Author: palmer

Exclusivity

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.

A Tale of Two States

A fast and furious weekend in forensics usually involves at least six nervous breakdowns; I’m happy to have gotten away with two.

The weekend began, in the way of many long weekends, on Thursday. I pulled myself into a bus at South Station after seeing a Hasidic man walking through the terminal carrying a bright yellow Easter basket. I spent three hours on the bus to Albany answering frantic emails about the new company’s website, and programming together a viable room master that I’ve been wanting for ages. It’s not quite ready for prime time, since it only shows the first day of a tournament, which worked OK for both New York and Massachusetts states, but won’t work for Nationals or Yale or further along.

Then I arrived in lovely Albany, caught up on the latest Catholic gossip from Catherine, and fended off the Mary Louis girls’ hopefully joking requests for a glass of wine. Kieran had done most of the gruntwork of paneling and selecting Congress judges, which was marvelous. I adjusted and tweaked and showed him a few more features. I got a good night’s sleep, listened as the New York regional directors bitched about room abuse by Policy Debaters, ran registration, and got everything running.

The New York states is a funny beast. The leadership of the organization has totally signed onto the idea of computerization; Kieran constantly thanks me, often on behalf of his wife and family, for all the time the software saves him. The tournament does seem to run faster even when things go wrong. However, the tab operation has only adapted somewhat; it reminds me of the early days of the MFL’s computer effort, when we were essentially trying to hand tab using computers. Things go easier on the computer if you do things like the computer wants you to, but it takes time to adjust folks’ comfort levels around that.

We adapted pretty easily in the MFL, but we run tournaments together all the time. The NYSFL does so once a year, and so I’m a little worried that it’s going to be like this for a while; a six tournament adjustment period takes us three months, but it takes them six years. And with all due respect to the New Yorkers of the Roman persuasion, their computer competence is somewhat….lesser than ours, collectively. I think the average age of the tab staff is cut in half whenever I walk in the room. We in MA have at this point about a dozen folks who can run a tournament OK on the computer system, while really only Charlie Sloat and some of the Brooklyn folks are adept among the NYSFL tab.

Back home after a delayed trip home on the Greyhound, I ran our own tournament. It went easily, even though it was difficult to panel, due to the small size. I terrified a kid from one school with fire and brimstone because they were going to drop a judge.

But the day was smooth; the panels were small, the school very well set up, and everything got off without a hitch. I also came up with the method of speeding the day by just starting things. We tend to not begin things until everything is perfect and ready. But you really don’t need the ballots to start the judge briefing; chances are you’ll finish them during it, and even if you don’t, they can wait just as well after the breifing. So just standing there and saying “Start!” helps a lot.

Meanwhile, back in New York, I kept getting messages from Charlie that said things like “Very Screwed!!! Please call!!!”. He somehow decided that the semifinal of DI had to happen about sixteen times, because he kept on breaking it, in more than one sense. There was a tiebreaker doing funny things, that I fixed on the fly, promptly disabling their sweepstakes, but then I fixed that too. No one has bitched yet about the results being wrong, and so it all worked out in the end.

So New York’s Rome is done, and State Speech is done. Next week all the problems belong to Rich Edwards, as we do our State Debate tournament, and the New Yorkers of the Avignon persuasion run their inaugural event.

Consensus and Legitimacy

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.

The Uber-ballot

Some good things did come from Harvard, and one is an idea that you’ll likely see at a Yale tournament near you in the fall.   Policy Mike was staying with me for the weekend so he could judge the Harvard policy tournament, and at one point he mentioned how judging speech left him feeling very ambiguous afterwards, since he didn’t have the opportunity to explain why he ranked the round in a comparative way, the way that debate ballots demand.   He suggested having a speech RFD ballot, a sheet that gets copied to all the people in the round, where the judge is asked to not just give individual feedback but comment overall on why they ranked the round the way they did.

That thought process would be valuable to know; one of the problems in speech judging is always figuring out what mattered most to the judge.   I’ll get a kid’s ballot where the kid ranked fourth, perhaps, and it’ll have (hopefully!) a few comments on areas for improvement.   But in the judge’s mind only one of them might have earned the student the 4, and rarely will that be thought through.   We ask debate judges to make their decision, and then justify it.   Speech judges are asked to justify their decision, and then make it.   Small wonder, then, that a useful ballot is rare.

Few judges are qualified to be coaches; there are many coaches in our judging pool, but there are also many more parents.   Speech ballots, however, are set up to make the judges into coaches; they basically ask the judge to say what worked in the performance, and what didn’t.   But judges aren’t coaches; figuring out how to identify strong and weak points is the coaches’ job.   A judge’s job is to adjudicate, and I think ultimately it’s much more fair to ask of them to explain their decisions of adjudication, than to ask them to provide advice and feedback in a vacuum to each student individually.

Debaters are rarely left wondering why a judge decided a round the way they did – though they are sometimes very baffled as to how.   I think it might be time to ask the same of speech judges; tell me who you believed and why.   Ask speech judges to think about it more than just perfunctorily and provide a justification.   It’s worth a shot, at least; we’ll be trying it out at Yale, most likely, and seeing how it goes.

Found day

So the snowstorm cancelled the Mardi Gras tournament Saturday, which resulted in a found day; an unexpected free day that I haven’t scheduled down to the hour.   That was very nice, since it meant that I could spend it any way I wished, without a sense of waste or failure.

So I did.   I watched a pair of movies,   La Cite des Enfants Perdus, and the Wire DVD I had kicking around, from Netflix.   The Wire’s incredibly good, and I blame Taco for making me watch it.   The movie was suitably disquieting and strange in that odd French way.   I also took a nap and did a metric ton of laundry.   All in all, a day without computers and without commitment is rare enough that it should be appreciated as it comes.   I only wish the outdoors were warmer and I had a garden to putter around or something of the sort.

Today I’m tweaking the tab software for NCFL registration and for some requests of a New Jersey persuasion.   I’m running the NCFL paneling this year in addition to the tabbing, which means I have to strip out some dirty hacks and replace them with other dirty hacks.   I also need to generate about four million different types of reports for various and sundry purposes.   Nationals, as could be expected, thrives and runs on the triple-check.   It’s the only way to manage a herd of that size.

But I finally managed to get the LOPSA website cleaned up.   Now it’s readable and easier to look at by far.   Next step is getting the menus and the navigation cleaned up, and perhaps at last get some writing going on there.   System administration is a field ripe for a critical mass of thinking and writing; we’re written about a lot in my field, but we need to speak for ourselves now.   It’s going to require a couple of hands pushing it forward, but if I have the time and the right forum, I think I can finally pull it off.   Better late than never.