2013-2014 Will Be A Pivotal Debate Year, Part 1 of 3

Vienna Debate Workshop-Finale (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This upcoming season of competitive debating is going to be one to remember. And we won’t even have to try.
I haven’t posted here in quite a long
time. I’ve had a lot of stuff going on in my life and really didn’t
have much time for writing. Hopefully I will now be posting here once
a week, and possibly more as the tournament season gets underway here
in the U.S.  
This first post is an examination of why I think this year is historically significant for debaters. Debaters not just in the United States, but worldwide.  Over the next few posts I’ll explain three of these reasons for why I think we will look back at this year as historically significant in the future.
There are a lot of changes. Debate is
in flux in the U.S., at every level. It’s an exciting time if you
know how to look at it. For a lot of people, these changes are
probably a bit disconcerting if not frightening.
This first post is focused on the United States, and why 2013-14 is going to be significant there.
Welcome to the World
Debate is finally becoming a global
activity in the United States. Although we have a long history of
international debating here, it has always been outside of the
tournament or competitive frame. Since the 1920s, British debaters
have journeyed to the U.S. to take a national tour, stopping along
the way for local color as well as to take on the local college’s
best debaters. This tour still continues to this day, but now it sits
along side the arrival of many international options. The Americans have been getting a slow and steady taste of international debating, but this is the year it is going to go from appetizer to main course.
This summer at the national
championship, the National Forensic League held an invitational round
robin tournament using the World Schools debating format. Although
this was an invitation only event in Alabama, the event was held in
order to introduce high school coaches, teachers, and debaters to the
new format they hope to roll out nationally starting soon. The past
two years I have taught at the Houston Urban Debate League summer
camp, helping to teach people this format last year for the first
time. This year I heard so many stories of enthusiasm for it from
teachers and students – and that it has taken off with enormous
popularity. World Schools debating is practiced globally – and it
is the format for the world championships held annually between
nations.
I predict 2013-14 will be remembered as
the year where World Schools was introduced, and in turn introduced
American debaters to a whole new world of international competition.
I don’t think it will replace any High School formats that are loved
by many, but I do think it will give these formats a run for their
money. World Schools debating will introduce the first generation of American debaters to the international style of debating not just as observers, as through watching a tour debate, but as participants.
But furthermore, at the collegiate
level, I believe this will be the first group of debaters in
University who will experience a very different tournament
environment than the one they do as first years. If their tournaments
only offer one format of debating, this is going to change over the
next four years. And these first year students are going to be the last group to
start under an old system and move toward a new one. 

At the University level, the popularity
of British Parliamentary or Worlds debating is gaining a lot of
momentum. Southern schools are going to start picking it up as it begins to spread. The more schools who are doing the format increases the
chances that there will be tournaments held in that format in those
regions. Other southern powerhouses are interested in exploring
Worlds debating as a way of allowing graduate students and law
students to compete. I think this year is the year where we will
start to see all of these things rising, and in a few years we will
look back to this year as the moment when it all started to change.
Of course, many reading this who are from the traditional debating formats in the U.S. might be concerned about what will happen to those formats. In the next post, I’ll explain why the arrival of new and popular formats that offer things the old formats can’t offer are actually helped by this development.

Related articles

Is WUDC still relevant?

Today, Achte Minute posted a great interview with the most recent convener of WUDC. This interview is something that many will not read carefully, but I believe everyone interested in the future of the World Championships should read carefully.  The reason is that the interview clearly shows the tension that exists between a World Championship and “World’s” – the current ideology and structure of WUDC is inadequate to provide something as complex and large as an actual world championship.

For a while now, I have been wondering how relevant WUDC is and how long it will maintain its relevance with the rise of debating in the BP style in the US and in China. Soon there will be competitors to the traditional WUDC tournament, and those interested and in favor of preserving Worlds have some hard work ahead of them to keep WUDC relevant. Here’s a short list of reasons why Worlds will lose relevance, and what could be done now to prevent that slide:

1. Destination Debating

It is unfortunate, but a number of people participating in the World Championships would only attend if they knew they were also going to a party in a major city that had booked them a room in an exclusive hotel. People bidding for worlds assume this, and attempt to out do previous bids that offered such amenities. There must be a huge new years eve extravaganza, plenty of alcohol, and a hotel better than any of the others around. The destination seems to be the goal, and the debating seems to be secondary. As I have heard and overheard many say, “I agree with your critiques about Worlds, but I sure would love to go to India!” The quality of the competition should be the reason people want to go to WUDC, not the tourism. We don’t want WUDC to fall into the position of a bad academic conference, only interesting because someone else can fund our trip to an exotic, fancy locale.

