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As an activity, forensics is supposedly all about communication. That makes me wonder how we can be so surpassingly bad at it sometimes. We’re good at talking, but really rather bad at other forms as a community. There are pockets of active offline communication, but pockets they remain.

This past weekend was the NCFL National Tournament, where the LD and the PFD resolutions met a mixed reception at best. The tournament featured some pretty classic arguments on both topics; on the question of fine arts education versus athletics, we’re told that the fine arts should be defunded, since that will help reduce the homosexual population. Ah, how cunning: musical theater doesn’t attract the gays, it creates them.

That aside, people seemed more unhappy than not with the topics. So, unlike most folks who just bitched in quiet voices to each other, I asked Greg, our local moderator who’s also on the executive council about it. He said they didn’t have much to choose from, just three submissions. Submissions, you say? Yes, it appears for years now, a call goes out in September for anyone and everyone to suggest potential topics for Nationals.

Well, I’ll be damned. That’s the first I knew of that.

The fault lines here are several. One is that the NCFL is structured in such a way to permit a lot of things like this to pass through the cracks. The league itself only communicates directly to the diocesan moderators, who do a variable job at best of pushing it onwards to their diocese’s members. I think the NCFL, like the NFL, operates under the false presumption that the diocesan moderators run their local league. This is untrue in Massachusetts, where the state league runs the show; it’s untrue in a lot of other places as well.

So where you have a structure like ours, the local CFL moderator runs the show two weekends out of the year; once when the qualifier is run, and once when Nationals itself happens. I can imagine there’s a natural tendency to pay attention only then. Or, a tendency among the moderators to worry mostly about the really important logistic details, and leave everything else aside.

The second issue is that league leaders are not uniformly drawn from all forensics persuasions. Some areas might have great debate coaches with lots to contribute, but if their league leader is mostly an interp coach, the communications channel may be inadequate to the task. Relying on the diocesan moderator to be an everyman who knows all the events well enough to express concerns is going to fail sooner or later.

So the NCFL loses touch of its local coaches, since it doesn’t really try to talk to the coaches directly; it talks to the moderators, who serve as inefficient choke-points for a lot of this information. I have a good moderator who also sits on the executive council, and yet the open submission of LD topics was news to me. That’s a problem, certainly, on the NCFL’s part.

But it’s a problem on the part of the LD coaches bitching about the topic too. It didn’t take me a heck of a lot of effort to just walk up to Greg and ask what the process was, and I don’t even coach LD anymore. There’s a strong assumption on the part of a lot of coaches that Things Are The Way They Are, and the only reason they haven’t changed is because some pinhead somewhere has managed to accrue a lot of power and privilege and refuses to budge. That’s sometimes true, but it’s not true a lot, too. Not all nuns are conservative, and not all traditions are hallowed; sometimes they’re traditions because no one bothered to try and change them.

So I’m going to short-circuit the whole thing next year, and do what perhaps the NCFL should have done in the first place, and bridge what the LD coaches should have bridged long ago. When the call for topics goes out, I’ll just post the friggin thing on Victory Briefs. Doing my part…

So I decided I don’t like debating economics, for the same reason I don’t like extemp speeches about science and technology. You need a master’s degree at least to talk about these issues directly in a way that can be debated.

In an ordinary comfortable LD debate, at issue are ethical issues which have voices of authority behind them, but at root there are no correct or incorrect answers once one has passed a relatively low bar of understanding the resolution at hand. Once you understand, say, that a question about security in a terrorist-threatened society is about protection versus liberty, you’re off to the races.

But what we faced this weekend in PF at the Just Another Tournament was a debate over economic issues; will Bush’s little checks and their related goodies actually dig us out of this economic hole? The trouble with this topic is that your average high school student, and average person, can argue effectively in terms of ethics and philosophy, but in the world of the economic, there are clear cut correct and incorrect answers in some fields. What do you do as a judge when a team flings a case of unmitigated falsity up there, and you know it? You can wait for the other team to tear it down, if they can, but it still leaves one unsatisfied. In extempland, I’d just write a ballot explaining the errors and move on, but that’s intervention in debate, and not fair ground.

Furthermore, what should a team do when their opponent starts flinging out (warranted!) things that are flatly untrue, based on misunderstandings of basic economic principles? Stuff becomes a push in debater terminology when really one team was absolutely correct and the other was not, and sometimes the judges know it and sometimes they don’t, depending on their own background.

Result? Lots of really awful debates. The resolution ultimately wasn’t about a question of thought and ambiguity. It’s a technical prediction. The question of whether Bush’s economic package will work does have an answer. It’s ambiguous not by nature, but by complexity; the model is too vast to know, but if we did comprehend it, we could have a clean cut binary answer. At root then, the only debates on this topic are debates as to interpretations of known facts trying to fill in unknown facts. That got messy, to say the least, especially given that the high schoolers in question somehow are not fluent in a field where PhDs still can’t make accurate predictions. Go figure.

