Not to be outdone by Mia, it was also Luke Stuttgen's birthday, Thursday. Happy birthday, Luke! What better way to spend your birthday than teaching debate!
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As the 2012/2013 Season fast approaches, remember to order your 2012/2013 Topic Analysis Books for LD, PF, and Victory Briefs' Policy Files. Ordering a subscription not only gives you a substantial discount when compared to purchasing the books individually, but also means that the books will be delivered directly to your email as soon as they are released. Follow the links below for more information.
2012/2013 Lincoln-Douglas Topic Analysis Subscription
Congratulations to St. Louis Park's Leah Shapiro for championing the 2013 West Des Moines Valley Mid-America Cup over Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue. The decision was a 2-1 for Leah (Legried, Hymson, *Melin). Leah is coached by Christian Tarsney and Charles McClung, and Andrew is coached by Aracelis Biel and Mark Gorthey.
The Federal Aviation Administration says you'll be allowed gate-to-gate usage of most of your personal electronics.
Congratulations to Apple Valley sophomores Prince Hyamang and Sophie Ober for closing out Minnesota's JV State Tournament. Prince and Sophie are coached by Chris Theis, Ed Hendrickson, Josh You and David Quinn.
In the Novice division Kiley Eichelberger a junior from Chanhassen defeated Edina Freshman Annie Amen in the final round to win the Novice State title. Congratulations to both debaters. Kiley is coached by Zach Prax
Congratulations to Cypress Woods' Xixiang "Shawn" Xiong for winning the 35th Isidore Newman Invitational! In finals, Shawn defeated Greenhill's Mitali Mathur on a 2-1 decision. Shawn is coached by Heath Martin and Jared Woods. Mitali is coached by Aaron Timmons and Rebecca Kuang. Isidore Newman is a semis bid to the Tournament of Champions.
Congratulations to Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue for defeating Scarsdale's Noah Thaler to win the 2014 Columbia Invitational!
More and more, there appears to be disconnects between judges and debaters on the virtues of using theory as a strategy practice. Theory debate has steadily garnered the reputation as a frivolous, unpleasant practice, labeled as a tool employed to garner “cheap wins,” a “crutch” for those who lack substantive debate skills, and even a mechanism to exclude underprivileged debaters from the activity.
However, I find that a lot of these issues are not inherent either to theory debate or strategic theory debate, but the way debaters run these arguments. While it may occur much less frequently nowadays, excellent theory debate does exist. The goal of this article is to establish guidelines to help debaters improve on theory debate, should they choose to engage in it.
Congratulations to Collegiate's Andrew O'Donohue for defeating Scarsdale's Noah Thaler to win the 2014 Columbia Invitational!
More and more, there appears to be disconnects between judges and debaters on the virtues of using theory as a strategy practice. Theory debate has steadily garnered the reputation as a frivolous, unpleasant practice, labeled as a tool employed to garner “cheap wins,” a “crutch” for those who lack substantive debate skills, and even a mechanism to exclude underprivileged debaters from the activity.
However, I find that a lot of these issues are not inherent either to theory debate or strategic theory debate, but the way debaters run these arguments. While it may occur much less frequently nowadays, excellent theory debate does exist. The goal of this article is to establish guidelines to help debaters improve on theory debate, should they choose to engage in it.
The 2020 November/December Lincoln-Douglas debate topic is, Resolved: The United States ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee.
The 2020 November/December Public Forum debate topic is, Resolved: The United States should adopt a declaratory nuclear policy of no first use.
The 2020 September/October Lincoln-Douglas debate topic is, Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.
The 2020 September/October Public Forum debate topic is, Resolved: The United States federal government should enact the Medicare-For-All Act of 2019.
The topics that will be used in Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum debate at VBI 2020 have been finalized for all locations.
Lincoln-Douglas
- VBI Philadelphia (June 27 – July 10): Resolved: The United States ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee.
- VBI Los Angeles Session 1 (July 12 – July 31): Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
- VBI Los Angeles Session 2 (Aug 2 – Aug 15) will use the official 2020 September/October topic.
