Tournament Update
Due to the conclusion of the season, LD and PF debaters did not compete at bid tournaments this past weekend. Best of luck to everyone preparing for NDCA and the TOC, and stay tuned for future tournament results!
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is LD instructor Kabir Buch.
Kabir debated for four years at The Harker School in LD. He qualified to the Tournament of Champions his junior and senior year, and was the top seed at the TOC in 2023. He also was in the semifinals of Stanford, Berkeley, and the Glenbrooks. His favorite arguments to read and go for were impact turns. He's excited to teach at VBI this summer!
On Topic Voting in Public Forum
by Lawrence Zhou
Voting entails responsibility. Consequently, those who vote have some general responsibility to vote in a way that is at least not harmful for all those that the vote affects. This might seem like a somewhat controversial opinion, but it is one generally agreed upon by political philosophers. Since the vote affects others, we have at least some epistemic obligation to vote well. Notice that this view does not speak to whether we have any positive obligations to vote, nor to what the institutional arrangements of voting ought to resemble; this view merely entails a very mild conclusion, namely that one ought to take at least somewhat seriously the importance that their vote has on others. I believe that this view extends to topic voting and I attempt to explain why I believe that topic voting should entail at least some epistemic responsibilities, particularly on the part of coaches.
This post is not merely to vent my frustration with my preferred topic losing the vote. I don’t even regularly coach Public Forum, spending much more of my time thinking about policy and World Schools Debate. Rather, it is perhaps to encourage community discussion about what the responsibilities entailed by topic voting ought to look like. I offer a brief contribution to this discussion by arguing that coaches should minimally do at least some research on a topic prior to voting, lest it again result in the situation we face with the current Public Forum debate topic lacking any real scholarly literature on either side.
What makes a good debate topic? It is ultimately unnecessary to fully detail out this question (and, in fact, I don’t really think there is one right answer). There are many diverging perspectives of what constitutes a good topic. Some desire topics that exclusively read as a policy action taken by the US federal government, some desire topics that examine grand philosophical questions, and some desire topics that ask about comparing various states of affairs. As now Professor of Philosophy Jake Nebel writes: “I don't really care for clash-of-civilizations debates between policymakers and philosophers: I think it's a mistake to privilege, without much empirical evidence, either abstract philosophical debate or concrete public policy debate as more fair or educational than the other.” The point of this diatribe is not to take a stance on the deeper nuances of what the features of a good topic are.
Rather, all that is relevant is that we share a common view of at least some of the basic features of a good topic. I think no matter what your view of what a good topic entails, one would come to the conclusion that a good (Public Forum) topic must have research on it. I would think that such a conclusion is uncontroversial, although I have had conversations in recent weeks challenging this view. To briefly defend this conclusion, I draw upon two lines of argument.
First, as I elaborate upon in an unnecessarily long piece here, debate has unique value as a research activity. If we didn’t believe in the value of debate as a research activity, we wouldn’t have topics announced a month in advance, or topics that lasted for longer than a tournament, or topics that attempted to expose students to a wide variety of issue areas. It is because we believe that debate, more so than many other academic activities, teaches students how to critically evaluate information, advocate for important causes, and to understand both sides of controversial issues.
Second, while other skills—such as critical thinking, creativity, and originality—do matter, they should be considered in relation to the value of research. I struggle to think of a coherent argument for the value of say creative thinking that is entirely unmoored from the existing literature base on a given subject area. What value is there in having high school students try to come up with unique arguments on an issue that they are uninformed on, especially if that issue pertains to an area that experts have already spent vast quantities of time studying? Those other skills would be better actualized starting from research, and then allowing students to creatively play around with arguments based on expert opinion. And, supposing none of the above was persuasive, other debate events like British Parliamentary and World Schools Debate do exist and would certainly capture whatever other values one might think debate offers beyond research (almost certainly better than Public Forum too).
One might bemoan the state of Public Forum as an activity focused entirely on the exchange of evidence at the expense of original argument and explanation, but the solution cannot rest in the selection of a topic devoid of quality literature for the underlying communal norms that insist upon evidentiary backing for all arguments presented will nonetheless persist, just with the difference that both the argument and its associated carded evidence will invariably be of lower quality.
The point is that Public Forum is—not necessarily exclusively—a research based activity. Good topics should encourage research and arguments based around that research. I think the current PF topic so obviously fails in that regard. The current PF topic is, “Resolved: The United Nations should abolish permanent membership on its Security Council.” This topic won out over, “Resolved: The Republic of Korea should develop nuclear weapons.”
