Here’s an open question for the community: Why is it a convention that teams should be obligated to give cites to their opponents after a round, but not the full text of the cards?

If we believe in open exchanges of evidence that has already been used in the interests of improving the quality of future debates, why do we force each other’s squads to go through the time waste and hassle of finding the original source materials when it’s just as easy to copy and paste the card in its entirety as it is to send someone “Smith, ‘Article Name,’ 76 Journal of Expensive Access 274, 1993?” To the extent that disclosure of evidence previously used is beneficial (increases equity, allows for more in depth debate and preparation and research), those advantages are much better accessed by just handing over the evidence.

While some might not be persuaded by the “it takes too much time to look up” argument, figuring that part of the value of the debate is in learning research skills (regardless of how tedious that may be), I think another more serious issue is one of resource access. Lending privileges at university libraries, access to journals, Westlaw, and/or Lexis are all extraordinarily expensive and out of reach for most squads.

I’m not so concerned with cites that just have a webpage attached, but in my experience a lot of teams purposely cite to difficult sources (and I’ve seen camp lectures this year where the instructors tell students to choose sources that are hard to look up). A norm which includes cite disclosure but doesn’t require card disclosure really makes research unnecessarily difficult when you have expensive database access, and impossible when you don’t.

A very easy solution to implement would just be the purchase of a simple sheetfed scanner to be used after the round for whatever relevant evidence the debaters want for later examination. In addition to solving all the problems I mentioned above, it would save the requesting team the time and delay of waiting for opponents to fulfill requests for cites, and save those getting the requests the hassle of fulfilling them.

The responses to Kauppi’s initial post have been varied but mostly against the proposed change in norms. Do you have an opinion either way regarding this issue? Should teams be willing to share the full text of evidence they have read in debates instead of just a citation? Please take a look at the MDTA thread and share your thoughts.

Whitman’s nationally recognized debate team fundamentally changed what debating looks like this semester by ditching their 40 pound plastic tubs and thousands of pages of evidence for sleek dell laptops. Whitman’s team is the first college to fully transition to paperless debate.

— Gary Wang, The Pioneer

While the University of Denver was the first team to go paperless way back in 2006, Whitman College’s decision to make the switch during the 2008-2009 college season has once again brought the issue of paperless debating to the attention of programs throughout the nation. Thus far, the bulk of the conversation has centered around the needs and concerns of college squads that compete in NDT and CEDA tournaments; the unique needs and concerns of the high school policy debate community have remained largely unaddressed. This article is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming.

What is Paperless Debating?

Most high school policy debate teams now produce their evidence and files electronically using word processing programs like Microsoft Word. These files are then printed, stored in folders and accordion files, and packed into 14-gallon Rubbermaid storage tubs. Most two-person teams require at least two and as many as five or six of these tubs to store their evidence, which is then packed into vans or checked in at airports and carted around at tournaments. While experienced debaters and coaches have found ways to make this dreadful experience more tolerable, almost everyone would prefer not to deal with the hassles involved with the transportation of tubs.

Enter paperless debating. As Aaron Hardy explains in his Paperless Debate Manual (pdf), laptops and flash drives can enable debaters to prepare, deliver, and share their speeches (including their evidence) without the need to print.

All files are produced electronically using the same Word template, which incorporates both the normal formatting/organizing functions of a debate template, and a few added features specifically for paperless. Files are kept centrally organized in a digital “tub” comprised of folders, sub-folders, and individual files.

Each team carries three laptops. The debaters will each use a laptop to prepare speeches with, placing all cards that will be read for the upcoming speech into one Word document. This is accomplished rapidly by using a set of simple Word macros which facilitate both transferring blocks and cards between open documents, and organizing them into speech order.

Immediately prior to speaking, the debater will place their entire upcoming speech on a USB jump drive. This is first given to their partner, who copies it to their laptop to ensure a backup is available in the event of a tech failure.

It is then given to the opposing team. If the other team has their own laptop(s), they’re welcome to use them to view the file. If not, the paperless team uses their third backup laptop as a “viewing” computer for the other teams use for the whole debate. If for some reason the other team needs a second “viewing” computer, the paperless team can let the other team use one of their other laptops during their prep time.

The same will repeat for each speech (at least, those with cards). After the debate, the judge is obviously free to use either their own laptop or one of the paperless team’s to look at the evidence.

Thanks to the innovative work of Jim Hanson, Aaron Hardy, and the rest of the Whitman team, any interested coach or debater can access a plethora of helpful information about making the transition. In addition to Aaron Hardy’s Paperless Debate Manual (pdf)—the most essential resource available for those contemplating the adoption of paperless debating—the Whitman website provides a helpful “how-to guide” and a Word template with all of the macros required for the system to function.

Already, several of college debate’s most prominent squads have decided to transition to paperless debating. The list of teams making either a full or partial transition includes (but is not limited to):

• Arizona State University
• Gonzaga University
• James Madison University
• Trinity University
• University of Georgia
• University of Central Oklahoma
• University of Minnesota
• University of Nevada-Las Vegas
• Wake Forest University
• Whitman College

At the high school level, Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart (Miami, FL) was the first to make the transition and many others are planning to follow their lead including the Westminster Schools (Atlanta, GA), last year’s winner of the Tournament of Champions and the National Debate Coaches’ Association’s Baker Award.

The Benefits of Paperless Debating

In addition to the obvious—no longer needing to endure the nightmares associated with traveling with tubs—there are a number of benefits outlined by the supporters of paperless debating. First and foremost, as Aaron Hardy explains in his Paperless Debate Manual (pdf), is cost.

Probably the number one factor informing our decision to switch at Whitman. Obviously, it saves all the money spent on paper, printing, copying, expandos, and other tub-related supplies. It also saves all the costs associated with checked baggage on airlines – with escalating fee structures, not an insignificant amount. Somewhat less obviously, it also saves money on the size of rental vehicles needed for to transport the average team. While obviously offset to a degree by the increased costs of the requisite technology (laptops, etc…), the net cost savings to our team just in the first year easily reach into the multiple thousands of dollars. In a time when many budgets across the country are at significant risk of being cut, paperless may soon become a necessity.

Aaron also describes several competitive benefits of paperless debating:

We have quickly found ourselves with a host of secondary benefits from the paperless transition. We have more prep time before rounds due to not moving tubs, we can more easily replicate standard work done in many different rounds, we get back to the hotel earlier because we don’t have to clean up, we can provide cite requests of every card read in a debate within minutes, it’s somewhat less likely my students lose their files…The list goes on.

While paperless debating remains in its infancy, its benefits have already become very clear to the early adopters.

