One of the things that has happened in competitive debate over the last decade or so is the development of the "kritik" (pronounced just like critique). This was just beginning to come into use when I was getting out of coaching and judging in the early 90s and at the time I thought it was a healthy development. Explaining how and why it began will require a bit of background in how a debate is structured. After an explanation of the general structure of how such arguments are used, and the levels on which they are used, I'll make it specific to the type of kritik that the Louisville Project used.
Policy debating tends to be very heavily skewed toward cost-benefit analysis. There is a resolution every year that could be implemented in any of a couple dozen or more ways, called plans. The affirmative team offers a plan that implements the resolution and argues that it leads to one or more advantages. The negative disputes those advantages and argues that it causes one or more disadvantages. They can also argue that the plan does not meet the resolution (this is a topicality argument) or they can present a non-resolutional counterplan to gain the same advantages and avoid the disadvantages. And most policy debates come down in one way or another to weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the plan and/or counterplan (unless they're decided on a topicality challenge).
So along comes the kritik, which is essentially a value or principle-based argument against the affirmative plan. As I said, this was just beginning to be used in the last year or two I was coaching and judging, but I thought it was a really good development because it was the sort of argument used in the real world. In many policy debates in the real world, a policy is ruled out simply because it violates a certain principle of government, regardless of what the benefits of it might be. We might well be able to save lives from drug overdoses if we imposed mandatory drug testing on all people in the nation, but such a policy would not pass because it violates our freedom to an intolerable degree (knock on wood).
A kritik is what debaters would refer to as a decision calculus - a framework within which the judge must vote in a debate, with the negative arguing that the judge should reject any plan that violates our liberty because liberty is the primary value (this is just one example of a kritik; there are many others). It should also be noted that affirmative teams can also use kritiks against the negative team's advocacy during a debate, but we'll leave that aside for now.
Kritiks can take place on different levels. Some kritiks are plan-level; that is, they argue against the affirmative plan specifically on the basis of some principled framework. Unfortunately, these are more and more rare. Debaters like to take shortcuts and not to have to do a lot of specific research, so they develop generic arguments that could be triggered by any plan under a resolution. So there are many kritiks that operate at the level of the resolution.
For example, last year's high school topic was that the US should increase support for UN peacekeeping operations. Aff plans had lots of ways to do that. Some were specific, increasing US support for a particular peacekeeping operation, such as in the Sudan or another area of the world. Other plans did so more generally, increasing US logistical aid to the UN, giving them access to more US troops for whatever missions they chose to undertake, or giving peacekeeping operations access to American intelligence or spy satellite data.
An example of a resolution-level kritik would be a sovereignty argument. One could argue that UN action undermines American sovereignty by its very nature and that therefore any policy which aids the UN should be rejected on that basis. Another example might be genocide trivialization - in short, one would argue that the UN, by invoking genocide as an excuse for their intervention, trivializes the meaning of genocide and desensitizes us to acts of real genocide, thus preventing us from thinking clearly when we may be called upon to combat the real thing.
And they can be far more esoteric than that as well, involving arcane philosophical arguments against sexism, racism, patriarchy, militarism, and many more. They often invoke the work of philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Lacan or Heiddeger (sadly, most high school debaters haven't a clue what that work actually means and that makes for some really crappy debates). But anyway, this is all just background on the types of kritiks there are, and this brings me to the last one, the one I find most objectionable: the activity-level kritik.
Activity-level kritiks essentially are ones that challenge the debate process itself. For example, one might argue that we shouldn't compete with one another, we should all just sit around and have discussions that reinforce one another, and this will make the world a better place. Such kritiks urge the judge in a debate to vote against debate itself and vote based upon an entirely different set of criteria than who did the best job of debating, or whose arguments are the most sound, or which side is better supported by the evidence. And that is what brings us to the Louisville Project.
Starting a few years ago, College Sports TV began filming a documentary of the National Debate Tournament every year. In 2004, that documetnary focused a lot of attention on the Louisville Project. The debate coach at Louisville, Ede Warner, was on a crusade to change the racial makeup of debate and they began using a racial kritik in every debate, not aimed at the plan or the resolution but at the activity of debate itself. In a nutshell, they argued that blacks are a very small minority of competitive debaters (true) and that this is because it focused on evidence and policy analysis that ignores the reality of the lives of black people.
Debate must be changed, they argued, in order to invite more blacks to participate, and to do that they would engage in highly stylized speeches about their personal experiences of racism with hip hop music playing in the background - in short, they would rap. And they would urge the judge to vote for them, despite the fact that they would entirely ignore the plan being offered by the other side but because voting for them would encourage more blacks to participate in debate.
And in 2004, Louisville's debate team made it to the early elimination rounds before being beaten (either in the octofinals or the quarterfinals, I forget which). At the end of the tournament, they showed a very upset Ede Warner yelling at some of the prominent coaches and judges at the tournament for voting against them. I can only say that he's fortunate that I'm no longer judging. If I were to judge a team using an activity-level kritik - any activity level kritik, not just this one - not only would they lose, they would get the lowest score possible and a scathing critique at the end of the round from me (judges typically give oral critiques at the end of a round, telling them what they did well and what they did poorly, and why he voted the way he did).
My answer to such kritiks is simple: there's the door. Debate is a game and like all games it has a set of rules and traditions. If you don't like the rules of the game, then don't play the game. Go find a game you do like, or go start your own game that suits your views better. But don't interrupt our game and tell us that we should vote for you even though you refuse to play by the rules.
