Brief notes

  • The Jan-Feb topic-induced emotional meltdown count, to my awareness anyway, is now at 4.
  • The NDCA email list decided to explode in a soul-searching Nature of the Organization thread the week leading up to our tournament.  Hurrah.
  • The Lexington tournament ran well, apart from the fact that I was dreadfully sick and lost my voice.
  • Bill Belichick’s pact with Satan is apparently more comprehensive than Tim Tebow’s arrangement with God.
  • UPenn approaches, and has significantly grown.  That, at least, is gratifying, in a month when there’s not much in debate to gratify.
  • And new, exciting things are in store for tabroom.com.   More on that later…

 

Paradigm

The last post certainly stirred up the world a bit, but it didn’t unfortunately put together enough of a consensus to produce action in our nebulous, poorly governed and disunited community.  That’s a shame, because students will suffer for it.

The objections to a topic change came down to two categories.  Some defenses are largely procedural in nature; essentially, they say my objections weren’t lodged early enough, and the voting of the NFL member chapters must be respected.  I disagree; the governance structure of debate does not have enough inherent value to me not to give way to the needs of substantial numbers of debaters.  I didn’t pay close attention to the topic list earlier because I’m not an NFL member, I have no vote, and since the NFL doesn’t release voting figures — probably because turnout is very low, as with most nonprofit voting systems — I have little concept of what it would take to change the topic consensus.    Furthermore, in the days before the topic release, I honestly didn’t believe that a responsible educator could vote for that topic.  Apparently I’m wrong.  But  I don’t believe there is a time limit on objections of this nature.

The second category of defense says we should face this issue and give it a platform and voice, and that it could empower people.  Platforms and voices are important, but this platform is ill suited to it.  We should talk about, and confront this issue.  I actually relish the discussion online about the topic, as it has certainly increased awareness in our community.  We should not, however, force minors to engage it in switch-side debate.  Debate is not about giving voice to your own opinions, because you cannot choose which side you’re on.  There are some victims of abuse who would like to, and should be able to, speak loud and often about this dark problem in our society.  There are others who choose privacy and would prefer not to fight for the cause.  We should respect both choices.   There are plenty of venues to speak up on topics of your choosing; we have one in forensics, called original oratory.  Debate is too restricted for such a live-wire emotional issue.  We should not be in the business of excluding people who feel they can’t talk about this issue, or even who could but don’t want to.  This topic makes them choose between their private choices, and debate education itself.

The process of topic selection strikes me as primarily focused on competitive concerns.  For instance, the topics are released in dribs and drabs, not all at once — which hurts pre-planning, but reduces the perceived advantage that “those who go to camps” have.  I can forgive that the process produced a bad topic; I don’t blame anyone on the committee or anyone else for not thinking about my objections ahead of time.  To be honest, it didn’t fully hit me until after the topic was  announced  and I gave it serious thought.   Wider exposure of proposed topics before they hit the ballot might have caught this sooner, but it might not have.

However, the reactions of those in a position to do something about them has deeply disappointed me.  Just as the replacement to the Islamic cultural center PF topic betrayed a lack of understanding of the nature of the objection to said topic, the responses coming from many of the leaders in our community, formal and informal, tell me that they’re not just respectfully disagreeing; they don’t get it.   A lot of the commentary tells me that many coaches at heart believe debate is  all game, no matter the subject.  The game, and the need to win it, trumps all; those who can’t hack it be damned.  The competitive instinct underlies a lot of the discussion; and its presence is why I object to this topic.  If coaches can’t separate that out in their online discussion of a topic, how can we expect minors to in the heat of a limited-time round?

I gave serious thought to leaving debate; maybe just for this topic, maybe just LD, maybe for good.  I’ll be honest, it’s still a  possibility.  It grew in likelihood the more I read people I otherwise like and respect defend this topic in ways that ultimately assert that debate matters more than the debaters.  I do debate because it’s fun.  It’s not my career; I accept no money for coaching.  This topic is not fun.  Nor is discussing it in the context of a debate round going to produce valuable education.

For now, I think I’m going to add this to my paradigm.  It’s still not perfect, feel free to suggest alterations.  Feel free to also adopt it yourself, if you’re a judge.  Feel free to strike me because of it, because I don’t want to judge this topic anyway.

Some rules aren’t meant to be followed.

——

I've decided that in my own right I will not force you to debate this
topic. The NFL may be uninterested in reconsidering their decision, but I am
under no particular obligation to them to enforce it. Ultimately what happens
in a round is up to the judge.