The Barriers To Paperless Debating At The High School Level

Unfortunately, the transition to paperless debating at the high school level is not without significant hurdles.

First and foremost, the high school policy debate community is much larger and more fragmented than its college-level counterpart. Even on the “national circuit,” tournaments bring together schools from distinct geographic regions that hold widely varying philosophies about the activity. While it would be relatively easy for a coalition of the nation’s most elite national circuit programs to come to an agreement about paperless best practices, attempts to expand this consensus to include a broad cross-section of the nation’s debate teams would be substantially more difficult (if not impossible) over the short term.

Indeed, many state organizations explicitly disallow the use of computers during contest rounds. The following are a few of the states whose rules and regulations would prevent paperless debating.

• Kansas: “The use of computers, cell phones, PDA, and/or other electronic retrieval devices will not be permitted in competition rounds at regional or state debate tournaments.” (KSHSAA Debate Announcements

• Minnesota: “The use by contestants of any electronic retrieval system (recording or information retrieval system) now known or to be invented is prohibited during any rounds at the tournament. Electric or electronic devices may be used for the sole purpose of keeping time. Judges may use a computer to take notes while judging during competition.” (MSHSL Debate Rules)

• Missouri: “The use of electronic retrieval devices shall be prohibited during the rounds.” (MSHSAA Speech & Debate Manual)

• Texas: “Any evidence used in a round must still be available in a hard-copy format for either the opposing team or the judge to view on request.” (TFA Constitution & Bylaws)

• Wisconsin: “All evidence read must be available in hardcopy to both teams and the judge at the time of presentation. If a team cannot produce a hardcopy of the evidence read in the round, that piece of evidence is forfeited and dropped from the round.” (WDCA Standing Rules)

This list is by no means exhaustive. Even the national organizations are a bit behind the paperless curve. While the National Forensic League has adopted a paperless-friendly policy regarding the use of computers, the policy applies only to the National Tournament—each individual district is allowed to set its own rules regarding electronic retrieval.

High school programs that travel to tournaments that do not sanction paperless debating will have immense difficulty making the transition. Even if the vast majority of the tournaments on a team’s schedule allow debaters to use computers to access and share evidence, students will be forced to print and file paper copies for use at the paperless-unfriendly competitions. While adopting a part-time paperless model is possible, doing so moots many of the advantages associated with the paperless transition. Debate is hard enough without forcing students to become experts at both the traditional paper and the paperless methods of preparing and delivering speeches.

Even when tournaments themselves do not frown upon paperless debating, at least a few judges will consider it their prerogative to discourage it on their own. At regional and local tournaments in many parts of the country, the use of laptops even for flowing is considered inappropriate by a sizable portion of the judging pool. Many of the same judges that take issue with “circuit-style” practices—open cross-examination, prompting, spreading, and casual dress, for example—and arguments will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent students from debating exclusively with computers. Anyone that has attended a state debate association meeting where technology usage was discussed knows how contentious of an issue it has become. Even when a consensus in favor of paperless debating develops, a subsection of coaches and judges will remain vocal critics of the practice—students who have made the paperless transition will certainly not look forward to seeing these individuals in the back of the room.

Beyond the organization and ideological barriers to paperless adoption, the major motivation for the transition—reducing travel costs—does not resonate nearly as much with most high school programs. While attendance at the major national circuit tournaments often requires air travel, the vast majority of teams in the country never set foot in an airplane—or if they do, it is only for the season-ending CFL or NFL Nationals. If the bulk of a squad’s tournament schedule involves only ground transportation in busses or vans, the economic advantages of paperless debating are not nearly as compelling. While the cost of paper and toner certainly adds up over the course of a season, so too does the cost of acquiring laptops (including a third, “viewing” laptop) for each of a squad’s teams.

And while the “laptops are too expensive” argument is often a red herring, it does pose a challenge to advocates of paperless debating when the school considering the transition travels mostly to local and regional tournaments. If both members of a team do not own their own laptops, the cost of providing them with one can be prohibitive—especially when paper and toner usage are considered “off the books” by school administrators who will see the request for laptop purchases as excessively expensive.

Even if computers are available for all students on a squad, most high school students’ possess less sophisticated computer skills than do the majority of college students. While most college debate programs focus on students with previous experience in debate, every high school program is built on the foundation of its novices. This poses an additional challenge: not only must coaches instruct their experienced students in the art of paperless debating, but they must also train their novice students not only in the basics of the activity but also in the use of relatively sophisticated technology. By no means is this impossible; in fact, training students to debate paperlessly may prove to be easier than the traditional paper-and-tubs approach. But the importance of teaching novice students makes the paperless transition a uniquely more challenging task for high school programs considering the move.

The Outlook For Paperless Debating In High School

Lest one get the wrong impression, the author is a strong advocate of paperless debating and has considered making the transition with his own program. But given the concerns discussed previously, such a move may prove impractical—especially because of state organization rules that prevent paperless debating.

This issue is not an easy one for directors of high school debate programs. Should teams move to a paperless system? If so, how can they accommodate attending tournaments that disallow the use of computers for the preparation and delivery of speeches or the sharing of evidence? There is—at least in this author’s opinion—no easy answer.

Over time, the paperless transition is almost certainly inevitable. In the short-term, it poses difficult challenges. Please use the comments to share your thoughts. Is your squad transitioning to paperless? What lessons have you learned from your transition that would be helpful for others considering the move? How have other teams in your local or regional circuit reacted? What can coaches do to expedite the transition to paperless debating in their regions? Or is paperless debating even worth pursuing? The perspectives of debaters and especially coaches from across the country will be greatly appreciated—please join the conversation!

• evidence used to advance arguments outside its intended context;
• evidence citing unqualified, (functionally) anonymous, or even nefarious authors;
• evidence culled from (typically internet or tabloid) sources that are at best unedited and at worst contemptible;
• evidence advancing hyperbolic arguments supported by vitriolic and/or over-the-top language;
• evidence so old that it no longer makes sense given subsequent events or changes in the topic it discusses; and
• evidence which must be liberally interpreted in order for it to be used to support the desired conclusion.

The “Bad Cards” series is an attempt to highlight some of the most egregious examples of poor-quality evidence that is nonetheless commonplace in high school policy debates. It is not the author’s intention to “scold” or “shame” those who have read these pieces of evidence in the past or who will do so in the future. Instead, it is an attempt to influence the way that evidence is selected for inclusion in debate arguments by arming opposing students with the tools they need to defeat bad cards.

