The Devolution of Debate

I stand at the front of the room and take a deep breath, nervous but confident. I’ve been preparing for this moment for a month. My partner and I have made it to varsity quarterfinals at the Princeton Classic, a national debate tournament, and the debate is about to begin. I glance around the room at the spectators lining the walls, their pens poised and ready to write. My eyes land on the three judges, and I start to speak. “We affirm the resolution: The United States federal government should forgive all federal student loan debt.” I’m proud of our arguments. They’re logical, strategic, and true.

Then our opponents get up, introduce themselves, and begin to tear through an argument asserting that my partner and I should lose the round because we didn’t post our speeches on a website 30 minutes before the round. An hour later, the judges deliver the verdict: we’ve lost 1-2.

I compete in Public Forum (PF), a debate format in which two teams of two debaters each discuss domestic issues and foreign policy. There are eight speeches and three cross-examinations per round. Most importantly, Public Forum is a public forum. It’s a space where people can come together to share perspectives on relevant issues in an easily accessible way. Or it used to be, before it started to go downhill. Over the course of my four years debating, I’ve noticed an increasing number of changes in PF that resemble my experience at Princeton.

One example is the prevalence of “spreading,” a contraction of the words “speed” and “reading.” More and more debaters read speeches as fast as 300 words per minute or, in the case of my Princeton round, 325 words per minute (I counted). Debaters hope that their excessive speed will cause their opponents to miss an argument, which could feasibly cost them the round. Strong debaters must learn to spread in order to keep up, ultimately leading to incomprehensible rounds decided by which arguments were missed rather than who made more logical points. But more often than not, spreading excludes people without training from both listening to and participating in debate rounds. It also teaches debaters to use language to deceive instead of to clarify.

But spreading isn’t the only way in which PF has deteriorated: the rise of “theory” is a similar phenomenon. Debaters who run theory arguments (also called “shells”) contend that their opponents have violated a rule or norm of debate and should therefore lose the round. One popular theory argument is disclosure theory, which I encountered during Princeton quarterfinals. It argues that debaters should post their first speech on a website called the “Wiki” before every round so that their opponents have time to review it instead of coming up with responses on the spot. None of this comes from any debate league’s rulebooks; both the “Wiki” and this norm of posting speeches before rounds were created by debaters using theory to decide normative practices for debate. And the standard for what constitutes a norm is constantly changing. Recently, some teams on the national circuit have started reading rebuttal disclosure theory, contending that their opponents should have posted their second speech (which isn’t pre-written!) on the Wiki as well. Through specialized technical knowledge, debaters can enforce preposterous norms.

Similar to spreading, theory is inaccessible. Shells are built from an interpretation, a violation, standards, voters, and paradigm issues. If you don’t know what any of that means, I sympathize with you. During my first theory round, I didn’t either. I got so lost in the jargon that the round was over before it began. And once you learn the jargon, it doesn’t get much easier. There are so many unspoken rules that have to be followed in every theory round, such as repeating some parts of the argument word for word in every speech and responding to arguments in extremely particular ways.

So who wins theory rounds? Who knows the unspoken rules? The answer is not surprising. Debaters with the time and financial means to attend elite debate camps and hire coaches dominate these jargon-heavy debates. That means that privileged debaters have the ability to forcibly create new norms in debate, giving them a distinct advantage. In fact, 15 out of the current top 20 PF teams are from private schools. Large public schools with robust debate programs also benefit, but most debaters from smaller public schools are doomed.

Theory is just one subset of “progressive debate,” which consists of non-traditional arguments. Another type of progressive debate is a “kritik,” an argument that makes use of a lens (often philosophical or ideological) to critique some aspect of the resolution, the debate space, or the opponents’ behavior.

Just like spreading and theory, kritiks exclude people from debate. Since there are infinite possible lenses—feminism, Marxism, capitalism, settler colonialism, Afro-Pessimism, Techno-Orientalism, Baudrillard, and so on—it’s almost impossible to prepare for everything, barring extensive coaching and preparation. That’s why despite purporting to fight power structures, kritiks only exacerbate unfairness in debate. Kritiks are used by major debate schools to score easy wins against debaters without comparable resources. That’s also why kritiks are often intentionally dense, obscure, and confusing. Consider this quote from an actual kritik based on philosopher Georges Bataille’s writing:

“This will to mastery sustains itself via framework’s virtue epistemology—the desire for utility from debate. Our argument is that this submits education to the regime of encodability, destroying the possibility for knowledge to enter into the abyss. Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, so to become delightful, the self-satisfied happiness of a static topic must be tainted with the poison of death.”

Given five minutes, you might start to understand what this means, but unfortunately, PF only allows for three minutes of preparation across an entire debate round. Picture four debaters discussing philosophy that they don’t have enough time to explain or understand, and you will see how absurd these debates are. In comparison, logical debates centered around the agreed upon topic provide applicable skills by making students literate in current events rather than esoteric philosophies. 

Rather than teaching us that good communication means clarifying and explaining, PF is teaching us to muddle and to confuse. That has actual consequences: debaters tend to work in government, and clarity is crucial in a world of misinformation. I’m disappointed in PF’s current trajectory, and solving this problem would require a fundamental change in the mindset of most judges and coaches, making it unlikely to happen. Even so, there are ways to get something out of PF. At Stuyvesant, we still have fun teaching our novices to improvise and think critically. I’m genuinely grateful for everything PF has taught me, and I hope that people continue to find their own way to enjoy and learn from it.