Therefore, if both debaters mutually agree to debate an old topic of their
choosing, or any of the topics on the 2011-2012 NFL ballot, I will happily
judge that round. I will also give both debaters 30s for their efforts.

If there is no agreement on using an old/alternative topic, then the
affirmative, after notifying the neg before the round, may run advocacy that
addresses a topic about the core of the resolution -- vigilantism and self
defense -- while avoiding domestic violence specifically. If an aff pushes this
debate into non-emotionally charged ground thereby, I will not vote on topicality and I
will give the aff 30 points. The aff must only inform the neg; the neg need
not agree. Negs should have answers to those types of positions anyway.

If the aff doesn't decide to do so, then I will hold the aff responsible for
the entirety of the resolution, and will not affirm on PICs bad theory or
other limiting factors that attempt to box neg into ground where they must
risk arguments that offend or trip over emotional landmines.

If you don't like this, please do strike me. Every strike I get on this topic
is a gift, because I don't want to judge it anyway. If that makes me a
terrible judge so be it; I assure you, I would be a terrible judge for this
topic anyway, because I feel zero compunction on this particular issue about
intervening if one of the many lines this issue raises are crossed. There's a
chance that I may refuse to sign ballots on this topic; for example, if a
student simply cannot continue a round (which has happened in practice).
I don't really know what the limits are and don't want to find out, and
I'm willing to shower you with astonishingly liberal speaker points if
you help me avoid it.

On Fairness: Part II

I went to Greenhill for the first time last weekend, as the proud coach of the eventual tournament champion no less. Winning the first time around isn’t a bad way to begin with a tournament, I have to say.  L’Etoile debated 19 times over the course of the round robin and the tournament, and we had another six rounds from Tinfoil Hat*. Even though we had a massive assist in elim rounds from the lovely CT, that Long March drained my gas tank. Coaching LD is now very active; gone are the days when researching a single case took days and thus you went into each tournament with one affirmative and one negative, and the flip in elims decided which you’d read. Now we have options, and the luxury of matching our arsenal to our opponent’s, which means figuring out how to do so once you know your opponent.

My judging load at the tournament wasn’t so heavy, however.   One easy way to accomplish that is to forget to register oneself as a judge during the round-robin.  Oops.  I don’t put much stock in my status as a Circuit Judge, so it never dawned on me to question it until late in the 1st day.  During the tournament itself, I have the double challenge of being over the age of 25, firmly so, and not having been around the circuit more than a year.  So I don’t get rated that high across the board, and rounds are hard to find for me.  L’Etoile’s continuing success will at some point nudge me into higher ratings, my credit (blame?) for whatever ill defined services I render that help him succeed.  I’ll end up judging more rounds, and then people will come to hate me for what I’ve done, instead of doubting me because they don’t know me.  Such is life.

However, I had one round which turned out interestingly, in the alarming sense.  It started normally enough, until Aff threw a very quick, half-formed theory argument into the midst of his 1AR as defense against a negative argument.  I remember thinking this choice wasn’t tactically smart, and even wrote as much directly onto my flow, but didn’t consider it much beyond that.

Neg sure did.  His reaction was to run a full 6 minute critical theory argument with reverse voters and everything, saying that the affirmative had invoked an ideal of fairness in the round which upholds unfair outcomes.  Debate has notions of “fairness” baked into it that are anything but fair, and are not often questioned.  Aff invoked that standard of fairness without defending it.  So neg argued that I, the judge, should choose a different standard of fairness (as choosing between standards of fairness is necessarily itself arbitrary), and should choose one that checks against the exclusivity of debate, and the exclusion of other voices, by voting down this half baked and ill-developed notion of “fairness” that harms accessible discourse.

Aff, well, he didn’t know (or understand) what hit him.  He extended some arguments about time skew and win skew.  Affirming in LD is hard, and evidence does support that.   I’ve complained extensively about how little action that seems to inspire.  L’Etoile affirmed only once in his march through elims to win the tournament.  But those arguments all rely on that standard of fairness that negative told me to reject.  Aff gave me no clear reason to prefer “debate fairness” over another. He didn’t have much chance to; he had 1 minute of prep time left, and 3 minutes in the 2AR to speak, when he was hit with this thing.  He was set up to fail, therefore. I struggled a lot in sympathy; it was very hard to engage that debate correctly in the time left to him.  I kept wanting to see two more speeches to see how it’d really play out.  I did some work for him, no less, to see how much I’d have to intervene to write an affirmative story.

