Author: palmer

A thing to remember

Last year was rough for the LD community; we had flying accusations, acrimony, and internet attacks which by their nature afford few defenses.  A good number of people, both debaters and coaches, were attacked online by anonymous voices for things they did not do, which is wrong.   A good number of people were attacked for things they did do, but since the targets were mostly minors or educators and the forum was the internet, that too is wrong.

I stopped writing a lot last year, largely because of these conditions.   To speak up was to align oneself, taking a side where there should be no sides.   I am averse to conflict, and get along with just about everyone in LD.   That’s not by accident; it’s someone I have chosen to be.  I don’t dismiss people who do things I dislike, or even condemn; instead I try to find out their reasons.  Plenty of bad, unethical actions can at least be understood, if not forgiven, once you know the villain’s story.   Plenty of villains, especially at a young age, can be persuaded out of it, helped by the compassion and concern of their “enemies”.

After all, life is just a collection of more or less broken individuals; the best we can do sometimes is try not to harm each other with our jagged edges.   A lot of folks failed to avoid that last year, but many of them were young people with problems of their own, stories of their own, and our debate community failed them as much as it failed their targets.

So in retrospect, it was ill judged on my part to stay out of it.  That was as active a choice as speaking out, after all.  If all the responsible voices are silent, then only irresponsible people speak.  As a result, we never really resolved anything in LD.  We simply outlasted the issues by letting the students who served as lightning rods, unfairly or otherwise, graduate and move on.  I fear we have no better handle on how to address or prevent such things in the future.   That is our shame, and should be our challenge.

Collegiate policy debate is going through a much louder and more fundamental dispute this year.   The divide between teams running arguments based primarily on critical race theory and similar literature, and those who concentrate on the more traditional government plan/disadvantage debate, has grown sharper and more acrimonious.   There’s been active talk about splitting an already small world in half.   The divide is mostly driven by coaches and adults: the debaters seem to be mostly trying to keep their heads down and win rounds.   The nature of how their preference sheets work mean that while the “right wing” and “left wing” debaters regularly confront each other in rounds, their judges and coaches do not, and so the judges and coaches both seem uniquely uncompromising and hostile throughout this past fall.  They view each other at some level as simply enemy generals.

I’m about to be thrust into the middle of it, as I travel to LA next month to tab the USC and CSU Fullerton tournaments, together a “major” tournament swing, occupying the same space an octos bid tournament does in high school.   I will mostly keep a low profile, as it’s not my world; they’re a userbase for Tabroom to me, and I have no direct stake in their dispute.   I appreciate the value of traditional policy debate, even as I laugh at some of its excesses like the politics DA and the consult counterplan.   I can appreciate the need for boundaries like topicality, but at the same time, I cannot help but be persuaded and compelled by the criticisms of the society and debate itself which the “left wing” teams level.   I too am an outsider, though I do not wear that on my skin as others must.   Instead, I have to tell people, which is sometimes an asset, and other times a burden.

Times like last year in LD, and this year in college policy, are when debate disappoints.   When an activity dedicated to discourse and communication fails to address its own issues in a productive forum, but resorts to ad hominems and vitriol, online and in whispered conversations, we have failed in our mission on face.   We contradict our own purpose.

In both instances, the coaches and powers of debate have forgotten something about the nature of tournaments.   They forget that we cannot, and do not, educate only our own teams.   I am your students’ teacher too, and you teach mine.   At tournaments I teach Lexington, but I also teach Bronx, Scarsdale, Whitman, Greenhill, Hockaday, Harvard-Westlake, PV Peninsula… as their coaches teach Lexington.

Debaters can and should compete against one another; one of the secret sauces of debate is that the competitive aspect encourages debaters to use what they learn actively, instead of just repeating it undigested, as on a standardized test.   They have to assimilate information well enough to win rounds on it, and that teaches them a wider body of material with more depth than nearly any high school class.   Debaters can challenge and contend with each other all they want, and not harm debate itself; their competitive drive is our engine.