Public Forum
- VBI Philadelphia (June 27 – July 10): Resolved: The United States federal government should enact the Medicare-For-All Act of 2019.*
- VBI Los Angeles Session 1 (July 12 – July 31): Resolved: The United States federal government should enact the Medicare-For-All Act of 2019.*
- VBI Los Angeles Session 2 (Aug 2 – Aug 15) will use the official 2020 September/October topic.
* Subject to wording changes based on the final Public Forum Topic Committee announcement.
The NSDA has released the potential LD topics for 2020-2021, and this season voting will look different.
In previous years the NSDA released a list of 10 topics and over the summer voters would rank their top three for each topic slot. The first choice for nationals was assigned first, then March/April, working backwards to September/October.
This season, the topics have been divided into groups of three by topic slot, and the top vote getter in the group will be the topic for that particular slot. As the NSDA puts it:
"The Lincoln-Douglas Wording Committee will assign a set of three topics to each bi-monthly topic cycle. All potential topics for the year will be released on Monday, June 22. In June, chapter advisors and member students will know “These three topics will be voted on for Sept/Oct. These three topics will be voted on for Nov/Dec” etc. One week prior to the topic being released for that topic cycle, chapter advisors and member students will vote on which of the three topics they prefer. The topic that receives the most votes will be the topic for that cycle. This change was made to involve more people in the voting process and introduce new possibilities for coaches who teach debate in the classroom."
Here are the topics and groupings for 2020-2021:
September/October 2020
- Resolved: The United States ought to adopt a proportional representation system for elections to the House of Representatives.
- Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory.
- Resolved: Social media companies ought to be legally responsible for content posted by users on their platforms.
November/December 2020
- Resolved: In the United States, workers ought to have the legal right to vote for representatives on corporate boards.
- Resolved: The United States ought to legalize adult sex work.
- Resolved: The United States ought to provide a federal jobs guarantee.
January/February 2021
- Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
- Resolved: The United States ought to expand the application of the Public Trust Doctrine to wildlife habitats.
- Resolved: The United States ought to end its use of secondary sanctions on other countries.
March/April 2021
- Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee universal child care.
- Resolved: The United States ought to recognize a positive right to reproduce.
- Resolved: Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is unethical.
National Tournament 2021
- Resolved: A wealth tax is just.
- Resolved: Sin taxes are unjust.
- Resolved: A public health emergency justifies limiting civil liberties.
Lawrence Zhou was the 2014 NSDA National Champion. He now works as an assistant coach for The Harker School and is the Director of Publishing and Lincoln-Douglas Debate at the Victory Briefs Institute.
The Opinions Expressed In This Post Are Those of the Author And Not Necessarily Those Of Victory Briefs.
I penned an article like this at Nationals 2018 and some of those thoughts remain (you can find that post here). I wasn’t present at Nationals last year (the first time I missed attending since 2010) so I’m back with some thoughts about this tournament. This was a weird tournament, not just due to its online nature, but also because I was judging policy for some reason (they must have been real desperate if they wanted me) instead of being able to judge Lincoln-Douglas. But I still have some thoughts!
Instead of reiterating the same points again from my previous post, here are some random takeaways from this tournament.
1. Congrats!
First, congratulations to the champion Jo Spurgeon and the finalist Shreyaa Nagajothi, both womxn competitors, securing the 2nd championship by a womxn in a row at NSDA Nationals! (Now if only it could be like this at TOC…) And, congratulations to David Edwards and Eric Gottlieb, repping the circuit all the way into the semifinals of NSDA Nationals.
Also, congrats to Ohio! They had 3 LDers in the top 6 this year and this was their second year in a row with a finals appearance. I believe a team from Ohio also won PF finals (and they were also a womxn team!). And, I can’t resist giving a shout out to my home state of Oklahoma who had 3 debaters still in by Round 13 and had a 15th and 13th place finish. Oklahoma also won the policy championship. Finally, congratulations to all the students I coached. While the tournament may not have gone as we hoped, I’m still incredibly proud of all of you and the work you put in before and during the tournament!
2. Bad topics are bad :(
I probably liked this topic more than the average debaterbut that isn’t saying much. This might be one of the WORST topics we’ve had forNationals in recent years. I’ve struggled to find someone who disagrees withthis view. From any kid who competed on the circuit to even the mosttraditional of coaches, it was hard to find someone who really liked this topic.Even last year’s topic, violent revolution, was better than this. Targetedkilling was waaaay better. Why can’t we get more topics like that?