But I kept coming back to a salient fact: Aff started it.  Theory does boil down to accusing the other debater of cheating — and he tossed it off so casually.  He didn’t mean it flippantly at all, but that’s worse; we do these things without considering their full implications all the time.  Debaters in LD sling this powerful weapon around like it’s nothing.  My own debaters tend to — though L’Etoile will tell you this sparks some lively, ahem, discussions within our ranks.  Debaters will pull it even in front of judges who profess to hate theory itself (not me) or hate how it’s used so often (yeah, I’m guilty of that one).  There’s not much fair about that.  Negative spoke truth.

The unanswered rhetoric from the negative gave me a non-interventionist reason to vote — though I did suspect it was mildly interventionist  at the time, just less so than voting affirmative.  In retrospect, it was not.   I thought it might be, because the unfairness and the casual use of theory gave me active reason not to want to cut affirmative slack despite his manifest time disadvantage weighing heavily in the round.  But in the end, it just meant that my flow said I should vote for the side that I wanted to win, a distinction that I try very hard to maintain as a judge.  I vote on stuff I find stupid or wrong all the time.  Any judge who doesn’t isn’t doing their job well. So when my ballot and rooting interests come together, I doubt myself a little.  But they did come together.

And so, I negated.

I’ve written before about how our community expects and wants debate to be fair, and how debaters tend to react and rebel against unfairness when it affects them.  Boy howdy did I get that.  After my RFD, which I will admit was considerably less clear than the above two paragraphs (digestion of new ideas takes time, after all), the affirmative signaled some abundantly clear displeasure.

In the course of the ensuing post-debate debate, I was struck by something, something that ties in a lot to what I see as unfair in debate.  See, I’m a sleeper.  I look and sound like an aristocrat.  I went to Milton Academy and then Harvard.  Some of that polish rubbed off on me.  I have a comfortable intellectually-oriented job that carries a salary well above that of your average teacher/coach — another unfairness.  But those things are layers of paint, covering but not changing the shape of a kid who grew up on some rather mean streets in a fading paper mill town in central Massachusetts.  I’m also apart again, due to being gay, one of those minorities that is as visible as the individual wants it to be (and in my case, isn’t hugely so).  So I understand stacked decks and institutional  unfairness, even as I don’t look or sound like someone  who does.   The other three people in the room were the negative, who if he isn’t a Muslim from the Bible Belt, must certainly get mistaken for a Muslim kid often enough in his Bible Belt home so as to understand.  His coach is white, but through choice of dress and style deliberately sets himself off as an Other, which despite my white bread looks I understand is valid, and sympathize with — you should meet my youngest sister if you doubt me.  The third person in the room was an observer, a young African-American lady, presumably a debater who wasn’t debating this weekend.

The Aff debater looked (and this is a dangerous judgment, proven by myself, but the pattern is there) like your typical scion of a wealthy program in a wealthy town.  He  left the room very upset and not understanding my decision at all.  Partly he was too angry to hear, and partly I was not capable of fully explaining it, and I knew that, so I took my blows and my yells in silent acceptance.  However, I did notice that as I tried to explain how my decision came to be, the other three people in the room were nodding.   The young woman was my best barometer; after all, coach and neg debater had written this position, so they clearly understood it long ago.  But she hadn’t heard it before, and didn’t get to read it afterwards like I did.  But she got it.  There were concepts buried in the decision that I didn’t need to explain to her, to the neg debater or his coach, or to myself.  But I did need to explain them to aff, and failed.  They are hard lessons to hear, and harder still when mixed into the disappointment of a loss, even an  insignificant  one (the debaters were not in contention to break).

It’s an important lesson to learn, though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t able to teach it, and that he won’t learn it from me now — if ever a round ended with a resolution to strike the hell out of a judge soundly and permanently, that was it.  It is far from his alone to learn; we struggle with it in our own program.  (Jai ho!)  The vast majority of people in debate are in the same boat as the aff, operating with only one standard of fairness because many others are hidden from them, and growing uncomfortable when confronted with it.  Having your world shaken is something we all flinch against.  In that one room, that one round, for about 60 minutes, those who understood temporarily outnumbered those who did not.  Usually in debate, and in life, it’s the other way around; and those of us labeled outsiders don’t often get as upset, because we’re used to it.

The Project, as it’s called — and what a loaded word that is — is trying to bring these types of issues to the fore, mostly in policy debate.  A representative of it was top speaker at the TOC last year.  I saw him debate in Emory finals: he’s a very good debater.  The project struggles against a few things.  One is receptiveness to the very idea, naturally.  Another is that the resolution and topicality, one of the few guideposts we have in debate, rarely ties cleanly into the conversation that the project wants to have.  But they believe, not without reason, that the unfairnesses built into how debate is done, and the assumptions it operates under, have to be answered before the effective and open debate that we’d like to take for granted is even possible.

