(Editor’s Note: Pope Center Director of Research George Leef has participated in, coached, and judged debate for more than 40 years.)
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were two of the foremost debaters in American history. But if either of them walked into a college debate these days, he’d hardly even recognize it as a debate.
Debate started out as an activity that called for skills in researching a question, formulating a case, quick, analytical thinking about the opponents’ arguments, and most of all, persuasive speaking. Debating was a competition to see which team could do a better job of making clear and convincing arguments on the assigned proposition.
Over the last 30 years, debate has changed greatly. The infamous “mooning” incident in a debate last August showed “debate” at its worst. Outrageous shenanigans aside, debaters still have to be able to research the topic, although the Internet has made that much less time consuming. Quick, analytical thinking ability is still crucial, but (for reasons to be discussed later) it plays less of a role than in the past. Persuasive speaking ability has unfortunately been nearly abandoned as a key debate skill.
The primary competitive debate forum is “policy debate.” (Two other debate formats, “Lincoln-Douglas” and “Public Forum” have developed, but haven’t yet achieved the same stature as “policy.”) Policy debate pits two teams of two members each, one on the affirmative side and one on the negative side, debating over whether the federal government “should” do some action. For example, the national debate topic for the 2008-2009 year is:
Resolved: that the United States Federal Government should substantially reduce its agricultural support, at least eliminating nearly all of the domestic subsidies, for biofuels, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, corn, cotton, dairy, fisheries, rice, soybeans, sugar and/or wheat.
In years gone by, debating called for eloquent language, witty flourishes, citing experts and statistics, and maybe some philosophy. Debaters addressed the judge much as a lawyer would address the jury in court. Today, however, debates go by in a torrent of words that might make you think you had accidentally wandered into an auction. The speaking speed can approach 400 words per minute. At that rate, the debate is barely comprehensible.
Eloquence and persuasion? There’s hardly any time for that.
Instead of trying to make their cases as persuasive as possible, debaters for the most part try to win based on sheer number of arguments they manage to produce. This is a technique called “spreading.” The idea is to have so many arguments out that the opposition won’t be able to counter every one of them.
A “silence is consent” convention entered the debate scene in the late 1970s–if an argument is not answered, then it is considered to be “true” within the context of that debate. The more arguments a debater or debate team can make, the more likely it is that some of those arguments will go unanswered. Then the team that made the argument might say, “Judge, note that our opponents dropped our seventh DA (disadvantage), so we should win.”
With words going by at lightning speed, it’s extremely difficult for the judge to know whether that argument was actually logical, pertinent, and supported by any credible evidence. The quality of debate arguments tends to go down as the quantity of them goes up. Meticulously logical debating is often trumped by rapid-fire delivery.
All of those developments are bad enough, but in recent years it has become accepted to employ arguments that are tangential to the actual topic of the debate.
One type of argument that has become generally accepted is the kritik (derived from German, pronounced “critique”). Kritiks challenge general assumptions or a mindset put forth by the opposing team. For example, in a debate over agricultural subsidies, the negative team might offer a kritik contending that private property is illegitimate or that capitalism is immoral. The main problem with this is obvious. Such arguments avoid the topic that’s supposed to be debated.
A great virtue of traditional debating was that it compelled the participants to focus strictly on the topic. To the extent that tangential kritik arguments are accepted, debate loses some of that virtue.
A newer and (fortunately) still somewhat controversial development is called “performance debate.” Performance debates are arguments that are literally presented with a performance (such as acting, rapping, storytelling or singing) or a combination of performance and reading evidence. (Here is a video showing performance debate.) Performance debaters usually engage the debate topic marginally, but speak primarily about issues that they view of greater importance. Usually these issues involve arguments about the institution of policy debate itself or socio-economic issues.
For example, imagine that the first affirmative debater has given his speech, advancing several reasons why U.S. agricultural subsidies should be eliminated. The negative team responds in its first speech with a “rap” about how racism is the greatest problem facing America. It has little or nothing to do with the affirmative case. “Performance debate” attempts to substitute emotion, theatrics, and volume for reasoned argumentation over the subject.
A key question is why “performance debate” didn’t immediately die. After all, it’s merely an attempt to change the subject and win by trampling on reason. Suppose a defense attorney said, “I don’t want to talk about the guilt of my client because society faces much bigger problems!” He would simply lose the case. Or if a basketball team showed up for a game but demanded that the rules of basketball were unfair and it should be allowed to run with the ball rather than dribble, it would simply forfeit the game. Why didn’t debate judges just say, “The negative team’s performance had nothing to do with the resolution, so it loses the debate”?
The answer is that most debate judges are college professors in the social sciences or humanities. They’re not inclined to be hard on ideas that are pitched as somehow righting past wrongs and advancing “social justice”—the subtext of most “performance debate.” Basketball refs make teams stick to the rules of the game, but many debate judges are willing to allow a great deal of latitude, especially if teams are playing to their political ideals.
Don’t get me wrong. Debate is still a worthwhile activity for students. The problem is that its standards have been eroding, making it less worthwhile than it could be. In that, college debate is representative of college education generally.