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It’s the night before I depart for Vegas and the NFL Tournament. I have a sequence of horrible flights, but I can’t really complain too much since they’re a freebie from the airline. I also now am on some list of terrorists, so I can’t check in online anymore. A guy who’s never been out of North America and always travels with 5-15 adolescents, I guess, is highly suspicious; probably true, but not usually for carrying bombs. Pattern matching software is notorious for generating a huge number of false positives. Ah well, there’s a website where one can register one’s bafflement at this condition and see what happens. I bet I’ll get audited, though I’m sure the cavity search tomorrow will be gentle.

It’s raining. It’s a beautiful rain; that cold humidity in the air making one unsure if it’s hot or cold or both at once. It’s thundering, and pouring, which is something of a summer ideal for me. Watching the rain fall in a warm summer night with little lights here and there under the leaves just fills me with a sense of normalcy. You see, I grew up in the shadow of a mountain that flung thunderstorms at us with clockwork regularity. We get far fewer down here in the coastal areas, and I miss them, so whenever one does come roaring through, it quiets and comforts.

I mention this because this last night and last two weeks have had a pace of normalcy about them that’s often missing from the forensics life. Tomorrow I’m headed to Vegas, but I’m also staying longer than the tournament, and explicitly going to have a good time. The presence of the national tournament is tangential at best. It helps that I’ve come to not care about the NFL and its Nationals one way or another. They make their tournament too big a deal, spend too much time backslapping coaches publicly, and it’s a little too much about sponsors; no sense of a balance there. Most of all, they run their organization entirely on the incorrect assumption that everyone sees it as the singular apotheosis of forensics, which prevents them from seeing, or at least acknowledging and correcting, certain problems.

The NFL for me is now eminently skippable, while once upon a time I saw it as a Big Freakin’ Deal. But at this point it’s hard for me to see anything in forensics as a Big Freakin’ Deal. I’ve run tournaments, I’ve had kids win them, I’ve had them lose, and I’ve not noticed much long term difference between, outside the fact that kids sometimes learn something. I also lose respect for tournaments each time I realize that education and competition are at cross currents. It irks me when I tell the kids to do things that I know risks them defeat. I won’t compromise on that, but it saddens me when I become aware of it. And it really kills me when the kids themselves — and every kid I’ve ever coached has done this — push back and do the lesser thing to win the tournament, and get a trophy in return for their integrity. Bad trade.

The NFL does that to my kids more often than most tournaments. I hear the collective voice of NFL judges pushing back at me through the students’ mouths a lot, despite the fact that we don’t even get ballots back and so we don’t actually know why NFL judges do what they do. The tournament overall has a distorting effect, and cheapens the education I feel I can present my students. So I go there tomorrow, but I try to leave no wake, make no waves, and remain as anonymous and concealed as I can. And hope to God nobody asks me to fix their !@$#%!@ website.

I had a sure sign today that I have too many responsibilities in forensics. The Nassau Inn emailed me asking me after the standard details for the Princeton tournament; when were the tournament dates, how many rooms in the block, etc. These are all issues that I do provide advice on for any of my tournaments.

The trouble is, Princeton is not my tournament. They did ask me last year, but I had to say no, because I was already bringing kids to GMU. Then, at Columbia, Admiral Menick tries to talk me into adding Princeton, mostly because he likes the restaurants there. And now I’m running the tournament by acclamation of the bloody hotels; how they knew who I am is beyond me. I’m not sure exactly how I got appointed the chairman of the northeastern collective tab room. I suppose, in a volunteer-driven world, you just need to start doing a job, and sooner or later it acquires official weight.

But thankfully, it’s not much of a problem to foist that one off on actual Princetonians. The summer is a nice time; I don’t do much tournament management, apart from calming down an occasional Yalish panic attack. The Yalies sometimes fail to understand that the likelihood no one is coming to their tournament is lessened with every immediately sold out hotel block we acquire. But anyway, during the summer, I actually get to build curriculum for my camp, which then also informs the curriculum for the coming year at South. I’m also chairing the NCFL Extemp committee, trying to tackle issues there about moving the questions themselves forward, along with the Computers in Prep Question. I still think computers in prep is a huge Pandora’s box, but for now the power requirements of 210 separate laptops in prep put the idea out of practical reach anyhow. But it’s nice to think sometimes about this actual activity, and the reasons why I do it. I like nicely run tournaments so I run them, but at the end of the day, it’s the coaching that keeps me doing this.

And I try as much as possible not to touch much code, apart from a few weekends here and there when the mood strikes me. I do want to pre-empt the Admiral’s inevitable bitching about how housing requests work in my software, to save my poor bug tracking system from being overwhelmed by his love notes in early November. I’m sure he’ll come up with lots of….suggestions, anyway. But I want to at least make him work for it.

But beyond the summer, I’m also trying to build the tournaments in such a way that I’m not needed. There’s a common method to them, and the only thing I provide is a veto threat that sticks. The average college tournament is a collection of people who want to do the right thing — run a good solid tournament that the kids enjoy and learn from — and others. There’s the Profiteer, who spends a lot of time dreaming up concessions schemes that never pan out; the Lazy, who just wants the thing to go away; the Self Important Twit, who wants titles and recognition for being a marvelous forensics oracle despite not actually contributing to the success of the tournament.

My real role is to be outside of their internal team politics. As such, I can mercilessly crush the bad ideas from the Useless People, and be sure as much as I can that the Good People stick around in the tournament management. I’ve whittled down the other jobs I do as much as I can, and mostly focus on that. After all, if the principle motivations behind a tournament are sound, the rest falls into place with minimal, fact-based guidance. And if I finally do have that much-delayed nervous breakdown, at least then the details won’t all get lost.