And specifically on the Louisville Project, I've got deeper problems with it. The most obvious is that it is racist. Yes, I know that they claim to be fighting racism, but that claim is hollow. I don't doubt their sincerity. I'm sure they really believe that they're battling racism, but in fact they are only deepening it. They are operating from the assumption that black people either won't or can't engage in a debate using facts, evidence and logic. They are assuming, falsely in my view, that black people won't be attracted to an activity that focuses on intellectual battle rather than on personal feelings and experience. But I know that's not the case because I know black debaters who not only loved debate but were incredibly good at it.
We were talking about this the other day during our dinner and poker game, and my friend Will, the MSU debate coach, told me about a guy who debated for Emory University a few years ago who was one of the best debaters in the country, and was black. He said that he asked this kid in an email what he thought of the Louisville Project and that he responded with a long and scathing reply, absolutely furious at the implicit racism in it. He was appalled that they would argue that black people either won't or can't compete in an activity that focuses on policy analysis and debate. And I think he's right.
If the reasoning of the Louisville Project were to win out, you might as well rule blacks out of law school and out of any policymaking positions. If anything, were they to succeed, they would damage the ability of black students to receive training in the skills necessary to compete and succeed in those fields. This is an example of a kritik that doesn't foster better debate or a more educational experience, but destroys the integrity of the activity itself. As it is, resolution-level kritiks, focusing on issues that are predominately generic and esoteric, are bad enough. Postmodern kritiks, which are probably the bulk of them, are truly annoying. But activity-level kritiks threaten the entire activity and should be stopped.
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Correct me if I'm wrong (stuff like formalised debate competitions don't take place in Denmark, AFAIK), but it seems to me that right at the very end you're saying that kritiks that challenge the premise of the debate (resolution-level kritiks) are a Bad Thing.
In many cases you are probably right, but surely if the premise is utterly, patently, stupidly false, then it would be wholly legitimate to challenge it, would it not?
If, for instance, the debate was over Iraq, and one team had as its resolution that Something Must Be Done about the Iraqi WMD (of course that would probably never happen in a competition, since that premise is patently false), would it not be appropriate to appeal to the utter falseness of the resolution in ones opposition?
JS-
No, the kind of kritiks I'm objecting to are ones that challenge the structure of the activity itself (activity level kritiks). Resolution level kritiks can be both bad or good, depending on how well they are argued. But I don't have any general problem with them.
Hmmmmm. The very first NDT round I ever saw, as a freshman debater at the University of Utah, was an octo-final round between Brown University and Emory University. Melissa Maxey and her partner (whose name I forget, sadly) from Emory were the higher seeded team against Brown, whose members were (who could make this up?) Tuna Snider and Hotep X. Tuna was a large guy, and by large, I mean he could have been smaller (should have been smaller his cardiologist might say), with wild mane of curly hair, a jacket that was often askew, a tie that went many different directions. The Emory team was dressed well in debater gear, and looked fine. Mr. X, on the other hand, was dressed well, with short-cropped hair and perfectly shined shoes, and arguments as crisp and clear cut as his attire.
Brown won the round. I was timing, so didn't keep a flow, but several others did, and our agreement was that Brown simply out-argued on most of the main points.
Can African Americans succeed, arguing in debates, and more importantly, arguing in U.S. courtrooms and in U.S. policy? I would think debater Barbara Jordan alone would refute the claim that blacks can't succeed, but then I think of Thurgood Marshall, Johnny Cochran (who is still on billboards here in Dallas -- power beyond the grave!), Harold Washington, Barak Obama, and even people like Thomas Sowell.
How is Louisville doing on the debate circuit now?
Holy cow, you saw Tuna Snider when he was still in college? Tuna is now a legendary college coach at the University of Vermont. When I coached at Okemos, I sent my top debater to his summer institute, which he called the Boot Camp for the Brain. Tuna is one of the most eccentric most engaging people you could ever meet. You'd be hard pressed to find many people who have given as much to the activity of debate as the Tuna has. And in addition to his debate work, he also runs a huge reggae festival in Burlington, Vermont every summer. My kinda guy.
I was quite surprised to read about policy debate on this website; it was an unexpected pleasure! As a former high-school policy debater with James Logan High School(1995-1995), I can attest to the facts that debaters:
a)Look for shortcuts whenever possible and
b)Run high-flung kritiks with only an inkling of what we were talking about.
I have run kritiks in my debate past and rebutted kritiks, and I feel that plan/resolution kritiks have their place in debate, but activity level kritiks are jsut absurd. I despised them as a debater (when I would work with just about anything that seemed cool), and I find them even more ridiculous now. I have no problem with running philisophical kritiks (if you know what you're doing), but too many people resorted to kritiks as a means to either run multiple forms of topicality (on different levels) or as a disadvantage that had topicality primacy, and had to be address just as fast.
As to the Louisville Project, as an African-American debater, I find the kritik patently offensive and patronizing. Not only does the kritic avoid all pretense of on-topic argument, but it casts a poor light on the genuine lack of color present within policy debate. Running that kritik round after round smacks of pretension and laziness. It lets the team running the kritik feel morally superior while they run a squirrel kritik. If you want to get black folks into debate, set up recruiting programs and middle/high school debate programs instead of running foolish critiques such as these! Kooky, smarmy logical fallacies like these, along with the proliferation of spread debate, were threatening to kill team debate in the CHSSA (Callifornia High School Speech Association) before debate began to slow down (and nuclear impacts to disads starting becoming more reasonable).
/Affirmative open for cross-examination.
As a quick correction, I debated from 1995-1999.