the point, the alternatives to MJP don’t measure up. The number of people who want totally random judging, going by the number of people who storm the tab room when they don’t like that they got a 3 (and who drive in in tanks with cannons blazing when they get a 4 or a 5, treating those numbers as de factor strikes), is pretty damned small, at least at circuit tournaments. This is competitive debate with high stakes. Few are the teams that are willing to take their chances on going to Kentucky in the Spring on a toss of the dice. Don’t pretend otherwise, please. Aside from MJP and random judging, there’s assignments by the tab room of judge rankings. Again, I’ve argued at length why this is not the most fair way of handling things. I’m in endless tab rooms. Do you wish to trust your judging fate to my evaluation of the judges? Didn’t think so, although that’s the way we used to do it. Of course, some juggling of the percentages and number of categories in MJP may improve the strict breakdown of 5 equal groups + strikes. Maybe. But from my long years running systems departments and managing change, I maintain that the devil people know is always best, unless there’s a true, definable, demonstrable and preferably immediate change for the better for them. People have been getting used to what we’ve been doing, and work their prefs accordingly. Changing it without serious systemic amelioration simply makes their lives more complex without their perceiving any benefit. If all tournaments do things the same, people know what to do. If each one is different, or one or two are different, not so much. People will adapt, but they won’t be happy. And minor changes at one tournament won’t change endemic problems with preffing, if there indeed are endemic problems.

Oh, well. That’s my two cents. It doesn’t matter much, until people start storming the tab room again. When they do, I’ll be the guy hiding under the desk listening to my Legendary Masters of the Art of Yodeling album.