But coaches should not.   Coaches should see themselves as responsible for the whole of debate, not just their portion of it.   We realize this when prompted, and pay lip service to it occasionally, but do not remember it enough.   Smearing a debater online is a competitive tactic, meant to make the debater less successful; it doesn’t actually address any negative behavior, real or imagined, that debater may have committed.   Attacking judges online for voting on topicality and framework, or for failing to do so, is a competitive tactic, concerned about the wins instead of the message.

In the end, when we start viewing some coaches as “them” and not all part of the grand “us”, be it because of debating style, camps, or worst of all because of race, gender or identity, then we have ceased to be coaches.   The only “us” and “them” is the line between a coach and a debater.   The debaters should play the game, play it hard and fast and to win.   However, as coaches, we lose the right to make winning supersede our responsibility to debate itself, and each others’ debaters.  A good coach is not always a successful coach; and a coach who only aims for success is a bad one.

If I could say something at the start of each tournament, I’d say: be colleagues first and antagonists second.     Say something helpful every tournament to your biggest rival, your least favorite team, and the debater whose style is most unlike your own.   If a debater is upset, ask why; if a debater wins a big round, congratulate them no matter who they defeated to do it, and no matter if you agree with the judges’ decisions.   Wish your opponent good luck before you try and defeat them.   In short: live up to this contest we have built together, and cannot have without each other.

A Theory of Justice: the Musical!

I saw A Theory of Justice: The Musical! on its last run at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a show bound to appeal to debaters on the title alone; though I weep for the state of modern LD that one of my stronger junior debaters asked “What’s that a reference to?” in response. LD was derailed a little from it’s usual ground a few years ago, not by the influx of policy debate styles I think, but because we had a slate of resolutions focused on individual moral choices, not state functions. When that happened, the basic prep work of a lot of debaters shifted from the concepts of justice and liberty, focused on the state, to deontology and personal morality, which is different literature altogether. Rawls and his ilk were left behind; we have LD debaters who don’t know what the social contract is. Someday, someone will “discover” it anew and present it excitedly to a bemused coaching staff as the Next Big Thing.

Until then, the Musical!. It chronicles the struggle of philosopher John Rawls to either invent the next big theory that both synthesizes and revives political philosophy, or get laid, depending on your point of view. There’s this girl, you see, a student he names Fairness, that he pursues by trying to concoct a Grand Theory of political philosophy. To do so, he travels through a Time Vortex that the physics department conveniently opened in Harvard Quad, whatever that is. He then consults with the various surprisingly musically inclined philosophers of the past.

The production values were, shall we say gently, collegiate. The vortex was a rotating gel, and the set was simply blank with two large veils hung from the back. Yes, veils. The lighting was full of holes; actors’ faces were often in the dark, overzealous use of spotlights, that sort of thing. But I’m sure the lighting hang was just a standard one common to six shows in the same venue, so there’s only so much you can do. The singing was one of those shows attempting to make up in volume what it lacked in other qualities, and the dancing looked exactly like a bunch of painfully white Oxford students trying to dance.

Rawls was a bit too hamfisted in his delivery. Sure, suspension of disbelief wasn’t exactly on the agenda anyway, but Rawls just was flat and kind of broke the veneer of believability sometimes with overdoing some lines. Nozick was written as his archnemesis, chasing Rawls through time to prevent the creation of a theory that might reconcile Americans to income redistribution and taxes. He’s marching at the orders of his dominatrix mistress, Ayn Rand. That character was more fun, by nature; he was played by an emaciated Robert Pattinson stunt double with good comic timing and great Sinister Looksâ„¢.   Nozick was fun as a classic cartoon villain: he cackled a lot but was ultimately harmless.

The rest of the cast was ensemble. The utilitarians were a barbershop quartet, a cute idea, though their song didn’t sound at all like barbershop, though maybe only Americans could tell? The best song was Rousseau, in the guise of an aggressive French ladies’ man who steals Rawls’ love interest away for a scene or two. And the show stealer, of course, was Immanuel Kant, whose entrance late in the show as the six foot tall Deontological Fairy Godmother with a baritone voice as powerful as a howitzer helps Rawls cut through the crap and reach his final a-HA! moment.