OVERVIEW

Probably the most popular piece of terminal impact evidence for disease scenarios, the South China Morning Post ‘96 card is used to support the claim that diseases will culminate in human extinction. The problem is that the article being cited was the result of a newspaper writer being duped by a con man who defrauded investors in his (fictitious) AIDS vaccine project.

THE CARD

Disease causes extinction.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 1996 [“Leading the way to a cure for AIDS,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Byline Kavita Daswani, January 4, Available Online via Lexis-Nexis]

Despite the importance of the discovery of the “facilitating” cell, it is not what Dr Ben-Abraham wants to talk about. There is a much more pressing medical crisis at hand – one he believes the world must be alerted to: the possibility of a virus deadlier than HIV.

If this makes Dr Ben-Abraham sound like a prophet of doom, then he makes no apology for it. AIDS, the Ebola outbreak which killed more than 100 people in Africa last year, the flu epidemic that has now affected 200,000 in the former Soviet Union – they are all, according to Dr Ben-Abraham, the “tip of the iceberg”.

Two decades of intensive study and research in the field of virology have convinced him of one thing: in place of natural and man-made disasters or nuclear warfare, humanity could face extinction because of a single virus, deadlier than HIV.

“An airborne virus is a lively, complex and dangerous organism,” he said. “It can come from a rare animal or from anywhere and can mutate constantly. If there is no cure, it affects one person and then there is a chain reaction and it is unstoppable. It is a tragedy waiting to happen.”

That may sound like a far-fetched plot for a Hollywood film, but Dr Ben-Abraham said history has already proven his theory. Fifteen years ago, few could have predicted the impact of AIDS on the world. Ebola has had sporadic outbreaks over the past 20 years and the only way the deadly virus – which turns internal organs into liquid – could be contained was because it was killed before it had a chance to spread. Imagine, he says, if it was closer to home: an outbreak of that scale in London, New York or Hong Kong. It could happen anytime in the next 20 years – theoretically, it could happen tomorrow.

The shock of the AIDS epidemic has prompted virus experts to admit “that something new is indeed happening and that the threat of a deadly viral outbreak is imminent”, said Joshua Lederberg of the Rockefeller University in New York, at a recent conference. He added that the problem was “very serious and is getting worse”.

Dr Ben-Abraham said: “Nature isn’t benign. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary programme. Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn how to mutate and evade the immune system.”

He cites the 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreak as an example of how viruses have outsmarted human intelligence. And as new “mega-cities” are being developed in the Third World and rainforests are destroyed, disease-carrying animals and insects are forced into areas of human habitation. “This raises the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious viruses would, for the first time, infect humanity at a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race,” he said.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT

Beyond the hyperbolic language and questionable logic used to support the claim that a new disease will wipe out humanity, the most pressing problem with this piece of evidence is the “expert” being cited. The article praises Dr. Avi Ben-Abraham for his incredible accomplishments and gushes at his unrivaled intelligence. In fact, debaters often cite this evidence as quoting “one of the 100 greatest minds in history”.

Perhaps that is why, when Dr Ben-Abraham was called “one of the 100 greatest minds in history” by super-IQ society Mensa, nobody was surprised. The Israeli -born doctor, now an American citizen, is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the youngest person to become a doctor of medicine and surgery: he was 17 when he was granted his medical degree at the University of Perugia in Italy.

…

The son of a mathematician and teacher, Dr Ben-Abraham learned to read and write at two, mastered Einstein’s theory of relativity at seven, took part in open heart surgery at 16 and was nominated for a Nobel prize at 23. His IQ is so high that it cannot even be measured and a sperm bank for geniuses even offered him US$1 million (about HK$7.7 million) to inseminate highly intelligent women. He declined.

The 38-year-old doctor has been hounded by the media for two decades. Newspapers throughout Europe and his home country labelled him “a monster of intelligence”, a “super genius”. He was designated by the equivalent of Time magazine in Israel as “Man of the Year” when he was only 18. When it became public knowledge that he was treating Pope John Paul I and was intimate with the powers-that-be at the Vatican, the Kremlin and the White House, the glare of the media spotlight intensified. He turned down requests for TV interviews from 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and declined lucrative offers to serialise his story for international publications. He has wanted to lead a quiet life, to deliver lectures, speak at symposiums – and most of all dedicate himself to discovering cures for humanity’s most appalling illnesses.

It turns out that this back story is almost wholly fabricated. The over-the-top biography probably should have tipped off readers, but Ben-Abraham was quite a talented con man. It wasn’t until 2001 that the truth about his background and his scientific credentials came to light thanks to an investigation by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune reporter. To make a long story short, Ben-Abraham had duped the South China Morning Post reporter as well as many Hong Kong investors (and eventually, many high school debaters and coaches).

Here are some cards to support an indictment of Ben-Abraham:

1. His medical degree is illegitimate; he didn’t even graduate from high school.

John M. Crewdson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, then senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, 2001 [“Ben-Abraham fooled authorities into giving him medical degree,” Chicago Tribune, July 31st, Available Online via EBSCOhost Newspaper Source]

Of this there is no doubt: Avi Ben-Abraham does have a degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Perugia. But more than 100 interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the Tribune paint a picture of a young Israeli boy who, despite his record as an indifferent student and his apparent failure to even graduate from high school, managed to convince a powerful Italian professor that he was a genius-and then to fool Italian authorities into believing that he had fulfilled the academic requirements for becoming a doctor at the age of 18.

2. Ben-Abraham is a con man — his credentials are fabricated.

John M. Crewdson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, then senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, 2001 [“Avi Ben-Abraham quickly became toast of Hong Kong,” Chicago Tribune, July 31st, Available Online via EBSCOhost Newspaper Source]

Based on more than 100 interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune, little about Avi Ben-Abraham’s life is as it appears. The real story of Avi Ben-Abraham is one of an indifferent student, rejected by Israeli universities, who found his way to Italy and obtained a questionable medical degree at the age of 18, then used that rare distinction to build a globe-spanning network of relationships that included presidents, prime ministers, European royalty and Hong Kong billionaires.

Ben-Abraham declined to be interviewed by the Tribune. But his legend withers under scrutiny. A Guinness spokesman said Ben-Abraham’s entry “somehow slipped through the net” and was dropped after only three years. Mensa says it has never compiled a list of “the 100 greatest minds in history.” Authorities in Rome say it appears that Ben-Abraham’s medical degree was obtained through “a false presentation of documents.”

3. Their evidence is based on an interview in which Ben-Abraham was promoting his AIDS vaccine — this was a scam intended to defraud investors.