I get that we’re trying to foster traditional debate focusedin on value disagreements, but this seems the wrong way to go about it. Thistopic was interesting as a research project but horrible as a debate topic. Ilearned a lot about the flavors of egalitarianism, different ways to justifydemocracy, and even various criticisms of democracy I had not previously beenaware of. The philosophical literature on this was deep and interesting.
But none of that really translated into debate rounds.
And I really wanted my more apocalyptic predictions to notcome to fruition. I certainly didn’t want to see or hear of rounds that werenot good. After all, it’s NSDA Nationals- it’s supposed to represent the bestand brightest of the debaters we have! However, after watching a few livestreamsand talking about rounds with other judges and debaters, I couldn’t help butnotice that it seemed like a decent number of rounds either contained (A)arguments that were as far from the topic as possible to try and catch peopleoff guard or (B) not particularly nuanced or consistent defenses of democracy.
Here are 3 reasons why I thought this topic wasn’t good inpractice and how we can avoid these in the future.
First, on a topic that’s supposed to incentivize more in-depth philosophical research, there’s a natural disincentive from getting too deep into the literature if a significant portion of the judging pool isn’t particularly familiar with the background literature that’s being discussed and if there isn’t a natural incentive to learn more about distinctions between various conceptions of democracy. The prediction was likely that debaters would learn about the differences between Dewey’s conception of democracy and how it might have differed from Niko Kolodny’s justification for it. That just didn’t happen. Why would any debater be bothered to dig into that literature if (A) a majority of the judges weren't going to be able to truly follow those justifications for it and (B) those distinctions didn’t transfer to an in-round competitive advantage? What’s the value for the affirmative digging down into one cohesive view of how democracy works if the negative was never going to be able to exploit those differences in a meaningful way? If the affirmative was defending a broadly egalitarian view about how democracy ought to work, the literature provided many deep criticisms of such a view, including asking questions about what equality really meant. But the negative could never really engage in those nuances because it didn’t matter- they were always going to be defending some more rights-based argument anyways. So, there was no incentive for affirmatives to craft any particularly nuanced defense of democracy if that was never going to be contested by the negative. The negative was always going to say their generic responses to equality, the affirmative was always going to say their generic responses to property rights. There wasn’t a built-in incentive to dig in any deeper than that.
So, I think that good topics aimed at incentivizing morediscussions about values and general principles need to be about subject areaswhere there is a natural incentive to be particularly well-read about the topicliterature. Topic areas like the ins and outs of democracy are great research projectsbut not great debate topics.
I suppose some might disagree with me and argue that LDdebate is supposed to be about general philosophical discussions that arebroadly accessible to parents and a lay audience. Such a view seems plausiblebut I think ought not be the case at NSDA Nationals, the premier traditionaldebate tournament in the country, and the tournament that caps off the careersof many seniors in debate. While I agree that debaters ought to be focused ontailoring their arguments to be widely accessible at tournaments at locals, I’mless in favor of such shallow debates that don’t reward additionalphilosophical research at the national tournament. I tend to think that weshould have topics that reward students for extra research, not penalize themfor making arguments not easily understood by those without some philosophybackground.
To clarify, I don’t think this is a problem with judging atNSDA Nationals per se (although I’d prefer if we had more judges with morebackground in philosophy). This is a problem with topics that encouragephilosophical discussion in an area where most judges have almost zerobackground knowledge and on a topic where the nuances won’t ultimately benefitone side or another. If topics are meant to encourage deeper discussion aboutphilosophy and values, I think they ought to be over less fringe areas where mostjudges won’t know a lot about the clash at hand but will at least have enoughbackground information that debaters could get a real competitive advantage by beingmore well-read in the relevant philosophical literature.
Second, topics shouldn’t shoehorn in only one impact. Inthis case, it was all about democracy. Anything not related to democracy didn’tmatter to the topic. (A) This makes for subpar debates even if debatersfollowed this approach. I think it’s silly to have debates artificially limitedto just one impact as opposed to exploring any impact that is in theliterature. (B) This just wasn’t a natural backstop on the topic as it playedout. Plenty of negative debaters made arguments about how “death taxes hurt theeconomy.” Not only was this not a topic about death taxes, this also had almostzero relevance to democracy. And yet this was an argument that abounded and wasmade frequently both in preliminary as well as elimination debates. But fewjudges were willing to discard those arguments from the debate because somejudges weren’t particularly familiar with the topic and because there werereally no other good negative arguments to be made on this topic.
