My experience at Oxford last year was similar – break rooms and top rooms, closed adjudication aside, were easily identifiable as the tab rolled by – the panels of big names revealing exactly who the CA and DCAs deserved “good judging.” At Oxford, perhaps the defense might be that in top rooms, debaters are less likely to listen to or accept a decision educationally if they don’t have respect or admiration for the panel. This is not a good defense, by the way, for an event that proports to teach people how to argue in front of “reasonable people” instead of “specific information experts,” but it trumps the HWS decision by at least having some logic to it.
The Hobart & William Smith decision is less defensible. One judge in a room is not a WUDC round, nor is it even close to being the same event. If students sign up to debate at a Worlds style tournament, the tournament director, CA, host, whoever it is has an obligation to match the rules of competition as close as they can. To do otherwise is to violate the rules under which debaters and adjudicators paid money to compete. This is flagrant violation of the rules of the competition, in a situation where those decisions were absolutely not forced.
Not sure what the tournament hosts were thinking, but my guess is they weren’t. Some debate programs are focused just on the competition – and there’s a defense of that to be sure. But to have good, deep competitions one needs to think to the future, farming and cultivating the future generations of debaters who will dazzle us with argumentative prowess. Non-decisions such as this one harm the future generations of our practice in innumerable ways. Even a heavy contest or heavy competition-based philosophy of debate requires a pedagogical practice of some kind to get the results that we all want – good debating. There’s a reason behind stacking judges that goes beyond “that’s how it’s done at the best competitions in the world,” or “this is how it’s always done.” One of the silliest fallacies of thinking that we generally laugh at when we hear – the appeal to tradition. Unfortunately, I suspect this is the sort of thinking that allowed this judgement to happen.
Assigning judges to the bin should be given at least as much thought as assigning judging to the top room. This goes for tournaments where mutual judge preference is in use as well. Perhaps it’s good to get a judge you both dis-prefer, or feel lukewarm about, than to get the highest mutually ranked judge each time. At top IVs, this sort of thing just wouldn’t happen. The rules of the contest – that rounds should be paneled, trump the tab rooms or adjudication team’s sense of which rounds “matter” and which don’t. Placing one judge in a room alone at the bottom of a tab sends a very clear message – debate is only for those who are already good. We do not care that you are here if you are new.
In Worlds debate, perhaps care in rotation should be in order. Do you really want a homogeneous break? Or do you want teams that can persuade a panel to come to consensus that has a very highly practiced judge, a mediocre judge, and one that is quite new? Do you want the best debaters, or the best persuaders? What do you want your final round to look like? A public debate on a viable controversy? Or do you want it to be a finely tuned monastic display of ritualized discourse? You cannot avoid the question of pedagogy – everything you do in a tournament and everything you assign in a tournament reveals your hand. CAs, what baggage do you want to be carrying? What will be the legacy of the decisions you make when setting panels for first year debaters?
Comments
5 responses to “Judge Not!”
If I have time later, I may post a full response/justification of our thought process, but for now I just wanted to say a few quick things:
1) This was hardly a case of prioritizing the “top room” over the bin. What we choose to do was assign three judge panels to the live rooms, all of which were bubbles, as our highest priority. We certainly weren’t stacking judges in high rooms throughout the tournament, but Eric and I felt that round 6 (given its extreme relevance to the break) demands a higher level of precision in live rooms.
2) Our decision reflects a sub-optimal outcome that was no one’s first choice. Because of the extreme shortage of judges that was imposed upon our tournament by a combination of illness and dereliction of duty by some of our novice debaters, we were forced to make a choice between being able to put 3 judge panels in each bubble room or being forced to have most rooms with only two judges. In this situation, I (I won’t try to speak for Eric here) think that we made the right choice by prioritizing the rooms relevant to the breaks. I honestly believe that if other tournaments were faced with the same situation they would (and should) make the same decision we did.
3) Finally, I think it is unfair to insinuate that we didn’t put thought into the allocation of judges to the bin room, or don’t care about less good debaters. Neither myself nor Eric would have placed the any chairs in a room if we weren’t confident in their ability to not only judge accurately but also give helpful feedback.
-Buzz
Buzz,
Sorry I couldn’t be there, but the combination of illness and inability to find hotel meant I couldn’t come.
Also not a critique of your on-the-spot decision making. But I think the philosophy (for lack of a better term) in how those decisions were made is my target here.
I’m sure you thought over the judges carefully within the overarching assumption that there are “dead” rooms and “live” rooms as your starting point. It’s that starting point that is my concern.
I’m sure you guys ran a fine and fair tournament under an ontology that I have lots of problems with.
Two things: 1) In one of the bin rooms Round 6 Yale IV, a couple of my novice students had a single judge who was texting (not taking notes–they asked afterwards) during the entire round. 2) In their honor, I think we should start calling bin rooms the Walking Dead. Truth to power and all that.