John M. Crewdson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, then senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, 2001 [“Avi Ben-Abraham quickly became toast of Hong Kong,” Chicago Tribune, July 31st, Available Online via EBSCOhost Newspaper Source]

Ben-Abraham had an important message for the super-wealthy Hong Kong investors who quickly befriended him and took him into their homes: the company he headed, Toronto-based Structured Biologicals, had developed an AIDS vaccine that was ready to begin human testing within the year.

All Ben-Abraham needed was $20 million to finance the vaccine trials.

“He had this great story about saving the world from AIDS,” recalled one Hong Kong acquaintance. “And of course everybody said, ‘Hey, that’s a great concept.’ He walks around the with Guinness Book of World Records and says ‘This is me and I did this and I did that,’ and everybody says ‘Wow, that’s great.’ So he said, ‘Put some money into this company, and it’s got a fantastic technology that can save the world.’ And these people said, `That’s a great idea.’”

There was no AIDS vaccine, and never would be. But Avi Ben-Abraham left Hong Kong with $4 million from investors that included Asian casino magnate Stanley Ho, and Michael Kadoorie, whose company owns the Peninsula Hotel chain, both of whom are among the world’s wealthiest men.

HOW TO ANSWER THIS EVIDENCE IN DEBATES

It is probably unnecessary to read evidence to support a frontline indictment of this card. If the opposing team challenges the veracity of the indicts, evidence can be read in the subsequent speech. One way of phrasing the argument is as follows: 

(___)

Disregard their South China Morning Post evidence—

It quotes a con man who duped a reporter into believing his dog-and-pony show about an AIDS vaccine — this was just part of a larger scheme to fleece innocent investors out of millions. Ben-Abraham is a fraud — he conned his way into a medical degree and did not graduate from high school — his hyperbolic claims about disease impacts are self-interested and not credible.

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting popular but poor-quality pieces of debate evidence. If you’d like to recommend a card for inclusion in this series, please leave a comment or contact the author.

Recall that Kennedy’s successor, with far more political capital than Kennedy had, promised to defeat poverty. Historian Steven Hayward notes that in 1966, Lyndon Johnson’s commander in the War on Poverty, Sargent Shriver, told Congress that the White House believed poverty in America would be eliminated within 10 years. “Why,” Hayward wryly asks, “should social science be more difficult than rocket science?”

I don’t know that one is more difficult than the other, but I do know that they are not interchangeable. Physics is good at figuring out how to split atoms. Sociology, not so much.

1. Normalizing the verbal citation of author qualifications will “nudge” the debate process in the direction of the development of new “metrics of scholarly authority.”

Much of the feedback regarding the article has centered around the competitive outcome of this change in the norm about evidence citation: how will debates about qualifications be resolved?, what qualifications will be preferred?, etc. This largely misses the point: the function of this change in norm is to emphasize the importance of these discussions and encourage debaters and judges to address them explicitly.

Nick Bubb highlighted many of the issues in a thoughtful comment:

[M]any people perceive authors’ opinions to be a politically motivated response to a given issue, rather than an independent evaluation of the truth. … For example, do we minimize Howard Dean’s opinion on health care reform because he’s a democrat and advocates for health care reform? Or do we prefer his analysis because he knows the policy? Or minimize his opinion because he stands to gain politically from the enactment of health care reform? Or do we prefer his opinion because he’s a doctor? What about his opinion on the political implications of health care policy? There are fair arguments to be made on all of these questions, but the structure for interpreting who is qualified to speak to the truth of a given issue is difficult. Certainly some individuals are more qualified than others, but how can we answer that question? If you are to believe some aspects of a hermeneutical process, authors’ qualifications are really their biases and we as the listener have biases for/against their experiences. We can be jaded and dismiss them or we can listen to their reasoning. But which action corresponds with finding the truth? The answer can’t be as simple as to listen to everything, because that degrades back into the problems you’re attempting to address: the prevalence of questionable evidence quality.

There’s also something odd about needing qualifications to speak to an issue. You don’t need a degree from Harvard to talk about poverty. A narrative from a poor person may be equally as powerful. I suppose the “qualifications” can change depending on the context, but then what do qualifications mean?

[A]s a judge, I wouldn’t know how to handle comparative claims. Do I prefer evidence from an economics professor about poverty policy or is it more important to listen to the people that the policy affects?

This is exactly my point: these issues are difficult, but they are also important. In a world where students are exposed to ever-expanding volumes of information, learning to intelligently separate the good from the bad is essential to informed citizenship.

I do not pretend to know the answers to the questions that Nick has posed. I can offer no mechanism for cleanly separating the intellectual wheat from the chaff. But the current model we have adopted in debate is certainly subject to criticism: “if it’s published, it’s evidence” has absolved us of our responsibility to take these issues of scholarly credibility seriously and of teaching students to intelligently navigate through the maze of information at their fingertips.

Effectively determining whom to believe—and more importantly, why to believe them—is arguably the most essential life skill that debate can teach. Perhaps better than any other activity, debate can effectively train students to think critically—to question others’ arguments and to evaluate their claims with skepticism. Working through the complicated business of analyzing sources and comparing qualifications is part and parcel of this facet of debate pedagogy.

The current norm—evidence should be verbally cited only by author’s last name and date of publication—hamstrings our ability to emphasize this aspect of critical thinking and in fact actively undermines it by framing the issue of qualification as separate from instead of intrinsic to the evidence itself.

As I argued in the article, this effect occurs at two levels:

1. Excluding qualifications from verbal presentation implicitly de-values their importance when considering the quality of a piece of evidence. If the author(s)’ qualifications are not important enough to read aloud, after all, how important can they really be? …

2. Requiring students to locate the qualifications of a given piece of evidence “privately”—during speech or prep time—prevents the judge from considering qualifications as part of their initial understanding of the evidence as it is being presented.

Shifting the norm to require verbal citation of author qualifications uniquely addresses these concerns.

2. Debate participants overestimate their ability to present, discern, and evaluate the “warrants” of most arguments.

Troy Bolton questions the need for a shift from “competing warrants” to “competing author qualifications”:

Why exactly is it so imperative to shift debate away from a discussion of competing warrants (which is more or less the norm now, at least in the decent rounds) to a discussion of competing author qualifications? Or put another way, if debate is just a game, and the way to pick the winner is to decide who did the best job arguing a partciular case within a particular set of parameters, why should we shift the parameters away from what they are now?

This was addressed, at least in part, in the previous discussion of information consumption. More importantly, though, there is no forced choice between an evaluation of warrants and an evaluation of qualifications. Indeed, the attempt to separate the two harms the hermeneutical process through which arguments are understood in contest rounds, something that will be discussed in more detail below.

As I mentioned in a comment responding to Roy Levkovitz’s recent article “Revisiting the Toulmin Model in debate,” there is more to an argument than simply a claim and a warrant.