I have some sympathy for the view.  The question it begs, which this post does as well is: why participate in an activity that you believe unfair?   Debate is clearly biased to exclude people based on wealth, which given the wider unfairnesses in our country, therefore also excludes based on race.  So why play that game?  It’s just a debate round; aren’t there better venues for social justice efforts?

Well, life’s unfair.  America can be unfair.   Every society is stacked and tilted in some way or another.  The answer’s not to leave it behind.  If you want no inequality in your world, may I suggest living in the Yukon, far from anyone else.  If you believe you live in a world without substantive and unfair inequality, may I further suggest that you are simply at the  receiving  end of the benefits of said inequality, and thus are psychologically set up to not see it.

Instead of retreating, I try where I can to push the low end higher.  You don’t have to push the high end down; this isn’t a seesaw.   That’s because debate is education.  You don’t lose your education for others gaining it.  In fact, your education grows more valuable the more that others are educated: none of my high tech skills would command half a plantain if I were translocated into the Amazon rainforest and told to live among the hunter-gatherers.  Our country’s colossal  failure to properly educate the sons and daughters of the poor, much of it motivated by racial prejudice, will hang around our neck as one of history’s great lost opportunities.  Debate is education.  Debate’s job is to engage in hard topics, and hash them out.  That makes it a pretty good venue for this discussion in my book.  Unfairness is no reason to leave debate; debate itself is a good platform to engage it and expose it.

Just don’t flinch if you get burned by something hotter than you expected.  After all, it’s just a debate round.

*Thinly (if you’re a debate person) concealed nicknames preserve the identity of minors, ala Menick.

On Fairness

We’d like debate to be fair.

We’d like our tournaments to be maintained and run impartially, distantly, and to follow the covenants made with the attendees ahead of time, both those spelled out and those generally understood.   We’d like students to advance or not based on the merits of their arguments and the quality of their work, instead of their coaches’ influence, their position in the community, their identity along whatever spectrum identity can take, or those moments when random events blunder into the debate round.   We want the winners to deserve their wins, and the losers to learn from their losses.  We want debate, ultimately, to be a paragon; a paragon of education, of competition, and of intellect written larger than you can find in usual high school activities.

It’s an adolescent kind of fairness.  A typical high school with a strong debate team is a place where we can dare to dream the world is  perfectible.   The unfairnesses at such places are small, irritating, and finite; students come to believe that given enough work and fighting, surely  unfairness can be eliminated outright.  A good high school is built to be fair; grades are mostly given to those who earn them, and students who   work hard and do well in school are uniformly rewarded with great colleges and bright futures.  Students who don’t work or lack talent are relegated to lower tiers.   Unfairness and mistakes tend to be minor and exceptional; the general rule is a gradient of work mapping to achievement and rewards.

Where you stand is a direct reflection of who you are.

To such students, geared and groomed and pointed Ivywards from a young age, the greatest nightmare is that someone — that I — should stand lower than earned.  One way to stand lower than you earned is if someone unworthy should step in line ahead of you.  If a kid with poor grades gets into Columbia through influence & connections, or membership in a favored group, another student with better grades goes to their safety school instead.  To those aimed Ivywards, that fate is terrifying; they’ve been told if they work hard and grow smart, they’ll do well.  Education pays off.   So these kids will react violently in times when they see someone earn a prize, and yet not receive it.   The great terror is that they’ll be smart enough to get into Columbia, but end up at NYU.  And they save a special place in hell for the interlopers who cheat the system, and thus cause it.

But debaters, and high school students at schools without debate, tend to undercount their unearned blessings.   They can’t help it; everyone they know shares in those blessings. Does a fish notice the water?  The fairness of their worlds is itself uncommon, and unearned.  The rarity of debate speaks to a wider problem, the rarity of a good education, the kind of education that only money and resources can truly provide.  In America, we save that good education for a select few students, who can penetrate the barriers of property values that are raised around great high schools.   And the bare truth is, you gained entry to that high school on your parents’ achievement, not your own.

There are places where hardworking students don’t go to college.  There are schools where nobody at all goes to the Ivy League, not the best, not the worst, not the most connected.  There are high schools where more students have children themselves than go to college.  There are high schools where the best and the brightest end up in gangs and often then in jail, not because they are weak and didn’t listen well enough to the anti-drug and anti-violence programs, but because gangs offer money, protection, and support, and their schools, families and neighborhoods offer none of these things.  The boundary between school work and life is much thinner, in places where families are one illness away from disaster, where children go to school hungry and tired, where home isn’t heated in the winter or cooled in the summer, where the day to day insecurity of life makes people snatch and grab for whatever stability they can find.   There are entire school systems where students dread vacations and snow days, because school means seven hours of heat and lunch, and days off mean neither.