It was good to see Patrick discuss alternatives to hotel lodging in his interview. This can be fixed by Council adopting rules where all events must take place within walking distance of the place where participants are staying. This would effectively limit those who can host Worlds to University campuses with ample dorm space. This reduces the cost of WUDC for everyone, and focuses the debate upon who can best host us, not which destination has the best alcohol or weather. Facilities should be a priority alongside safety, which means the campus must be willing to support the existence of the number of people there. Many of you are going to cite Botswana as a horrible experience and I don’t disagree. But I will remind you that this was a bait and switch, not part of the bid, and Destination Debating logic had almost everyone in full sway toward that bid, if the collective guilt about never hosting WUDC in the developing world didn’t have you convinced.

2. Parties

There’s nothing wrong with a good time, until multiple ambulances have to be summoned. There’s also nothing wrong with parties unless the express purpose of the party, as announced by the people hosting it, is to help people hit on one another or find partners for sexual activity. Both set up WUDC not only for legal issues, but for oblivion. It wouldn’t take many lawsuits to bring down WUDC, especially considering that the council has no official legal status (so far as my research can determine) and such lawsuits would be directly against the officers and conveners as persons.

This point always baffles me when I think about it. Why would you travel halfway around the world just to hang out with the same people you already know night after night? I would think one way of reducing the cost of WUDC would be to host less parties, or facilitate transit into the city for those who want to have a look around and enjoy what the local venues have to offer. The issue of safety and security is one to consider, but being out on the street in a public space might be more safe than these parties that occur without proper supervision in venues where the people serving the drinks do not have proper licensing or training to do so. I realize all of the parties are not this way, but many are, and I think once they happen if the WUDC does not put a stop to them, they will be blamed for the unfortunate results. Let’s lower the registration price and let our cities do what they do best – cater to tourists. With some guidance from the Org Comm, things will be safer and more fun for those with an interest in night life.

I know this contradicts my first point in some ways that debaters will no doubt point out. However, if we are not going to dispense with Destination Debate, we should dispense with the parties. But if you agree with point one, we could have more social events on the campus as long as they follow the rules and regulations of the University. I am not against interesting events happening at Worlds. I am against horrific risky events happening at Worlds. The people attending Worlds aspire to great things; it would be more than shameful if someone died due to the party atmosphere at Worlds.

3. Publicity

The idea that a WUDC bid could go forward without money earmarked to fly in the best judges is humorous at best. But who are these “best judges?” What are the standards and practices they follow? Does Council have a normative list or guideline for conveners on this issue?

I suspect they do not, which is a shame. This practice could be really amazing if we were developing judges who place pedagogy before competitive excellence, or as competitive excellence. Unfortunately with no rubric, we are creating a defacto one, where judges who were great debaters are always funded, while intelligent, thoughtful people who were not good debaters are not given a subsidy. Why is this a problem?

It all has to do with the reasonable person standard we cling to as the rubric for our entire competition. If we don’t have any reasonable people, how can we be teaching this as the goal or result of our competition? We are in fact creating a group of people who serve as a reasonable person standard, but this tide pool is not the sea. If we want to have any hope of convincing others that debate helps people become better speakers in the world, better at influencing others, or better at getting important ideas across, we need to address this issue – it is ultimately an issue of publicity.

Worlds should be treated by the local media and other media sources as the type of event it purports to be. Inviting in local political officials and such is quite nice, but asking people in the public to serve as adjudicators is a real media story. It would give WUDC the chance to speak about part of its important function to those who might only consider debate as a result of a process, leaving out the important dimension of debate as process in itself. Debate has helped me think better, and I hope it does the same for my students.

Having a mixed bag of untrained, unfiltered adjudicators would change the perspective of the tournament participants among competitors and judges alike. Now we would have a public element shifting the balance in adjudication away from doing things “the right way” to win a debate and doing things “the persuasive way” instead.

An area where WUDC is shining more and more in this problem is online. More live video and more recorded video should make its way up onto the internet in the coming years. Debaters should not be ashamed to show their debating online – if they are, it is a symptom of a style of debate that is outside, or possibly even counter to, the public who might be interested in such debates. We don’t have to make pandering debates that include all the public, but we should find a way to check our impulse to make debate more cloistered and further removed from the interested public. I find it sad that I can no longer show a debating video from WUDC as a way to recruit new debaters because they find it incomprehensible and strange.

What have I left out?