Without grounding, a warrant is just another claim. Many times in debates, the only grounding (or backing) that a piece of evidence offers is its appeal to authority. Even when a card has “warrants,” it rarely has any data to support them (that portion of authors’ arguments tends not to get cut/included in debate evidence).

In reality, the “warrant” for a given argument cannot (and should not) be separated from the larger context from which it is derived. The notion that debaters and judges can intelligently resolve incredibly complex debaters over issues of public policy controversy by simply “comparing the warrants” is naive to the level of absurdity.

We do our best, for sure, and our training in argumentation often helps us make much better decisions than would be made by a layperson. But we are not experts in the fields that are discussed in our debates, and we rely on cited experts for that very reason.

Before discussing this further, a detour is necessary.

In a comment made to the original article, Alex Gulakov argues that the verbal citation of an author’s qualifications is indistinguishable from other, undesirable demands on debaters:

I think your argument taken to its logical endpoint would say debaters should not underline evidence and they should read the entire article or book chapter. Debate is a game, so no one’s going to voluntarily read a qualification like “oil lobbyist” that obviously disadvantages them by pointing this out verbally to the other team. Just like a debater is rewarded for catching some key non-underlined sentence qualifying the opponent’s tag and pointing this out, the same is true if a debater catches their opponent’s card having an unread “biased” qualification. … [T]he underlying logic is the same: that a debater should sacrifice strategic benefit in favor of making debates overall more quality, expert–reliant, or otherwise “better.”

The justification for verbal citation of author qualifications is not the search for truth—if it were, then this comparison would make more sense.

First, the quotation of excerpts from published works is an accepted scholarly practice. When debaters cite excerpted paragraphs from a book or article, they are engaging in a legitimate practice: there is nothing wrong with “highlighting down” an author’s work so that its content may be presented within the time constraints of a contest round. If the underlining/highlighting process changes the content of the author’s work, then that is another matter. If this occurs in a debate, my hope is that it is being done unintentionally. But the issue of whether an author’s qualifications should be cited verbally is distinct from concerns about accepted practices for excerpting published work.

Second, the “oil lobbyist” concern is a benefit to the verbal citation of author qualifications. If students would be embarrassed to read a piece of evidence if the qualifications of its author were cited aloud, they should not read that piece of evidence—this seems self-evident. If, on the other hand, a debater feels that a given piece of evidence is strong despite coming from a source that could be perceived as biased, they should read that piece of evidence and vigorously defend it.

In either case, however, we should not pretend that the lack of verbal citation of the author’s qualifications does not impact the hermeneutical process through which that argument is understood. One of the primary effects of our current norm is that arguments are understood as separate from the authors cited to support them. When an argument about an author’s qualifications is made, it is the first time the judge has heard that qualification—s/he does not have a context for incorporating this new dimension of the argument into what s/he initially understood.

Returning to an example used in the initial article, there is a dramatic difference between a judge’s understanding of a piece of evidence describing the feasibility of clean coal technology from “Lucas ‘9” and their understanding of the same piece of evidence from “Lucas, spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, ‘9”. If this piece of evidence is presented in the first instance without the author’s qualification, the opposing team’s assertion that “their evidence is from a coal industry spokesman—prefer our evidence because it is from independent scientists without a financial stake in clean coal” will be isolated in the judge’s mind from the initial argument about clean coal’s feasibility.

This is largely responsible, I think, for the difficulty that judges have in resolving arguments about evidence quality. A similar refrain is heard from a broad swath of judges when questioned about these arguments: “debater’s don’t impact their author qualification arguments enough,” “I just think the argument in the card still makes sense,” “I don’t know what to do with this argument—I don’t want to throw out the card entirely,” etc. This is a predictable response given the aversion most judges have to “intervention.” When author qualification arguments are perceived as distinct from instead of intrinsic to the argument being advanced by a piece of evidence, it will be difficult for judges to avoid feeling “interventionist” about them.

Finally, the incorporation of an author’s qualifications into the understanding of an argument does not mean that certain authors need to be preferred. In the above example, a debater could persuasively defend the authoritativeness of evidence from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity in a variety of ways: it cites scientific studies, it cites the consensus of experts, the author has many incentives not to overstate his claims, the industry’s opponents are unqualified/relying on bad science, etc. A rational decision-maker might decide to listen to evidence from a lobbyist or industry spokesman despite their conflict of interest because he or she made a good argument.

Indeed, Congress routinely solicits testimony from “biased” experts on both sides of an issue like clean coal. Members of Congress and their staff listen to their arguments, read their prepared testimony and supporting materials, ask them questions, and then come to a conclusion about the issue at hand. But the first thing that every expert does when testifying before Congress is introduce themselves and describe their affiliations/positions—in debate-speak, their qualifications. This provides Congress with a context within which to understand their testimony. Debate judges should demand the same context.

Gulakov continues:

The norms you talk about in the introduction are not arbitrary. They did evolve logically: from debate being a competitive game. It is nice to quote an emphatic, totalizing phrase in cross–x (like “after examining every possibility, i conclude there is no other possible challenger to us heg”) to leave an opponent with no possible “but what about x” objection, or to say something like “our author clearly refutes your arg here: ‘While some may consider x to be the root cause of y, such logic is flawed for three reasons.’”

The dominant features of “good evidence” were not selected at random, certainly. But neither are they objectively correct.

Totalizing rhetoric, for example, can be viewed not as helpful but as harmful to an author’s credibility. Academic authors rarely write with the degree of certainty expressed by these hypotheticals (“after examining every possibility”), and for good reason: a degree of modesty about one’s conclusions reveals a thoughtful mind.

Tim Alderete has explicitly discussed this in his judging philosophy:

I am changing how I approach hyperbolic evidence. Particularly with all of the sources available on The Internets, way too many un-peer reviewed cards make ridiculous claims and use Extremely hyperbolic rhetoric. This isn’t only an issue of warrants or qualifications – some well qualified authors make ridiculous but warranted claims using hyperbole. My concern is that debate rewards this because power wording and extreme arguments are what make for “Good Cards” in debate. I am increasingly skeptical of this – I find it very hard to give the same weight to a screeching Weekly Standard Neo-Con that I give to a more reasonable author. Bottom line, if your author is hyperventilating about the blood of terrorists, or claims that his elixir can cure cancer, AIDS, racism and poverty, I think that the hyperbolic rhetoric is an Indict of that author, not just “power wording.” I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, I rarely will just ignore evidence, I don’t know how much of that needs to be made in the round – I don’t Know where I will end up on this. But for practical purposes, I think that I will reward teams that point this out, and I will make every attempt to apply the same standards to hyperbolic Kritik evidence, which I probably haven’t done in the past as well as I can.

