The debate tournament went well, though I definitely realized that I am too old to do that anymore. It ended Saturday night and I'm still recovering from the lack of sleep. Still, it was a nice nostalgia trip. I was disappointed in the quality of the debate that I saw. The best team there was from Ohio and I can't imagine they would last long at a major tournament. I was told they went 3-3 at Wake Forest a few weeks ago, which is a major national tournament, and that sounds about right.
I don't know if the quality of debate overall has gone down in the 13 or 14 years since I was actively involved, but apparently the number of schools fielding teams in Michigan has gone way down. I was told that at last year's state tournament there were 13 teams in division 1. When I was coaching, you had to get through districts and regionals to get to the state tournament and well over a hundred teams participated trying to get in. There were at least 35 or 40 schools in the state tournament. My team was one of the teams that led the battle to drag Michigan debate into the 20th century so teams could compete on a national level, and I know that during the early and mid 90s, it had paid off. East Grand Rapids, East Lansing, Groves, and several other schools had teams that made it to TOC (Tournament of Champions at the University of Kentucky), but it seems that now everyone else has just dropped their programs. That makes me sad.
What made me happy, though, was meeting the coach from Okemos High School, the team I coached. I coached there from 87-90 and when I left the program shut down. They restarted it in 2000 and the new coach is a very sharp former MSU debater. He was pretty excited to meet me and hear about the former glory days, and it was nice to get to meet him and the kids on the team. If they can get some money out of the administration there, there's no reason why that can't be a powerhouse program. It's a wealthy and highly educated community with an academically challenging school system, right near a major college library.
One thing that surprised me was the grief I got for giving low speaker points. My first round I gave out nothing higher than a 26 (on a scale of 1-30) and the tab room actually came and asked me if that was intentional. I was told that no one really gives out less than a 26 these days. Seems absurd to me. What's the point of dropping the high and low scores when handing out speaker trophies if the whole range of possible scores is 4 points? Hell, what's the point of handing out trophies at all. The difference between 1st place and 30th can't be more than a few points. I guess speaker point inflation has followed grade inflation in academia, and I don't like it any better in one setting than I do in another.
Anyway, it was a good time, all in all. I may try to judge one or two more over the course of the next few months. Maybe I'll go to the Glenbrooks tournament in Chicago so I can see some good debate.
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There are many reasons for the decline of policy debate, including its descent into weirdness over the past two decades (though that's not a universal condition, I understand), its overemphasis on blizzards of arguments, and its less-than-attractiveness to lay judges, but mostly it's expensive. In fees, supplies, and training, it's at least double the cost of Lincoln-Douglas or Public Policy debate. Lincoln-Douglas, by the way, is headed in the same direction.
There are many reasons for the decline of policy debate, including its descent into weirdness over the past two decades (though that's not a universal condition, I understand), its overemphasis on blizzards of arguments
I got rather annoyed at the one team from Ohio. They were clearly the most talented team there, but in the semifinals they went for the "throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope something sticks" approach. Unfortunately, it worked. The 2AC dropped or only one pointed several arguments and the neg won easily as a result. I told them after the round that I wanted very much to vote against them but couldn't justify it. Two of the disads contradicted each other, for crying out loud, but the 2AC didn't catch that. They put out a kritik that was really just a disad. It was ugly. And that was the BEST team I saw there.
What annoyed me most was that a team would ask me before the round if I had any advice in terms of my judging philosophy and I would give a fairly detailed list of things - and they would ignore it. Like I would tell them every round that I hate squirrely topicality arguments. If you really think the case is non-topical, then make a serious case for it and stick to it, don't give me 15 second topicality violations that you have no intention of continuing and only intend as a time suck for the 2AC. After doing that in one round, I had a team give THREE such violations, all of which were dropped.
The other thing I found disturbing was the lack of ethics in terms of tagging and cutting evidence. In two rounds, I asked to see cards after the round and the quote said the exact opposite of what the tag said. In one case, it was a link to a hegemony disad and the card actually said that the US should take the dominant role in the world like Great Britain did in the 1800s! And when I told the girl this, she nodded and said, "I know". I'm not one who really likes abuse or ethics violations, but this one was begging for it. This really is unethical.