This is not true of ethical questions that make the usual stuff of debate. We’ll never have an answer as to whether hate crimes are just or not; exploring that issue is exploring thought, not fact. That’s better ground for debate, and I hope the mysterious back room topic writers stay there in the future. There is room for economic debate of course, but it should redirect towards the social questions of economics; how much assistance should a society grant its poor? How should goods be allocated? Stick to that and we’re OK; but for now, watching high school kids trying to do the work of dissertation writers is nobody’s idea of fun.

So Mr Menick is jealous of the CFL PF topic, and I’m jealous of the LD topic.  I think the solution is clear; let’s trade!  His major objection to the LD topic is the lack of a conflict; there’s nothing inherently oppositional about arts education and athletic education; and in the realm of LD that may be true.  However, there’s a little thing called a budget; I’d say that pragmatically, arts education and athletics are in constant competition for the same extra-curricular pot of money.  Neither is part of various state testing procedures, so neither is required per se; but both need resources and therefore are head to head with each other when it comes to building a school district budget.

That’s all very detailed based and pragmatic for your average LDer, but in PF it would make plenty of ground for debate.  Massachusetts in the age of Prop 2 1/2 has felt this acutely, and usually to the detriment of the arts.

Meanwhile the Native Americans question has all sorts of fascinating angles that stem to sovereignty, the responsibilities of an occupying government towards a technically subject people, how much aboriginal Americans are in fact members of our society and how much they’re something else entirely, what is owed, and to whom.  It’s also a milder and less emotional way of attacking those issues, due to the fact that most Native Americans tend to be a step outside of mainstream and therefore their affairs aren’t as hot button as say, talking about slavery reparations to African Americans, or the Palestine/Israel crisis.   LDers can get away with far more with an LD style negative than PF teams will be able to on the aboriginal question.

So the solution is clear:  trade you!  Hell, I’ll even throw my next Scrabulous game to sweeten the deal.

This weekend we held the State Debate tournament. It was a small affair, but that fit well into a small school, enough so that we could flight the Varsity LD and Public Forum divisions and zip through the day three hours ahead of the intended finish, while adding a fifth prelim round. That left the novices with 4 prelims and a final, but if they wanted to step up, they should have stepped up; it’s not like it’s hard to qualify for States in debate. Nor should it be, so long as it stays small enough to host.

We had, after much promotion and excitement, 5 Miss America pageant winners of various stripes in attendance. They were led by Amanda Liverzani, who judged mostly LD.  The others, who hadn’t seen debate before, were in Public Forum. Their presence amused the hell out of everyone, though it was accompanied by a faint sense of doubt in everyone who had seen the infamous Miss South Carolina YouTube video. I wasn’t worried, though; Amanda was obviously sharp, and came highly recommended, so I doubted she would bring rank morons to a tournament. Any remaining doubts were dispelled by their first round ballots, which were crisp and insightful explanations of their decisions.

They were also terrific sports; they wore their tiaras all day, judged the Public Forum final together, and took pictures with the finalists and teams. I really hope they come back.

That got me thinking about aspects of exclusivity in our event. Public Forum, for all its foibles, has at its core a belief that it’s necessary to keep debate honest by routinely injecting fresh blood into the judges’ pool. Oliver Wendell Holmes described the law not in terms of an overarching theory, but rather simply as the accumulated set of actions judges take. If a judge will rule x, then x is law. Debate can be framed the same way. If judges collectively vote for something, then it will win; if not, then it won’t. If you have a stable judging pool with a long apprenticeship period, as exists in LD and Policy, you eventually grow a large body of unwritten rules and conventions that simply must be followed to win a ballot. In Policy and LD, the end result has been emphasis on argumentation that is logically sound, but ultimately unpersuasive; no one is going to change their own beliefs on the strength of most LD and Policy argumentation. But judges will change their ballots, so the students pick up on that, and leave aside the much tougher task of being persuasive.

Public Forum is an attempt to narrow the gap between ballot and belief, by constantly welcoming reasonably intelligent judges who have no preconceived notions of competitive debate. These judges are ignorant of jargon and must have it explained, so jargon is limited. But more to the point, they’re much more likely to vote on what they find more persuasive than some ethereal sense of context-less flow-logic. That keeps the event honest, and it brings a unique set of values to the forensics community.