The latter of Gulakov’s examples (“x = y is wrong for three reasons”) is not really relevant to this discussion—obviously, authors that explicitly cite and refute another’s argument are fruitful sources of evidence for debates. But this is really external to the question of whether an author’s qualifications should be read aloud.

Gulakov’s final objection is that the verbal citation of author qualifications forces debaters to jeopardize their strategic position:

If debate rounds were structured more like a philosophy or lit dept conference, we’d obviously look for different things in writing. … Can you give me some examples of other times that debate norms changed towards something that is “unstrategic”?

I disagree with the premise that the verbal citation of author qualifications is “unstrategic.” As explained above, I do not think the outcome of a discussion of evidence quality is pre-determined: just because you’ve read a piece of evidence from a lobbyist, for example, does not mean that you will lose the given point. To the extent that the verbal citation of qualifications discourages debaters from reading evidence which, if questioned, they would be unable to defend, however, this demand is desirable.

To separate the source of the piece of evidence being cited from the argument that the piece of evidence is supporting undermines the hermeneutical process through which that argument is understood. If improving our understanding of arguments is “unstrategic”, then we need to recalibrate the norms of our game.

Gulakov proposes a “counterplan”: debaters should textually cite the qualifications of the authors they are citing and judges should consider evidence without such a cited qualification as equivalent to an analytical argument.

Just having the quals in the cite is a better idea for a norm because it is more feasible to implement and doesn’t require the judge to already be convinced. This is not the status quo: the major change would be having judges regard evidence without qualifications (or a debater’s ability to provide one) as on the level of analytics. It would be quite easy for debaters to start putting quals in all their cards especially given this deterrence.

I think this is the status quo, at least for some subsection of judges. For the rest—those willing to evaluate evidence without qualifications and those who prioritize “having a card” over an analytical argument—this transition is undoubtedly an uphill battle, something I am more than willing to admit.

Compared with the initial proposal to normalize the verbal citation of qualifications, however, this counterplan falls short because it retains the hermeneutical wall between the argument advanced by a piece of evidence and the qualifications of the author the piece of evidence is citing. The only unique disadvantage to verbal citation is “time loss”—but this is a red herring. If establishing a norm in favor of orally citing an author’s qualifications results in better debates, then the time investment is justified.

Conclusions

This brings us full circle. If it is true that developing more sophisticated ways of assessing the qualifications of evidence presented in policy debate rounds is desirable, then it is important to seek ways to actualize this outcome. Given the authoritative role played by judges in determining the norms that debaters follow, then it is important that judges take the initial step to “nudge” debaters in this direction. Enforcing an expectation that students verbalize the qualifications of the authors they are citing will bring the issue of author qualification into the hermeneutical process through which arguments are understood in a contest round, thereby encouraging students to develop innovative ways to assess scholarly authority. The resulting proliferation of arguments regarding source quality and author qualifications will improve debates both competitively—by spurring better, deeper argumentation about evidence—and educationally—by training students to behave as intelligent consumers of information.

Additional comments—either here or on the original article—are appreciated.

The recent discussions of evidence quality in high school policy debate have highlighted the need for debaters, coaches, and judges to revisit the prevailing assumptions about the proper role of cited material in our activity. While a drastic shift in the community’s approach to the evaluation of evidence remains exceedingly unlikely, there is an emerging consensus among debate educators that improving this facet of our pedagogy is both possible and necessary.

What is the problem? In short, the explosion of content enabled by new media has shattered traditional constraints on what constitutes “published” scholarship. While debaters in past decades were limited in their research to published books, journals/magazines, and newspapers, the debaters of today have access to a nearly limitless stream of information—all at their fingertips, and searchable in ways never before thought possible. As Gordon Mitchell describes in “Debate and authority 3.0,” the resulting information abundance has created a need for new ways of separating the good from the bad.

Publication, previously a one-to-many transaction, has become a many-to-many enterprise unfolding across a complex latticework of internetworked digital nodes. Now weblogs, e-books, online journals, and print-on-demand book production and delivery systems make it possible for a whole new population of prospective authors to publish material in what Michael Jensen (2008), National Academy of Sciences Director of Strategic Web Communications, calls an “era of content democracy and abundance.”

In content abundance, the key challenge for readers and referees has less to do with finding scarce information, and more to do with sorting wheat from the proverbial chaff (the ever-burgeoning surplus of digital material available online). The pressing nature of this information-overload challenge has spurred invention of what Jensen (2007) calls “new metrics of scholarly authority” – essentially, new ways of measuring the credibility and gravitas of knowledge producers in a digital world of content abundance.

Policy debate’s “metrics of scholarly authority” have developed slowly—changes in dominant assumptions about what constitutes “good evidence” have occurred over decades based on the organic back-and-forth of the contest round. At the high school level, the influence of summer debate institutes and the trickle-down from intercollegiate competition have played a major part in this evolution. While regional differences remain, the vast majority of those that participate in policy debate on the “national circuit” hold remarkably similar views about what makes a piece of evidence “good”. Indeed, the dominant conception of “good evidence” has become so normalized that it is often framed as self-evident: good evidence “speaks for itself”.

But the evidence can’t “speak for itself”—judges must inevitably make sense of the evidence cited by debaters in order to render a decision in the face of competing arguments. In a thought-provoking 2007 thread on the e-Debate listserv, Michael Antonucci revealed the impossibility of a neutral evaluation of evidence.

Judges enforce “evidence quality-control” all the time.

It’s called reading evidence?

The standards that we apply when reading evidence aren’t neutral, natural valuations. The community’s evolved a fairly homogenized set of techniques, but this set isn’t logically inevitable. … Judges could apply a radically different set of standards to evidence, if they so chose. … Tweaking the standards for good evidence would really be no more or less interventionist than current practice. Ultimately, you have to decide what a “good” card is, and it’s difficult for a debater to discuss every decision criterion you might employ in the course of [five] minutes. At some point, when you’re reading that card, you’re on your own.

Antonucci argues that most judges approach the evaluation of evidence in more-or-less the same way.

When reading evidence, judges generally apply a series of tests. How current is the evidence? Does it make a strong claim? Does it have a warrant? Does it appear to respond to the opponent’s claim? Does it have totally sweet violent imagery? Does it have supersweet 24 point font? Is that font Copperplate, which is clearly the best font ever?