But this ain’t Rent. Technical brilliance and magnificent music would have been wasted on the idea. It was supposed to be funny and cute, and it was. The humor was all in-jokes, given in full grand elitism without any hints or clues for the civilians who may be in the audience. It dropped little hints and jokes about how terribly long and unreadable Rawls’ great book was going to be. “I know! I’ll put all the conclusions in the first three chapters!” he says at one point to Fairness, who expresses doubt about the idea. Socrates is a live marionette sitting on Plato’s lap, saying whatever he wants, in front of a crowd of philosopher students who are collectively gayer than the Bronx Science coaching staff. Towards the end, the Veil of Ignorance is revealed as a device that removes your personal selfish motivations; when Ayn Rand is pulled behind it she promptly disappears as there’s nothing else to her.

If you get these jokes, the show is fun. If you don’t, I have no idea what you’d think just happened. So it’s not for everyone, but it was hilarious enough for me.

The Massacre of the Novii

On July 1st of each year, I have a ritual I call the Massacre of the Novii.  Today I go through the database on Tabroom.com and change every student listed as a novice to not be a novice anymore.  I also this year went through and automatically marked any student with a grad year 2012 or before as “retired”.  So your team rosters will be considerably smaller; and *sniff* our little babies are all grown up now into the vicious argumentative hellions we’ve trained them to be.  Papa’s so proud.

I’ve been working feverishly on Tabroom.com this summer, mostly doing boring behind the scenes work to prepare to it function much more smoothly with debate events, particularly international debate events.  This work is supported by a grant from the  Open Society Foundation, which is George Soros’s main philanthropic effort, and IDEA, the International Debate Education Association.   The plan is for Tabroom to become the integrated web fronted for debate tournaments worldwide, working together seamlessly with the CAT/debateresults.com system developed by Jon Bruschke of CSU Fullerton, who’s been a great hippy Californian partner in arms in this effort.   Mostly,  I’m doing the web stuff, he’s doing the desktop client.

This is not a black UN helicopter taking over Tabroom; I’m still going to be in the thick of it, and the software itself, by OSF mandate, must be open sourced.   This effort on OSF/IDEA’s part is about expanding their services and therefore their own profile in debate, and also attempting to cross-pollinate good ideas from abroad and the US.  It’s not about seizing control of anything.  There are also plans afoot to integrate this tabulation and results system into a global honor society, in which debaters can be recognized for their entire careers, high school, college and coaching, worldwide.  All of which I think is very exciting, and I’m glad IDEA is stepping in to fill these needs.

The programming itself is unspeakably boring, because it mostly consists of me correcting some fundamental flawed assumptions and mistakes that I made back in the beginning of Tabroom 2.0, which was released more or less in 2004.  (Tabroom 1.0 was 2000-2003, but nobody ever used it except for me).  Tabroom 3.0 features a professional graphical design based on the new IDEA website, which is spiffier than anything I could come up with; I can design for clean, but not quite for “shiny”.

But I’m also working on some cool new features; I don’t want to over promise, but I expect that Tabroom will support texting/email of pairings, team management features where your students can sign up for tournaments directly on tabroom and only requires coaches’ approval, the ability for judges to enter their ballots and results directly online by computers and phone, more varied ways of displaying results (a carryover from debateresults.com), and a few new surprises that I’m cooking up.   It’ll support US formats, together with various global formats, such as 4 team British Parliamentary debate and more.

So that’s the future of Tabroom.com.  Launch is August 1st for registration, Sept 1st for tabbing/pairing features.  And brave new worlds shall be upon us.

Why I coach debate

There’s a great diner in Watertown, the Boston burb where I eat & sleep when I’m not coaching debate or paying homage to the ancestors back in Fitchburg.  I discovered that the ownership’s opened a new location, in Newton Center in an old train station.  The menu is mostly the same, and the food’s just as good.

I had dinner there a few Sundays ago with Wild Bill, who’s a Team Palmer alum from my second forensics stop, Newton South.  WB was one of the first debaters I’d coached in a long time, after a long run doing purely speech events.  He switched over from extemp to PF and never looked back, foreshadowing my doing the same.