The trick will be when I can “run” a tournament according to this regular method without actually going to it. Once I get that right, maybe I’ll run Princeton. However, I also hear tell of a Florida invitational tournament in need of a tabber that weekend, and if that proves true, it’ll be hard to convince me that the first weekend of December shouldn’t be spent in southern Florida. And gosh, the preparation is bound to be so intensive I’ll just have to come down a good week before….I’m easily bribed by beaches.

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…

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.

I teach the kids a lot about the concept of governmental legitimacy. Basically speaking, if a people governed believe that the government has the right to lay down laws, for whatever justification, then they are more easily governed. The belief of the governed is what matters most, though; for thousands of years hereditary monarchy was a perfectly legitimate way to run a country, and people didn’t have much problem with it. But beliefs changed, and now it’s no longer viable; while kings in 1200 had paltry armies and no police, modern dictators have to create vast mechanisms of control and fear to hang on. Even still, many are forced to have democratic trappings to keep it together. The Roman emperors never did get around to eliminating the Senate, for much the same reason.

Legitimacy is a complex thing. It requires trust. You need to assume the government is at least trying to think through issues the way you do. Nationalism ties into that a lot these days; people don’t trust other peoples to look out for them. Serbia lost its legitimacy among the Kosovars, since the government of Serbia suddenly decided that it mattered that the Kosovars were ethnic Albanians. Once it mattered to Belgrade, it suddenly mattered to the Kosovars as well, and they would not trust the central government again. Belgrade had declared that the Kosovars were not Serbians in their regard, and the natural response was to leave Serbia. The alternative would have been unrest and bloodshed, or repression, which is the only tool an illegitimate government has to survive.

I’ve recently been pondering this in the context of the various boards and groups I’m embroiled with. Right now the LOPSA board enjoys a good amount of legitimacy, since one of the lynchpins of legitimacy and nationalism is defining yourself as not being another group; you’re not so much “us” as “not them.” We have a very convenient if rather sleepy them to not be at the moment; SAGE is controlled by an outside group of people with interests entirely different than those of sysadmins, and therefore the governance thereof is illegitimate. I feel just about everyone knows it, too, since SAGE has pretty much done nothing over the last year. It will die on its own, and then we’re going to have to make our way without a convenient foil.

Forensics is another beast. Right now the MFL is trying to achieve some fairly sweeping change; eliminating one event (Radio), adding another (Impromptu), and substantially changing a third (Group Discussion). I myself believe all three changes would be positive, though I’m only hugely passionate about the last. Change is always tough for a collective organization, since those who have a stake in the way things are — a concrete reality — are always more passionate about it than those who have a stake in the way things could be — an ephemeral guess. Change is even harder given that the underlying purpose of the activity is competitive. However, right now we’re a little hamstrung in that our state league board does not include some of the most respected folks in it, for various and sundry reasons. It’s difficult to make a change stick when too many trusted folks are outside of the decision process; so even though these changes were hashed out to death and considered from dozens of angles by the Board, people suspect we missed something. So the debate drags on, nothing new is said, and nothing changes.  The “us” versus “them” divide is within the league, and while it’s not so pronounced as previous internal divides, it is nonetheless there.
Over in New Yorkland, there’s an ongoing dispute about the nature of their state tournament, which as far as I can tell is the natural byproduct of the fact that New York is not One Big League the way we do in Massachusetts. We evolve and change slowly in the MFL, but we do so together, so the state tournament is no different than any other. New York has a number of local leagues, who then have to decide how to do things when they come together. So the local conflicts get delegated up into the statewide conflicts, and the waters grow ever muddier. Brooklyn comes to one conclusion through a wrenching process, and then Rochester reaches a different one, and the Mid-Hudson leaguers a third; but then they have to hash out the whole thing all over again at the state level. Apparently that hashing doesn’t happen well, or often; one faction prevailed, and the other stays out of the game as a result. Not good.

That can be somewhat awkward for me at times, because I get along with almost all of the coaches I knew from New York, and I can never keep track of who hates whom. “Let’s have dinner with so-and-so!” turns so readily into an awkward and uncomfortable silence in that kind of situation.

I tend to think that the real problem in New York is a lack of a venue for bitching. Bitching will always happen, but without a time and a place set aside for official bitching, it has to happen under the radar, where it takes the guise of hurtful gossip instead of constructive feedback. Some folks have a hard time with that concept, since it’s always better to get along.  When you bitch at someone and they take you seriously, they’re no longer an evil strange Serbian in your eyes, but part of the “us” again.  We had our MFL coaches’ meeting, and boy did they bitch, and while that was rather unkind since a lot of the bitching seemed to assume that the Board had taken action willy-nilly without thinking of the consequences, at least it tied everyone back into the League.

In a setup like New York’s, there’s bound to be even more dissension. However, they seem to close it all up and off, and so the dissenters, frustrated and voiceless, quite literally gather up their kids and found their own damn tournament. A sad situation that it had to happen. But that’s not my battle, just an example of what to avoid. I’ll go to NY States this year and get them running (because I’m a glutton for punishment), and I’ll probably attend the NE Championships next year with some kids in tow, unless Menick again decides to schedule it against a calendar that was quite clearly published on my league’s website for anyone to see months and months ago.

But if they add a 17th required event, they’re going to have to find a new damn president.