I also found that my oral critiques were mostly strategy teaching sessions. In the first round, I judged a team that ended up in semifinals and the round was absolutely over after the 1AR. The negative was absolutely crushing this team on two disads, the 1AR blew them both completely, and I was ready to start writing my ballot. Then the 2NR got up and said, "I'm just going to topicality". I said, "The disads are going away?" Yep. I ended up voting for them on the topicality argument, but fairly reluctantly just because the strategic choice was so bad. That team ended up in semifinals, and their opponents lost in quarterfinals. That gives you some idea how bad the quality of debate was at this tournament.
The "paradigm question" achieves the level of high comedy when, in a final round, all three (or five) judges have different judging philosophies, including the curmudgeon in the back who merely snorts "Speed kills."
What would it take, I wonder, to reclaim Policy for substantive debate? Longer time limits, perhaps?
The "paradigm question" achieves the level of high comedy when, in a final round, all three (or five) judges have different judging philosophies, including the curmudgeon in the back who merely snorts "Speed kills."
LOL. Speed doesn't bother me much, as long as it's understandable. Unfortunately, most of the speed debates are not. If they're not clear, I'll say "unclear" loudly, once. If they don't clear it up after that, I don't feel much obligation to keep on flowing. The big thing I want is a coherent strategy. 3 topicality violations, none of which are legitimate, and 5 disads, some of which contradict, is not a coherent strategy. A good rule of thumb is that if you couldn't win a slow and rational debate on any one of your arguments, then you are merely making a lot of them in the hope that the other team will drop a lot and you can win on a bad argument.
What would it take, I wonder, to reclaim Policy for substantive debate? Longer time limits, perhaps?
I don't know. I don't think that would really help. Given how most debaters are taught, more time would just mean more bad arguments given. I assume that the same thing is true today that was true 15 years ago, that the best teams in the nation don't need to use the spread because they generally have coherent strategies in mind. A confident, talented team can handle the spread in 2AC and put the negative back on the defensive again.
Part of the problem is the lost art of cross-examination. I noticed several times this weekend where the cross-x became nothing but "so how are you guys doing" questions because their partners were using it for prep time. So while they're dinking around wasting time, they're not asking questions that could have set up the responses to an argument. Like the card that said the opposite of what the tag claimed - if the opponent had asked in cross-x to have that card read, they could have pointed out that it didn't say what they claimed and then the response to the disad in 2AC becomes 15 seconds long and you don't have to deal with it anymore.
OR, and this is even worse, when they DO get an answer that can help them in cross-x and they don't use it. In the semifinal round, the neg put out two disads that contradicted. The first was a politics disad (Bush loses his base and can't drill in ANWAR ---> bad things); the second was a space-based missile defense disad (increased global cooperation ---> alliance for missile defense ---> space based weapons. In cross-x, the 1A asked why Bush isn't doing missile defense currently since he is so strongly in favor of it and the 1N says, "Because he doesn't want to do anything before the election that might cost him votes; once he's reelected, he'll push it through." Well that answer kills both disads. If flips the link to the politics disad because it shows that Bush is really concerned about securing the votes of moderates, not his conservative base, and the impacts collide - one says Bush must be reelected in order to drill in ANWAR, the other says if Bush is elected we'll get space-based missile defense which leads to war. Did the 2AC mention any of this? Nope. She could have taken out both disads in less than 30 seconds, but instead she put out a bunch of bad responses on one and punted the other. Very frustrating to watch.
They also had a drug war disad that was just horrible. The link was multilateral cooperation spurs the war on drugs and that leads to real wars. After the round, the aff actually asked me during my critique how they should have responded to it. How about uniqueness, for crying out loud. We don't have a drug war NOW? This was literally a two card disad in 1NC - coop leads to drug wars, drug wars lead to real wars. A halfway decent team could have taken this out in 30 seconds max.
I asked the winning team after the round, if they had run just one or two of the arguments straight up, with plenty of time to really get at the substance of them, do they think they could have won the debate. The answer was "probably not". I said, "Exactly. These are just bad arguments, and you know they're bad arguments, but you made enough of them early on that the 2AC couldn't cover them all, so I end up having to vote on really bad arguments. That annoys me. And against a better team, your strategy is not only going to lose you the round, it's going to make you look really bad while doing it."
The solution to this? Better judging, perhaps. Better coaching. Don't know how you make that happen, of course. But more time for bad debate just means more time for more bad arguments.