The reading techniques that we currently consider “neutral” are anything but. They are artificial, stylized, and frankly a little bit weird. We value claims, or predictions, over warrants. We favor specific phrases and tropes, even — clean binaries, simple spatial analogies, and some fairly violent imagery generate a warm reception, for pretty subjective reasons.

This generalized agreement provides an important benefit: because most judges evaluate evidence in the same way, students can enter a contest round with a predictable understanding of what kinds of research will be rewarded. If the basic benchmarks for separating good evidence from bad were to change from round-to-round, students would be justifiably frustrated by inconsistent standards.

At the same time, the dominant assumptions about evidence in debate should be subjected to steadfast scrutiny. If the qualities that currently characterize “good evidence” are antiquated or simply wrong, they should be changed—slowly, perhaps—through an ongoing process that acknowledges the authoritative role played by judges in the creation and maintenance of community norms. In other words, judges need to accept that their assessment of evidence is not—and can never be—neutral. This acknowledgment is both constraining and emancipating: while it removes the facade of objectivity protecting judges’ decisions, it also encourages students to experiment with different metrics for the evaluation of evidence.

The danger, of course, is that deviating from existing community norms will result in frustratingly inconsistent decisions. But improvements in the way that high school policy debate approaches evidence do not require a descent into judicial anarchy. Minor changes prompted by small shifts in community norms can have immensely positive results without jeopardizing the predictability upon which the legitimacy of contest round decisions relies.

The Debate Judge As “Change Architect”

In their 2008 book Nudge, noted University of Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that human beings—when left to our own devices—tend to make bad choices. In order to encourage better choices, public policymakers should use “choice architecture” to encourage good choices and discourage bad ones. In the context of high school debate, judges can be appropriately conceived of as “choice architects”: they have the responsibility “for organizing the context in which people [in this case, debaters] make decisions (Thaler and Sunstein, p. 3).” While performing as choice architects, judges have enormous influence over the behavior of the students who are competing for their approval. As the only decision-maker tasked with assigning a win or a loss, even seemingly insignificant changes in the way the judge approaches the debate can have a profound impact on the choices of individual debaters.

[S]mall and apparently insignificant details can have minor impacts on people’s behavior. A good rule of thumb is to assume that “everything matters.” In many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. (Thaler and Sunstein, p. 3)

In this article, I will argue that judges should exercise their discretion as “change architects” to encourage students to read the qualifications of their evidence aloud in debates. This change, while minor, will have a profoundly positive effect on the quality of evidentiary analysis in high school policy debate. Implementing this norm is simple: judges should insert the following text (or something like it) into their published judging philosophies.

Debaters are expected to verbally cite the last names of the author(s), their qualifications, and the year/date of publication for each piece of evidence presented in the round. Evidence that is presented without citation of the author(s)’ qualifications will be assumed to be unqualified (“no quals available”). Debaters are encouraged to advance arguments about the qualifications of the authors/sources cited in the debate.

These expectations are not mandates: judges need not levy draconian punishments against debaters that do not follow them. But debaters are easily influenced by the expectations of their judges, and change will occur quickly if teams begin to lose debates because their opponents exploit this opportunity to align themselves with a judge’s expectations. The best—and perhaps only—way to improve the quality of the evidence read in debates and the discussion of that evidence is for judges to nudge debaters in the desired direction. If judges are unwilling to alter their expectations—whether out of fear or an ideological commitment to “let the debaters be”—no change will occur. If we care about improving the quality of evidentiary analysis in high school policy debate, however, this is an unacceptable outcome.

The Case For Verbal Presentation Of Author Qualifications

Debates about the qualifications of a given piece of evidence are important and desirable. By verbalizing these qualifications during a contest round, their importance is amplified—even if students choose not to explicitly discuss them during a given round. The current norm—in which only the last name of the author and the year of publication are read aloud—serves to de-emphasize the importance of qualifications in two important ways:

1. Excluding qualifications from verbal presentation implicitly de-values their importance when considering the quality of a piece of evidence. If the author(s)’ qualifications are not important enough to read aloud, after all, how important can they really be? The current community norm emphasizes consideration of only the recency and content of a piece of evidence—the author’s last name is just a reference point. Qualifications are just one of many things that are not deemed important enough to be read aloud, lumped in with the title of the book or article being cited and the page number or URL from which the cited material is taken.

This does not mean that the debate community values the qualifications of an author equally with the page number from which a card was cut, of course. But the message sent to debaters is clear: as long as it has an author and a date, a piece of evidence is worthy of consideration. And not just consideration: equal consideration, at least until the other team challenges the quality of the source/author being cited. Given this norm, debaters rightly prioritize evidence with outlandish claims and strong language over evidence written by qualified experts.

2. Requiring students to locate the qualifications of a given piece of evidence “privately”—during speech or prep time—prevents the judge from considering qualifications as part of their initial understanding of the evidence as it is being presented. The judge is not merely an information processing machine: s/he experiences the presentation of arguments and evidence by debaters and actively participates in the process through which this rhetoric becomes meaningful. When only a last name and date are verbally cited, the judge cannot consider the qualifications of a piece of evidence as they initially make sense of it—while judges may ask themselves questions like “does this evidence contain a strong conclusion?” or “is this evidence recent enough to account for relevant changes regarding this issue?” while they listen to the initial presentation of a piece of evidence, they are prevented from considering questions like “is this evidence from a qualified author?” or “how might this author’s qualifications affect the argument they are advancing?”.

Some critics of “interventionism” will undoubtedly contend that this exclusion is good: judges should not think about these things, they will argue, because it is the job of the debaters to make these arguments. But this relies on the naive assumption that the judge can remove themselves from the process through which meaning is created from the back-and-forth of a contest round. In his seminal defense of the “critic of argument” approach to debate judging, V. William Balthrop explained the crucial role played by the judge in the hermeneutical process.

[A]t some point in time—either at the end of the debate or, more likely, during the presentation of arguments themselves—the judge is involved in interpretation, placing these positions into a scheme such that the importance of some evidence and some arguments can be identified relative to others. It is here, at the point of interpretation, that the judge engages in the hermeneutical process. It is here, that an awareness of the “rules” of debate as that judge understands them, of the content area of the debate as that judge understands it, of various judging paradigms as that judge understands them, all combine to influence the interpretation by that judge as to which team did the better job of debating. The judge cannot withdraw from participating with the debaters in the creation of meaning, though it is a different kind of participation; and rather than admitting one’s biases and seeking to keep them from affecting one’s decision, a better perspective seems to be that which tests one’s biases against the debate itself and seeks to understand how they affect the decision. (“The Debate Judge As ‘Critic of Argument’,” originally published in the Journal of the American Forensic Association (1983), republished in Advanced Debate: Readings In Theory Practice & Teaching, 3rd Edition, 1987, p. 170-171.)