Third, there needs to be equal and clear division of ground. This topic was not balanced. I had assumed (falsely) near the beginning of the topic that it was because I find libertarianism to be a solid enough literature base that it can sustain even a full topic’s worth of traditional debates for the negative. Coupled with a few high burdens that the aff had to meet (namely T: antithetical), I thought this topic would be relatively balanced. However, I was ultimately proven wrong. Libertarianism is just hard to defend generally if you’re not really familiar with the literature base but it was doubly hard on this topic because it was unclear what the connection between libertarianism and democracy really was (truthfully: very little). In some respects, this topic reminded me of the immigration topic from 2016 which was basically unwinnable for most negative teams (I mean come on, libertarianism affirmed on that topic and basically the only negative ground ended up being "racism good" but with more words). We need topics that are significantly more balanced for Nationals. There are legitimate value conflicts that exist and are relatively equitably divided but this was not one of them. Coupled with weird interpretation issues about what technically counted as the intergenerational accumulation of wealth and what the burdens were on this topic, and I found that this topic made for messy debates.
Note that in my diagnosis of this problem, I’m not convincedthe topic must contain an actor or be a policy action. Far from it. Some of myfavorite topics aren’t governmental actors and some good topics don’t even havean action. Targeted killing is a good example of this. Predictive policing wasalso fine. While I’d probably prefer the topic to be an “ought” topic, I’d alsobe fine with a topic that wasn’t an action so long as it had good ground. I’dsettle for something as simple as “Death taxes are unjust.” It’d get at most ofthe major themes that this topic was trying to accomplish without beingsubjected to many of its downsides.
3. Can we please change the judge paradigms?
It’s good that the NSDA forces judges to fill in paradigms but these paradigms are pretty much worthless. I’d almost rather we not have them. When I was competing, my coach told me that the paradigms were “drink coasters.” I’m not sure I read more than like 5 of the paradigms of the people that judged me. The problem is that these paradigms are more likely to be sources of misinformation than actual information. For example, preferred speed- they give you a 1-9 scale. What is the baseline for this? My 9 for speed is not what my former teammate’s 9 for speed is. This variation is likely to grow as different regions and different judges all have different standards for speed. Or what about a judge that says the value criterion is important or not? For me, I put that it is important but I simply mean that it is important for figuring out what arguments are relevant in the round. For others, they literally treat the value criterion as its own voting issue, i.e. that winning that your value criterion is superior constitutes a sufficient reason to affirm or negate (a nonsensical view but one nonetheless held by some substantial portion of the judging pool). These questions, rather than clarifying views about debate, are more likely to be sources of misinformation.
What are some possible changes? For one, have fewer presetquestions and give the judges more space to simply write about their thoughtson debate. That tends to be more accurate in gauging real thoughts about debate.For another, I think that having judges watch a sample round and providing adecision and feedback about that round that is then viewable by the students wouldgive students a concrete way for see how exactly their judge makes a decisionin round. This could be part of judge training and the round itself could beavailable for students to watch as well.
Really, any reform here would be better than what we currentlyhave. These paradigms just don’t convey much useful information and they mightactually be providing misleading information to debaters. I coach my studentsto mostly ignore these paradigms but I’d rather it be the case that the paradigmsjust provide useful information in the first place.
4. Online traditional debate is… fine.
Online traditional debate isn’t great but it isn’t terribleeither. I won’t spend too much time here because I’ve had many thoughts about onlinedebate which you can find on the Victory Briefs podcast “Next Off” episodes aboutthe online TOC and COVID. Suffice it to say, online debate loses some things,particularly in a traditional debate where the way that persuasive speaking andpresentation works is pretty radically altered by the online format. I don’tthink the losses are terrible and I certainly wouldn’t mind a few traditional/localtournaments during the season transitioning to an online format (either becauseof health concerns or for reasons of trying to promote a nationwide traditionalcircuit). For me, the worst part of online debates is after the decisions areannounced- there’s just such an awkward silence in the online format where thereusually would be applause. Awards ceremonies in particular are just so muchworse in an online format. And there’s definitely a loss of community thatreally does define the in-person NSDA Nationals tournament. Yet, for all theprophecies of doom-and-gloom, I thought NSDA Nationals went well and I would beopen to seeing more online traditional tournaments that more students acrossthe country could attend. Locals are awesome but many students don’t get theopportunity to practice with and compete against students from different localcircuits where they can learn from each other. I would love to see more onlinetraditional tournaments as supplements to existing local tournaments(especially in states with COVID concerns).