As Steve and many others know, I’m a major advocate of debate being pitched to a generally well-educated audience with no particular expertise in the matter being discussed. I also think that having panels to discuss decisions is extremely important. And, as a final preamble, I sincerely apologize to all those who attended our tournament for the fact that many debaters on my team (who had committed to judge), did not show up on Sunday morning. Regardless of whether you agree with how we handled it, as Buzz noted and Steve granted, we tried to make the best of a bad situation.
That being said, I don’t think that Steve’s ‘ontological’ position is right. If I understand him, he is claiming that all rooms (e.g., in round 6) are of exactly equal importance – regardless of whether there is a mathematical possibility of anyone in those rooms making it into the break – and so each should have an equally strong panel. First note that as a general policy, debaters themselves would not endorse this. And, even if the ONLY thing that coaches, tournament directors and CAs should care about is educational value to students (which even I think is a bit too strong, and I’m big into educational value), we need to realize that the students do care (often primarily) about the competition itself and getting the best teams into the break rounds. Failure to realize this (e.g., by using totally random judge allocation) will result in students being angry and alienated from the activity. We need to respect their goals too. So, not only is it almost universally accepted practice for those running a tournament to prioritize the quality of judging in bubble rooms, it is also a reasonable long-term educational strategy. Moreover, students would assent to this policy from a suitably impartial perspective (think ‘veil of ignorance’).
Once you accept that it is appropriate to prioritize bubble rooms in judge allocation, the justification for our decision is fairly clear. At the start of the tournament, everyone had the same opportunity to make it into a round 6 bubble room. We all know that a two-person panel essentially gives all the power to the chair and is thus not a good option if you really want care about getting the decision right. So, given the extreme shortage of judges, I stand by our decision to put three judges in those bubble rooms, even at the cost of having just one judge in two rooms.
People may still disagree with this decision. That’s fine and I respect that. But, I don’t think that the ‘feel good’ position that no rooms are ever more important than any other room is any more defensible than absurd ‘feel good’ claim that no judge is any better than any other judge.
I feel for both sides in this situation, however I find my sympathies tilting towards the side of ensuring that every room has at least two judges, even if that means that a bubble room lacks a three judge panel. Beyond what has already been well-said by Buzz, Eric and Steve I have three points I’d like to make:
First, the style of Worlds debate necessarily requires some measure of active evaluation of arguments by the judges. I don’t think that there is any way for a judge to do this 100% subjectively. The check on subjectivity is consensus judging. Every room deserves this check on the unavoidable problem of judge subjectivity, no matter their record.
Second: It can be difficult to make debaters in bin rounds take the event seriously. While I appreciate the freedom that being out of the break offers to run highly creative positions, it doesn’t help the educational or competitive goals of debate when a team who’s out of competition doesn’t show up, flat out quits during their final round or runs a case with zero bearing on reality. I realize that these are rare occurrences and there are a lot of reasons why a team would make this decision, it becomes harder to convince debaters to keep competing through the last rounds when the tournament seems to not take bin rounds seriously.
Third: I think that we should critically examine this concept of expert judges necessarily being better for high-panel rounds. As I understand it, one of the intents for this style of debate, as opposed to the policy styles, is to engage in discourse that is accessible to the public, not just the community of current and former debaters. I worry that if we base paneling decisions on seniority and status, we risk becoming a more closed community in which the power teams communicate in a way that may be preferable to the power judges but begins to subtly exclude those who are not as thoroughly inculcated in the norms of our community. Is this what we want from our event? Is the competitive benefit of high-power judges worth the risk that this community becomes more closed off?
As part of the advertisement for the tournament we’re having at UC Davis next week (BTW, space still available for a great new tournament in sunny California) I posted invitations on a major NPDA message forum. I received several responses, all of which were variations on the theme that worlds is uncompetitive nonsense and one of the main reasons is because it’s perceived that anyone can judge worlds, while only an expert can judge NPDA or policy. Apart from being empirically denied (go look at a typical NPDA judging pool) I feel like the fact that non-experts can appreciate and engage in this style of debate is one of its strengths. If we wanted to engage in a style in which we make ourselves and our students hyper-prepared to communicate to the very narrow community of other debaters, we’d probably be better off in policy.
The perception that only highly experienced debaters can judge meaningful rounds seems to fly in the face of the goal of communicating across communities. I’m all for making sure that each round has a chair who thoroughly understands the competitive framework and the norms of the style, but I think we should consider where the search for the ideal competitive experience would take us.
I’m not arguing for a complete re-think of this community. I am merely worried about Worlds in the U.S. following the historical paths of other forms of debate. The pattern in the U.S. is for styles to be founded with the goal of open communication applicable to broad audiences, but suffer a gradual narrowing of the scope of communication in the name of improving competition. The best way to check this back is to be aware of the assumptions we’re making and to realize that maximizing competitive equity is a good goal, but should not be the only goal.