(This link is an example; there are tons of NDT debates to watch on the Policy Debate Central YouTube channel)
The National Debate Tournament is seen as a tradition, the oldest, the most continuous, and the highest level of debate competition in the United States for intercollegiate debate. What’s funny about it is that the NDT is most notably an index of change. The more people think of the NDT as some traditional institution that always does debate in some traditional way, the more the motives are fanned to defend that tradition so the more changes are made to the way debate is done to preserve it. “We had to rebuild the village in order to keep the property values high!”
The NDT has changed so much even in my brief brushes with it never as a competitor, barely as a coach and most commonly as a critic and scholar of debate pedagogical history. The most important thing that has changed in order to preserve the NDT’s hold on the purest, best, most rigorous form of debate is technology resistance.
Even though we have laptops, internet, and all kinds of tools to word process and share information with one another it is still a necessary and incontrovertible part of the NDT that speeches must be orated in a room live at the same time as opponents. In contemporary debate anywhere but the NDT, recordings, blogs, social media posts, and video editing are a part of powerful arguments. It seems even a slight modification here to avoid the super spreading speeches would be for all cases and 1NC arguments to be released by the teams to one another so the speech time could be spent in investigating the connections, missed connections, and gaps in the arguments. I think this would improve the quality of debate but leave many people unmoored once they discover they have no expertise in argumentation or debate and plenty in how a tournament should be run. The gap here is huge and unnoticeable until you start trying to make the NDT look more like reasonable debate that occurs in contemporary institutions of all kinds.
Secondly is the desperate amount of energy spent to insure that nobody knows the NDT is happening except the NDT participants and the converted. If a tournament of this quality with this caliber debaters was happening at my university, I would be sure every single person walking around the perimeter of the campus knew it was happening and that I and my department (or division) were responsible for it. Such attention is unwanted, who knows why. Perhaps the NDT believes that their event is unintelligible. Most participants don’t notice this because the practice is a part of their traditions and culture. They also have the full text of anything being chirped in the air by a speaker on their computer. There’s nothing being preserved here except a very quirky and very esoteric understanding of “good debate.”
In rhetoric we have a very simple way to understand good debate: Look to the audience. Are they getting something out of it? NDT answers this question by rug pulling – there won’t be an audience; we will work hard to exclude one. Seems strange if you are the most prestigious debate competition for undergraduate students in the United States.
All this would take is the small adaptation of some video guides, commentary, commentators, and things to look for. Audiences could have access to outlines of the arguments that are coming. They could have video and audio access to expert commentators saying what’s going on in the debate and why it was a good move. NDT could keep their professional sport model of debating and just do what every other professional sport in the world does – offer commentators to explain the action and why the audience should be impressed. Also, allowing most of the debate to happen online prior to the NDT – the sharing of arguments in particular so the speeches can be more general – would be great. If you need a model for how this might play out in practice and still produce good arguments, look to the U.S. Supreme Court or any Federal District Court.
The biggest change, and the strangest one to me is the eruption of Go Fund Me pages of all kinds to bring our team to the NDT. If a team qualifies for the NDT, why don’t they just get to go? It seems like something that should be funded regardless of the institutions commitment to the tournament or debate in general. NDT should try to gather sponsors for this, but this also means accessibility must be a part of the tournament. This cuts against – like all the suggestions I’ve written above – the idea that the NDT is preserving some kind of true or better form of debating than could exist outside the annual terrarium that it puts together in some midwestern hotel. This is obviously false; there are tons of good forums (fora?) for debating out there that simply don’t meet or click with those who have identified the accidental sentiment of practice that has been passed down to make a tournament easier to win with being good at debating. There is no necessary connection between the habits of good NDT debate and good debate. There might be other good reasons to do the NDT, but those will vanish too unless the NDT and the practitioners of it can solve the funding issue.
If a Dean or VP of Student Affairs saw the video linked here they would probably feel very confident about their decision not to fund intercollegiate debate on their campus. They need an interpreter – and anyone who loves American debate traditions needs one. The NDT along with commentators needs a team of Sherpas to help those interested and not part of the high school workshop to debate recruitment pipeline understand what they are seeing and why it is powerful, it matters, and most importantly why it’s a necessary part of university life that is quickly being eroded into a job training site. The crowdfunding angle is so depressing to me and I see it everywhere. I think it should be addressed by the NDT directly and with an eye toward preserving whatever the value of doing NDT debate might be (I’m unfamiliar with the evidence other than the anecdotal and the post hoc law school success stories. There’s got to be better data out there somewhere ya?). It might be that the NDT has nothing to do with teaching rhetoric, debate, or argumentation and it does something quite different than the package suggests. We should change the packaging, or make the appeal coherent in some way to ensure that the funding will be there to have such an event.
The other solution is to distribute the NDT away from a
center and to the margin. NDT could be a style of debate meant to inquire after
complex, complicated, deep disagreement about national and international
policy. It could become a way to approach it, much like TED has become that for
research ideas or socially trendy curiosities. It could become like The Moth
has become for storytelling. Both of these organizations are models for the NDT’s
future – what’s the brand? High intensity, high structured debate on a policy
question that is research heavy. It’s not evidence based debate, it’s evidence centric
debating. That brand could make NDT something that is replicated in small venues
here and there not to discover a champion, but to discover the insights on
policy issues that only NDT debaters know can be revealed. The fact that the
amount of people who truly get what this style and approach to debate can reveal
about thought, evidence, the mind, and human communication is so slim is a
source of embarrassment. It can be addressed.