At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed

fliptop writes:

At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue 'capitalism can reduce poverty' or 'Israel has a right to defend itself' will lose-no questions asked:

First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She's been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won't know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze-perhaps she'll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis-she'll scroll on her phone to look up her judge's name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA [National Speech and Debate Association]. That's where judges post "paradigms," which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not "spread"-speak a mile a minute-debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes "impacts"-the reasons why an argument matters-debaters adjust accordingly.

But let's say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whoseparadigm reads, "Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I'm judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc."

[...] Traditionally, high school students would have encountered a judge like former West Point debater Henry Smith, whose paradigm asks students to "focus on clarity over speed" and reminds them that "every argument should explain exactly how [they] win the debate."

In the past few years, however, judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common. Debate judge Shubham Gupta's paradigm reads, "If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as 'illegal,' I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks"-low speaker points-"give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . . . I will not have you making the debate space unsafe."

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