The inclusiveness of the judging pool in PF highlights the exclusivity of the judging pools in LD and Policy. LD can be judged by novice judges, and the students sometimes adapt with success. LDers will often complain when they actually have to do this, even as they do grudgingly recognize the value of the adaptation skill. However, Policy doesn’t care at all. And therefore, it’s dying. The barriers to entry for new judges — understanding the event — are the same barriers faced by new programs. Those barriers are prohibitively high in Policy: the learning curve, and most of all, the lack of an immediately apparent educational benefit, together conspire to keep policy a closed and exclusive club. Forensics programs are not immortal, and every time a Policy team dies, it dies for good. We were down to 8 teams from 3 schools at States. Should one of those three programs decide to throw in the towel, especially Lexington, the league will likely have to follow suit.

I get a sense in talking to the true believers in Policyland that they’re waltzing on the deck of the Titanic; as a culture, they’re convinced of the complete superiority of the event, so they cannot countenance adjusting to others. Many don’t even recognize the value and abilities of those who do LD or PFD, to say nothing of IEs. So nothing changes. I remain sympathetic to their difficulties in finding rounds, but cannot do much else other than sympathize, and suggest subversively they give LD a whirl, or take a weekend and do Public Forum. I’m not going to start a policy program of my own, certainly.

On top of that, the expense of debate tournaments is amazing; our MFL events still cost $5 to attend, from the smallest Novice tournament to the State tournament. Debate events, however, can run up from $40-75 an entry, easily. As far as I can tell, debate is expensive because debate is expensive, and everyone’s passing the money around in greater amounts. It’s also expensive because travel is the norm, given the difficulty of finding those policy rounds especially. That effect too keeps new schools away; new programs are consistently willing to blow $5 on a day of trying debate or speech, but raise the tag to $75 and then you’re talking money; without a pre-existing, successful debate team in place, most folks aren’t going to bite. Most new programs are going to be creamed at first, until they gain some traction; they’re not going to continue to pay their $75 to get creamed week in and week out, but $5 for a year or two and that’s worth sporadic success until you can get traction.

With spiraling gas and air travel costs, however, the logic flips. I wonder if the debate community isn’t in for a severe retraction in the coming years, with former national circuit programs unable to travel, standing isolated amidst their local neighbor schools they ignored and kept out for years, not due to hostility but the inherent nature of the events we run now. PF will continue to flourish in Massachusetts, and I bet LD would grow given the big schools’ needs to host more local tournaments. But that will be the end of Policy, once and for all. An event cannot survive in the long term, or even maybe the short term, if a smart young lady in a tiara can’t judge it or even appreciate it. Adapt or perish.

The world of Public Forum is confronted this month by a particularly Lincoln-Douglas style resolution. The rez declares that civil disobedience in a democracy is a good “weapon in the fight for justice” or some such bombast. I rolled my eyes and realized there was major work ahead of us. Nobody around Massachusetts seemed to understand the November topic except for us, given that it was aimed at extemp-like squads. Civil disobedience, however, is the type of thing any PF team that’s an appendage of an LD team will have reams of background on.

So I trotted out the standard “Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and oh I guess Rawls” social contract lecture, to give the kids background on approaches the LD types will have down pat. However, PF is not just theory debate. We need facts, and examples, and to prove feasibility to make our case here. Despite that, PF bans plans and counterplans. And the topic is limited to democracy, so we lose the Burma and Tiananmen Square examples. In democracies historically, civil disobedience and expansion of rights usually coincide. Nobody knows if the civil disobedience caused the expansion of rights, but nobody knows that it didn’t either. So that’s not very debatable; we don’t have evidence or even a way of getting evidence.

So harumpf. So aff writes itself, but what do you argue on con? You can argue that other means are better but oops, that’s a counter plan, and verboten by the gods of Public Forum. You can stick to LD style moral justification arguments on why citizens ought not break the social contract, but then if the other side comes up with one good concrete example, most honest judges are going to go for that first. You can start swinging around wildly and say the tyranny of the majority is a good thing, but good luck convincing an average mom of that.

The problem is Public Forum was designed in reaction to problems in other events.  The founders of the event took a list of things they didn’t like about LD and Policy, and built an event that doesn’t permit those exact things from happening.  Therefore, most of its rules forestall negative trends, instead of encouraging positive ones.  But these rules and restrictions prevent more than critical, off-topic arguments; they also hamstring legitimate avenues of on-topic discussion.  That’s not a good way to create a coherent event. PF shouldn’t be the way it is because of negative trends in LD or CX; it should be what it is because it’s good for PF.

We’ll muddle through somehow.  Maybe we’ll come up with a clever way of imagining negative policy consequences to civil disobedience. But at the basic level I think the event as a whole could use some fine tuning, with the security needed to allow the students leeway to debate the issues fully.

I don’t like the coinflip either.  But that’s another post.