5. Yay livestreaming!
One very real benefit to online debate is the ability tolivestream certain rounds. While not a lot of rounds were livestreamed, I’ll takewhatever I can get. I think livestreaming is an incredible useful educationaltool for coaches and students and can provide immense benefits to teams downthe road. Anecdotally, the reason I went to Nationals my sophomore year was notto compete in Congress (I fell asleep in 3 out of the 4 sessions) but to watchrounds. That year, I got to watch 3 elim rounds where the eventual nationalchampion that year, Gabe Bronshteyn, deftly obliterated his competition. Ilearned so much from simply observing those rounds and I spent a decent amountof time that summer trying to dissect those rounds and figure out how to takemeaningful lessons from them.
Livestreaming is, in some respects, better than watchingrounds in-person because even though you lose out a little bit on the presencethat people can bring in-person, more people can watch the livestreams withouthaving to be at the tournament, and the livestreams can be recorded and watchedlater. The NSDA was under no obligation to stream rounds but I very muchappreciate that they did. I have a feeling that some of the rounds will bevaluable learning tools this upcoming season for teams all across the nation.
6. Why are we still presetting prelims?
This was mentioned in the last post, but I have to bring itup again. It remains beyond my comprehension why they do it. Seriously, it wasall online this year. I already answered most of the objections in my previouspost. The only one that was brought to my attention since then was the “judgingpool” thing. This is ridiculous- judges were required to pool for every round foreach day they were registered to judge. And we already don’t know the pairingsfor elims. Why is prelims different? It shouldn’t be. It’s fine if we have towait a few extra minutes between rounds 2-3 if it means those rounds are goingto be better competition for everyone. I’m totally fine with the strange 8/12ballot system (although I’m not sure exactly how the ballot count thing and apowered prelim would work together) and the double-elimination elim rounds butthe lack of power-matching is just getting more and more difficult to defend. Icannot think of literally any other tournament with 6 prelims that presets allof them.
7. More prelims, less elims.
I’m less committed to this one but I’d actually be okay ifwe had 8 prelims and broke less people into elims. This year, about 100debaters broke to elims. ONE-HUNDRED. That’s so many. What’s the point? I wouldrather that every debater be guaranteed more rounds than a typical circuittournament. I mean, even the Glenbrooks tournament has 7 prelim rounds. Moreprelims is better- it guarantees more rounds for debaters and it does a bitbetter of a job of ensuring that only the best of the best break. That beingsaid, I’m not as sold on this, but I think it’s at least worth discussing.
8. Can we keep it traditional please?
I heard of more than one round where debaters were reading Ks, spreading, or engaging in practices that sound less like what you might try and do to persuade a parent and more like a parody of circuit practices. Now, oddly enough, this doesn’t really apply to circuit debaters. A lot of them actually adapted very well and didn’t do anything that sounded very circuit like. Some did, but not most. This is really aimed at those debaters who have maybe a little bit of circuit exposure and thought about using some of those techniques to gain a competitive edge of their opponents.
Just please, no.
I think traditional debate is awesome and it doesn’t need tobe corrupted by certain practices. Yes, I wish traditional debaters would adoptsome more circuit practices (mostly those concerning evidence ethics) but Ialso would like traditional debate to be mostly left alone. I strongly dislikepeople who spread in traditional rounds and I especially dislike it becoming anincreasingly popular trend at Nationals.
Congratulations to St. Mary's School's Jo Spurgeon for winning the 2020 NSDA National Tournament. In finals, Jo defeated Jackson's Shreyaa Nagajothi.
In semifinals, Jo defeated Charlotte Catholic's David Edwards and Shreyaa defeated Bellarmine College Prep's Eric Gottlieb.
Full pairings can be found here.