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.

Harvard and Yale

So last weekend was the Debacle on the Charles, aka the Harvard Invitational. Sometimes it’s enough to make me wonder what it takes to get disinvited. The tournament is massive; upwards of 3,000 students find themselves thrust into competition, which is easily the largest tournament of the year. Sadly, that doesn’t speak much to the quality; both Nationals are smaller, but to get to Nationals you must qualify. To get to Harvard, you need a check that doesn’t bounce. And boy howdy does it show.

The people who run the tournament have improved things over the past few years. They’ve eliminated the double octo round and opted instead for another speech prelim, which reduces the degree of difficulty for everyone involved. There are a number of factors that make the weekend soundly miserable that aren’t exactly under their control: I’d rather have elective root canals than spend much time in Cambridge Ringe & Latin’s cafeteria together with 2,000 forensicators. The rooms are as far flung as the ridiculous schedule, and between the two nothing runs on time.

But fundamentally that is their fault; the tournament is clearly too large to be run comfortably and effectively. They opt to keep it big and hope for the best; there’s got to be a profit motive at the root of it. Their take is simply staggering; it must be upwards of $250,000. I’m going to do the math sometime and tell for certain, but it’s truly an amazing amount of money to pull from a three day event. And this year, fees increased again.

Beyond that, there are a few things they don’t seem to quite get. The likelihood that judges will bitch at you increases with the length of the lines they must stand in. It’s difficult to get judges to come to these things, and I don’t much appreciate Harvard making that task harder by forcing them to wait 45 minutes in line while a single person checks and hands out speech ballots. With that many ballots coming through, they should have an army of folks, and separate areas for speech and debate judges to shorten things further. I also don’t think they use their judges terribly well in elim rounds; the debaters have more complaints about this usually, since they care more and know more about their judges, but I still can’t help but wonder about some of their choices in elimination rounds of speech, after having read the ballots.

Tabbing is two things. There’s the bare minimum of putting out correct schematics; that is, every room has a judge who can judge all the students in that room, the students are all allowed to compete against each other, and so on. Correct schematics are good to have, and there are many tournaments that seem incapable of even reaching that plateau; I hear tell that Stanford this year fell into that category. Harvard, minus the usual snafus multiplied by their size, is quite adept at putting out correct schematics. However, it falls asleep at the switch at putting out good schematics. Good schematics are produced when coaches from the various regions at the tournament help put judges into speech categories that they actually like and are good at judging. Good schematics create panels where different points of view are represented, but not in such a dramatic way that the kids are left with an impossible situation.

Harvard does none of these things. IEs are tabbed by two people who are the models of helpful politeness, and do a great job with what they’re given. They also have no idea who I am, and probably don’t have much idea of who any of my friends are too. That’s a shame, since forensics being the excessively small pond that it is, I’m friends with most of the forensics coaches on the eastern seaboard who come to the tournament. So they’re missing some vital links that help make tournaments great.

You can’t always trust what coaches tell you about your judges, either. At my troika of college tournaments, I try to take time to read ballots by the A and B judges whose names I don’t know.   I try to get a sense of what is meant by those A and B ratings. After all, length of judging is no qualifier: you can be a crappy judge for ten years, and you’re still crappy. Instead, I look for the comments I would want as a coach, and comments that show me that the judge is paying attention to what’s going on in the round; it’s a bonus if they can manage to not swear heavily on the ballot too.

This whole process is vital to producing good schematics over and above correct ones.   It all requires people to help.   Harvard seems awfully proud about running on a skeleton staff. It is impressive that they manage to be correct with a skeleton crew running the thing, I suppose. But it wouldn’t be so difficult to bring a few more people in, people who can make the tournament both correct and good. That’s what I’ve done over the years at Yale and Penn and Columbia. Strictly speaking, I could run most of those with half the folks we usually have; we were a bit tight this year at Columbia thanks to the pansies who went to Emory instead, but the point remains. But I don’t want to; I want to ensure that the tournaments run smoothly *and* are worth doing. That takes pairs of hands, and lots of eyes checking things, and a coach in the room from each of your major geographic regions to help evaluate judges, and a host of other things. Effort. Effort on a scale that means that more people work to make Yale great than make Harvard simply run.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I bitch about Yale and the Yalies a lot, but right now I’m on the train back to Boston from New Haven after meeting next year’s tournament senior staff. What I saw was an enthused, committed group of people who understand what forensics is, and who understand that their tournament would have value even if it didn’t raise a dime for them. The Yale tournament should be proud of what it is, and even though people are fond of giving me credit, without the Yalies willing to dedicate themselves to the agenda I’ve urged on them, of making a tournament that people actively want to go to rather than feeling they can’t avoid, I’d have accomplished nothing at all. So this may be a rare moment, but hats off to the Yalies for remembering that, even if I have to remind them sometimes.

Snow Globe

For the last two days the weather has been somewhat like a snowglobe; we’ve had gentle falling snow that never seems to accumulate.   The snow powders the earth, and then the temperature just edges above freezing, so it melts; and then it drops another two degrees, we slip below the edge of freezing, and the earth is frosted again.

It’s magnificent.

This morning on Storrow Drive,   the world disappeared.   It was snowing thick, and the grey ground was covered with it.   A fog rose above the Charles.   The world shrank to the trees on either side of the Esplanade, the outline of Kendall Square’s across the river, and the bricks of Back Bay to my right.   And the line of cars with suicidal drivers zipping down Storrow going sixty, of course.

It was a great moment, when the world and nature intrudes on the city, and lets us know where we stand.   The weather can make the world dull brown, or it can make it shine silver in the morning, and we can only drive by and watch.