He graduated just three short years ago, and headed to Delaware for college, and is about to graduate from there a year early.  He’s not quite 21; so while I had a hot toddy — it was cold out and my throat was sore — he stuck to water.  He did most of the talking, which is good, because he had some great stories to tell.

WB comes across as old, which is jarring, because he looks so young; he has that blue-eyed blonde-haired fresh look that means he’ll get carded until he’s 35.  He’s conservative in his manner, if not his politics.  He maintains a brash, over the top and loud public persona to hide a deeply private inner life.  In normal conversation, when he’s not playing the dictator, he comes across as sad; he speaks slowly, and with little affect.  Sometimes he is sad, sometimes he’s just being quiet; I figured out the difference a long time ago, through coaching him.  He got overlooked a lot, and could sometimes be hard to deal with.  But he was always worth dealing with, I thought.

Much of his story involved a somewhat typical bout of college relationship angst whose details are important to the actors and their friends, and unimportant to anyone else.  The other half of the story was the traditional Plans After College.  These were less typical.

Next year, WB is going to spend a year that he could have spent in college instead working on the Delaware Right to Marry PAC, a non profit group agitating for full marriage rights for gays and lesbians in Delaware.  WB himself founded it a few years ago, and now he’s going to take his tuition dollars for his nonexistent fourth college year and use them to make a serious go of effecting a big change within a small state.

It’s ordinary for college kids, especially former debaters, to go off and try to get involved in politics after college.  Usually they take a much safer route; finding an internship in some Washington office where their work is dull but they can suck up to the right big names and hopefully increase the size of their own.  These types run up a spiral of increasingly lofty titles, but ultimately end up doing different types of clerical work all their lives and calling it power.  Liberal or conservative, they usually just become agents for the status quo, finding more difficulties than opportunities and calling that experience.

WB’s doing it better.  He’s going to spend a whole year living on ramen fighting a thankless battle for equality in a state that may not yet be ready for it.  If it fails he’ll have gotten nearly nothing.  If it succeeds, there’s a good chance a better-connected figure will swoop in and claim much of the credit.  But if he can move the lever and be the difference, he will be.  He made it abundantly clear — through action, not words — that he’s doing this because it’s right, not just because it’s right for him.   He can, he should, and therefore he is.

He’s straight, by the way.

For graduation, I gave WB the 2nd volume of Robert Caro’s excellent biography of Lydon Johnson, Means of Ascent, whose second half is a hugely entertaining tale of how LBJ engineered a stolen election against an entrenched Texas legend.  I wrote a note in the cover, which WB apparently re-reads often; I remember taking care to tell him the 2nd half of the book was not to be treated as an instruction manual; but more to the point, to remind him that power is to be used, not simply gained.  I told him I had faith he could be a rabble rouser and a big name someday, but if he didn’t harness it to a real cause or a real purpose, it’d be hollow and dry.

Mitt Romney fails to inspire because nobody knows why he wants to be President beyond having his name in history books; Barack Obama likewise has disappointed by conserving power instead of maximizing its effect.  Power conserved is power wasted; especially if it’s conserved for so petty a goal as re-election.  WB is better than both; underlying his sadness and sometimes anger, his occasional abrasiveness, and his aggressive public demeanor is a moral compass that puts most of our high leaders to shame; he’ll tweak Important Personages wherever he can find them, but the thing that surely must annoy them most is that he’s usually right; he’s shining light on areas they’d prefer to keep dark.

I can hope I had a small part in writing this story instead of simply hearing it.  If I taught him something about moral philosophy, political theory, or general causticness that nudged him onto this path, then 16 years coaching speech & debate were worth it.  I tend to be deeply cynical about What Is, but demand a lot of people to shape What Will Be, and try to impart some of the same to everyone I teach.  The Right Thing is often clear enough; we don’t fail to do it because we don’t know what it is, but because we don’t want to; and for that, there’s little excuse.

WB wasn’t my most talented or successful student, not even in his class.  He had a better than average debate career, but not a spectacular one.  Perhaps he was saving his spectacular for later.  I’m privileged to watch and find out.