In which we spew venom as the calendar settles down again

I think I was very circumspect when the subject of Emory moving into MLK weekend reared its ugly head. It wasn't so much that it was the dumbest thing I'd heard in a long time, so much as it was completely tone deaf. I simply referred to it as boneheaded. The fact that they have bowed to public pressure and gone back to their regular weekend, claiming how they were just trying to be accommodating, was not some great concession on their part. It was the only play they had. Because here's the thing: in 2015, nobody cares about Emory. Or Greenhill, or Glenbrooks, or Harvard. Most of the people attending these tournaments, at least in debate, are there for the bids. You may have noticed that it's the same schools participating at all of these tournaments, that small community of well-healed or well-funded programs that can afford to get on a plane week after week, and who only value success if they earn a bid. Go undefeated in prelims and drop in the bid round? You have failed, and perhaps the judging that caused you to fail was illegitimate. Nobody cares about doing well at or winning the tournament they're at; all they care about is getting to that final tournament, that apotheosis of all things high school debatable. Winning that one is the only win that matters. Never mind the flaws of the TOC—there's a length limit on blog posts, which prevents me from enumerating them now—as long as you get to the TOC. Every step along the way is merely that, a step along the way.

I don't need to lecture you on the nature of how we value things. In a nutshell, gold is valuable because we value it. You can do all the riffs on that yourself. The point is, we don't really value debate tournaments much anymore, at least on the circuit, or at least not as debate tournaments. The big colleges may put on good shows with good competition and the like, but half the people at these tend to be tourists. Harvard's a good example of that. So is Columbia, where people don't show up for rounds because they're taking in a matinee of "Wicked." People travel to the Ivies to see the Ivies, to buy the t-shirt, to pretend that some day they'll matriculate here. Maybe they will. As for the rest of it, where is the bid, and did you get it? That's all anybody cares about. How is that good for debate, or for education, or whatever else it is we claim to value about the activity?

One of Emory's mistakes was thinking that anyone gives a hoot about Emory qua Emory. If you move it, they will come. Actually, no, they won't. The circuit debate community comprises consumers of bids, and they will do their shopping where the bids are most reasonably available. These consumers will do their CBAs and act accordingly. They are mostly not impressed just because you give everything a fancy name and parade the coaches around like the College of Cardinals. Emory is a certain number of bids at a certain cost, while [insert local tournament here] is this number of bids at a different cost. Where do I best spend my team's debate dollars?

Giving colleges octafinals bids is, as I've said many times, high schools outsourcing their tournaments. Bietz had the best idea ever, that no college could ever have more than a semis bid. The idea that the college tournaments are so far removed from the audience they claim to serve that they could pull a stunt like Emory did—and that's only one example of a college completely removed from the high school community and acting accordingly—demonstrates beyond question the problem with our giving all our businesses to colleges. Keep in mind that I tab and/or help direct a bunch of college tournaments. What makes them work, in my mind, is that they have kept people like me, from the high school community, as part of their operation. We know the community they're attempting to serve. Think back to when all these colleges tried to do it themselves. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting yet another boneheaded move. The idea that tournaments have indelible weekends is so etched into the high school debate consciousness that, really, there is no excuse for what Emory attempted to do. That they could not see the ramifications of this defies logic, unless they simply are so removed from our community that it wasn't because they didn't care, but because they didn't even know. That's the saddest part about it. They didn't even know.