As I discussed on In the Bin, National Parliamentary Debate Association nationals had about 20 teams at their championship tournament.
Cross Examination Debate Association, by contrast, just had
their national tournament and hosted 86 teams.
Globally, the World University Debate Championships held in
Panama hosted 232 teams the last two weeks of December at their championship,
which an American team won from Dartmouth.
Why the disparity? If debate is dying, how do you explain these numbers?
Debate is not dying;
debate is inconsistent based on context. I agree these numbers are not what they were 20 years ago, but what was the same as it was 20 years ago? Nothing!
What are some explanations as to the relative health of some debate formats and not others?
The best explanation of the distinction between NPDA and
CEDA is CEDA has a long history of being rooted in the curriculum of speech
communication departments. There are still a large number of Boomer and tons of
Generation X professors who came up in a system where a CEDA/NDT program was
just an unquestioned part of the department whether they participated in it or
not. There could still be some tensions in such departments between those who
don’t understand or aren’t a part of the debate program and those who are. This
is mostly because of a failure of the debate program to communicate to the
larger department what they do.
I remember being
profiled as “not a debate person” when I visited the University of Pittsburgh
in 2004 to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. there. Since it was CEDA nationals
weekend, the students I met were not from the debate tradition, and were quite
critical of debate and the people involved – mostly because there was not much
communication about what goes on in the debate program, and these graduate
students had to put it together based on what they saw from time to time. This
is not their fault but the fault of the program to communicate its curricular
connection (or even better, necessity!).
Having an assumed curricular connection is not working for
debate in CEDA or NDT as the discourse is much more akin to sport today. Social media and University coverage of
debate accomplishments is in the rhetoric of a NCAA team. This doesn’t help
debate’s numbers because it doesn’t display fiscal need to the university. For
example, the necessity of a lab to teach science or the necessity of a language
center to help the foreign languages department is much clearer to a Dean than
“We won a tournament!” appears. In that case, it sounds like athletics, which
funds itself through donations and ticket sales (somewhat). This is directly
connected to the large amount of “please donate to our debate team”
crowdfunding posts I see on social media these days. Curricular connection is vital to the health of a debate program, but also requires the debate director to do a lot more than go to 13 weekend tournaments in one format as their entire program.
NPDA’s issue I think is related to this “assumed curriculum”
connection where there is no basis for understanding it among the faculty. Most
who did CEDA might not understand or see the connection to communication or
rhetorical theory at all. Most debate directors have a lot of anxiety about
having faculty come watch practice – either the practice will not be valuable
(edited to look like some imagined 19th century debate to deceive
the faculty member) or it will be a real practice, risking alienating the faculty
member and making them really question the value of the program. The best way
through this is of course to integrate the debate program into the campus life
very much how writing programs have done it. NPDA should try to connect it's more open style (although it has really raced toward the CEDA model as a way to survive) from the earlier days to things on campus such as democratic deliberation centers, the writing center, dialogue initiatives, and the like. The contrast would be very powerful: NPDA format could be another addition of things that can be done to investigate a controversy, share perspectives on it, or help people find their way through disagreement.
What about the international numbers? This is explained
through a few factors. First, debate is a club activity in most countries with
no curricular connection whatsoever. There are some student club funds for
that. But most importantly, non-American students do not have to pay huge
tuition bills to attend university. This allows for the annual expense of
travel and participation in an event that might be fun, interesting, and a
chance to meet a large amount of international peers. Also the international attitude
toward education is a lot less carceral than the American – not a lot of
attention to attendance or completing a daily task to pass the course. There’s
also not a lot of pressure to have a part time job to pay for school. There’s more time for practice and engagement
in debate as something enjoyable rather than another addition to an already
stressful, surveilled college experience.
The biggest thing to increasing the numbers of participants
in any debate format is more connection to a diverse, broad sense of audience.
Although WUDC has its issues with how it theorizes audience, it offers an
experience to debate the widest distinction between people with the widest
cultural and geographic diversity of participants to judge. NPDA offers the
most narrow in this experience. Diversity is great for rhetorical training as
the rhetorical theory of argument isn’t about getting it right as much as it is
getting it across. Practicing the same types of audiences before different
types of people is educational. This is rhetorical education, something that a
lot of people in debate don’t want – they want something more philosophical:
The correct argument, with the correct information, said the correct way – and
if you vote against it you are clearly stupid, wrong, an idiot, or worse, a
conservative!
Shifting what debate’s goals are is the way to get the numbers
up. Look at Worlds – the only distinction here is the diversity. It’s a tougher
travel and a tougher amount of time to be away (although it is a holiday which
makes the travel easier for those obsessed with class performance). This kind
of integration might not be possible for NPDA or CEDA but imagination can come
into play, as well as following the model of the writing center from
composition studies.