These students get Ds in math and English.  But that doesn’t make them lazy.  Or stupid.  Or undeserving.  The difference between them and you, my debater friends, is the legacy of accidents.  Of where they were born.  And to whom.

It is comforting for students at great high schools to tell themselves the world is fair.  If the world is fair and they sit atop it, then surely they have worked great deeds to enjoy their privileges, and should have no guilt over the benefits.  The poverty and problems that other, distant people experience  are the consequences of those people’s actions, and so are deserved.   If you ask, most privileged people will of course say they don’t believe that poor people deserve what they get, and many will vote solidly for tepid Democrats who promise to parcel off small margins of wealth towards poor people somewhere.  But by and large, they live and act as if the world were fair, and they deserved to sit atop it.   And so react very strongly when an event happens which threatens the balance.

Debaters are largely such people.  And so, debate rejects petty unfairness, but pays very little attention to the grand unfairness around us.  A student without a bid is going to the TOC — shock!  Scandal!  And worst of all, another one-bid kid may have to miss the TOC to accommodate a no-bid kid.  Gasp!  Terror!   The worst thing that happened all year!

There is an unfairness here.   The fact is that the no-bid student isn’t one of the top 80 debaters in the country.  I know this, because I acknowledge a reality most in debate prefer to forget: none of the students attending the TOC is one of the top 80 debaters in the country.  They’re just the top 80 students who have the chance to debate on the circuit.  For every kid who breaks, there are a hundred kids who are more talented and have more potential, but do not have access to debate, or anything like debate.  The same three dozen schools are at the TOC year and again; but there are about 18,000 high schools in the US, with over 14 million students.  Given that ratio, do any of you imagine you’re truly among the most talented 80?  The most hardworking?  The most moral and righteous and deserving?

Or do you choose to protest the advantages someone else was given, and neglect to see your own?

Debate isn’t the exclusive province of the wealthy.  There are a handful of schools that do well, despite drawing from student populations which face daunting real life challenges.  But everyone who debates is privileged to do so, whether it be by virtue of wealth your parents earned, or luck & happenstance of living near a school or a coach that values debate enough to offer it despite the daunting challenges of affording it, or the even rarer chance of having stumbled into debate without a program at all.

That’s the unfairness of debate that matters.  The unfairness of a bid round with an unfavorable panel pales next to the unfairness of millions of students living in poverty, never seeing a whiff of a debate round or even a stable life where their hard work could be rewarded or even recognized.  In a small way, debate realizes this, because we talk a great deal of helping new programs, and of outreach.  We know it should be done.  But we never do it.  We tell ourselves we don’t have time, but if it were important to the community, we’d make time.  After all, the amount of time we spend on debate has gone up a lot; when I started in LD, nobody wrote more than two cases, one on each side.  Tournaments were shorter, and had fewer rounds.  The amount of time debaters spend on debate has gone up, but the amount of time spent on new program outreach and accessibility has stayed flat.

So next to these injustices, I find it hard to get worked up about a no-bid student joining us in Kentucky to the exclusion of one-bids who stay home.  A vast horde of students is staying home with that one-bid kid, never having heard of a bid in the first place.  Debate itself isn’t important enough on its own merits to call this a tragedy, but these students represent vast untapped potential, for their talents are tied to less productive uses, their happiness and chance for a good life are subject to whims and mercies they cannot control, and their hopes of a fair life are long ago forgotten.

So tell me, is that fair?  If we’re looking for unfairness to fight against, isn’t that far more worthy of  struggle?  Can’t we do more about that than join Facebook groups claiming we’re “one million strong for the cause of the week?”  Is it worthwhile to spend hours on a VBD thread dissecting the TOC, and then claim we don’t have time to help new programs launch?

And should I have sympathy for those who ignore grand injustice but get pissed at small ones, if injustice it was to let JA in?   Simply because the grand injustice is a harder problem doesn’t merit ignoring it.   Hard problems need more work, not less.

You shouldn’t apologize for your privilege.  You didn’t earn it, so you can neither be blamed or praised for it.  But you shouldn’t ignore it either.   And you should never let small unfairnesses eclipse your understanding of larger ones, just because the small ones are pointed in your direction, and more immediate.   Your world isn’t the whole world, and ignoring that just reinforces the role privilege plays in our community and world.   And that is a terminal impact we all should avoid.