Anyone who has done even a modicum of research on both topics would quite quickly conclude that the South Korea topic has a wealth of literature on both sides (such as these Pro articles here, here, and here, and these Con articles here, here, and here) while the UN topic simply has none (as expressed in commentary here, here, and here). I struggle to find many articles on either side that are directly about abolishing permanent membership on its Security Council (although I would love to be proven wrong, if anyone has such articles, I would be overjoyed to see them). Rather, one finds a host of articles that are tangentially related to, but not directly about, the topic (e.g., articles about veto power, expanding the P5, etc.).
As the NSDA website notes, “A total of 748 coaches and 2,771 students voted for the resolution. The winning resolution received 71% of the coach vote and 48% of the student vote.” This means that the vast majority of the coaches voted for a topic that has virtually no direct topic literature. We can now look forward to a month of debates over a topic in which debaters will struggle to find any scholastic backing for their arguments, depriving them of the opportunity to deploy evidence-based arguments and to do research on an actually interesting subject area.
Why would anyone who has done even the tiniest bit of research on each topic prefer the UNSC one over the South Korean proliferation one? I suspect much of it was motivated by an aversion to debating topics that are about nuclear weapons. I don’t find such an aversion unjustifiable. After all, I too strongly dislike the modern trend of trying to find the fewest steps to a nuclear war instead of actually engaging the relevant topic controversies that actual experts take seriously. Policy debate is already overrun with this phenomenon, there is little reason to desire this in other forms of debate, especially in debate formats that are supposed to be more accessible.
But this throws the baby out with the bathwater. Just because discussion of nuclear weapons is over-privileged in the contemporary PF meta does not entail that we should arbitrarily prioritize topics that don’t directly discuss nuclear weapons, especially if such a topic lacks a strong research base. By contrast, the South Korean proliferation topic is a timely and relevant topic, particularly to people in South Korea who actually are invested in the topic of nuclear weapons given that it directly relates to their very survival. To both the people on the ground in South Korea as well as the experts that research this issue, debating about nuclear weapons in South Korea is a very real and important debate to be had, not one that should be so reflexively sidelined merely because (admittedly poor) debates about nuclear weapons already exist in the status quo.
If we want students to learn about things in the world, we should be voting for topics that have research. If we want students to think creatively and critically, we should be voting for topics that actually encourage students to examine important geopolitical debates happening outside of the borders of the United States from the perspective of a non-US actor (and that actually have research).
This is not to suggest that any topic with nuclear weapons should be debated because it’s more fun, nor is it to suggest that any topic that sounds more like a policy-style resolution should automatically be privileged above others. This is merely to suggest that topics should have research, regardless of what the topic is structured as or about.
In the same way that I am strongly opposed to the idea of circuit Lincoln-Douglas debaters trying to force their preferred topics on the rest of the country when the vast majority of LDers don’t debate in a way that is more or less one-on-one policy debate, I am also strongly opposed to the opposite, where coaches who don’t debate on a topic impose their vision of debate on others in a way that is epistemically irresponsible.
My brief essay is not intended to suggest maliciousness nor incompetence; it is merely about the importance of voting in a way that better actualizes the value of debate. I think debate is best when there is clash, in particular clash that is based in research. I think we should take care to vote for topics that actually encourage clash based on research.
Lawrence Zhou is the former Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate and Director of Publishing at Victory Briefs. He debated at Bartlesville HS where he was the 2014 NSDA Lincoln-Douglas national champion. He is formerly a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Trainer, the Debate League Director at the National High School Debate League of China, a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming, head coach of Team Wyoming, a CEDA octofinalist and Ethics Bowl finalist while debating at the University of Oklahoma, and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School and The Harker School. His students have advanced to late outrounds at numerous regional and national invitational tournaments, including finals appearances at the NSDA National Tournament and semifinals appearances at the Tournament of Champions.
This misses a critical consideration. There was a committee of coaches with the honor and responsibility of crafting the options. At best, if the topic choices are poor, the voters are a check against poor work by their colleagues. If the committee crafted poor topics, then there is an interest being expressed by those coaches to guide the form of PF debate in a certain direction.
I'd agree that the UN topic doesn't quite fit current trends, as there isn't as much direct literature, instead offering a more out of the box suggestion for SC/P5 reform where there is literature. That, however, does push the debate into a "is reform good" debate. I suspect that the nationals topic will be worse given the real world developments that have killed the suggested trade agreements making the actual substance of the debate all theoretical.