When author qualifications are not read aloud, they do not enter the hermeneutical process of the contest round unless/until an argument is advanced about them. But this leaves these arguments weaker and less meaningful than arguments about the content of a given piece of evidence because its content and not its qualifications were factored in to the judge’s initial understanding of it. Even if the judge enters the contest round intending to emphasize the importance of author qualifications in their assessment of the evidence presented by the debaters, they will be unable to do so during the course of the debate itself unless these qualifications are read aloud. While the post-round review process provides an opportunity for the judge to unearth the qualifications of the evidence that has been read, the consideration of these qualifications is at this point artificial and removed from the debate itself.

This is not to say that the verbalization of author qualifications will give judges a green light to consider them in their decisions regardless of the arguments made by debaters during the round. The onus remains on the student participants to discuss the importance of qualifications within their speeches. But by enforcing an expectation that qualifications be verbalized as part of the initial presentation of a piece of evidence, judges can “nudge” students toward doing so more frequently and more productively while ensuring that the hermeneutical process through which a given debate is rendered meaningful includes author qualifications.

Answering Objections

Critics of my position will undoubtedly advance a variety of objections. In what follows, I will attempt to respond to some of these objections while further developing the larger case for a change in the community’s evidence citation norms.

Debaters can make arguments about author qualifications regardless of whether they have been read aloud.

This is true, of course: even when only a last name and date are cited aloud, debaters can advance arguments about the qualifications of a given piece of evidence. But these arguments are necessarily separated from the evidence itself as it was initially understood. Verbalization at the time of initial presentation of a piece of evidence emphasizes the importance of qualifications while inviting judges and debaters to take them into consideration as they first make sense of the arguments being advanced.

In addition, time pressures should not be discounted. Reviewing each piece of evidence read by one’s opponents in order to discern the authors’ qualifications requires debaters to invest valuable—and scarce—time that could be spent on other forms of preparation. The dearth of qualifications debates in the status quo seems to support that students will most often ignore qualifications in order to preserve valuable preparation time.

A piece of evidence bestowing the benefits of clean coal from “Lucas ‘9” will be understood differently than the same piece of evidence from “Lucas, spokesman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, ‘9”—and for good reason. By normalizing the verbalization of author qualifications as part of the presentation of evidence in a contest round, judges can encourage students to take qualifications more seriously. At the same time, this norm will ensure that an author’s qualifications are understood as part of the evidence itself.

Reading qualifications aloud requires scarce speech time: it will tradeoff with the reading of additional evidence.

This, too, is true. But it relies on an unhealthy obsession with quantity over quality and with hyper-technicality over intelligence. If the verbal presentation of author qualifications results in three or four fewer cards being read in each constructive speech, that seems like an acceptable cost when compared with the benefits of improving the quality of evidentiary analysis in debate.

Because discussions of author qualifications are difficult, students will inevitably choose not to engage in them.

So long as arguments about author qualifications are not perceived as “winners”, debaters will choose not to make them. This is obvious. But in their role as “choice architects,” judges have immense power to alter the behavior of students. If judges expect students to read qualifications aloud, they will. And if judges take qualifications arguments seriously when evaluating debates, students will make them more frequently. Even in debates where they were not discussed, judges can play a positive role in their post-round commentaries by highlighting opportunities that students missed for advancing arguments about author qualifications.

The norm in favor of reading qualifications will be exploited by debaters—they will “highlight down” quals and “massage” them to make their authors seem more qualified than they really are.

This is a legitimate concern, for sure, but it is not damning to my position. First, any manipulation of the norm in favor of reading qualifications aloud will still take place within a context in which more emphasis is placed on qualifications. This provides a natural remedy for manipulative practices: because qualifications will be considered more important, those that attempt to disguise the shortcomings of their evidence will be subjected to heightened scrutiny. Even in a worst case scenario, this is an improvement over the status quo in which qualifications are largely ignored.

Second, the ethical norms that guide debate research will remain a strong firewall against abusive manipulation. The fabrication of an author’s qualifications should be treated in the same way as the fabrication of the text of a piece of evidence: as an unacceptable breach of the community’s trust. In short, there is no unique risk of unethical behavior associated with the verbalization of author qualifications.

Conclusion

High school policy debate is a research-driven activity: we rely on the citation of published material to support our arguments about issues of public policy controversy. In order to make sense of this “evidence” as it is presented in contest rounds, debaters and judges have developed a generalized agreement about the “metrics of scholarly authority” that determine what separates good evidence from bad. But recent developments in new media have called into question the veracity of these metrics. With a functionally limitless stream of information available at our fingertips, separating the good from the bad has become even more important than ever—and, unfortunately, more difficult.

In order to improve the quality of evidentiary analysis in debate, this article has advocated a shift in the community norm about the verbal citation of evidence. Instead of expecting students to read aloud only the author’s last name and the date of publication for each piece of evidence, judges should exercise their discretion as “change architects” to enforce an expectation that the author’s qualifications be verbalized as well. By adopting this minor change in expectations, judges can emphasize the importance of author qualifications to students while encouraging them to make arguments about qualifications more frequently and more seriously in contest rounds.

This “nudge” is no panacea. Many issues will remain regarding the community’s approach to evidence even if reading qualifications aloud becomes normalized. But this small step can have a profoundly positive impact. By elevating the importance of qualifications and forcing debaters and coaches to take them more seriously before and during debates, this move by judges will contribute to the much-needed development of new “metrics of scholarly authority” in high school policy debate.

This is the second in a series of full-length essays published by The3NR.com. If you are interested in syndicating or republishing these essays, please contact the author.

While the heyday of academic scholarship about competitive debate has passed, its voluminous legacy remains a vibrant source of inspiration and knowledge for contemporary students. Tapping into this rich history of debate scholarship is a fruitful way for students to deepen their comprehension of key theoretical issues while improving their overall ability to debate them effectively in contest rounds.

This article provides advice for students wishing to leverage debate theory research toward improvements in their debating. First, it provides an overview of the sources accessible to most debaters. Second, it provides a list of suggestions for making use of these articles. It is my hope that this article will give interested students the basic guidance they need to dive head first into the world of academic debate scholarship.

Where To Find Debate Theory Articles

1. The Debater’s Research Guide

Published by Wake Forest University’s Debate Team from 1979 through 2007, the DRG was an evidence handbook that included a handful of theory articles at the front of each issue. All of these articles are now available online and they provide an interesting retrospective on the development of debate theory over the past three decades. Several DRG articles are seminal texts: Roger Solt’s “The Disposition of Counterplans and Permutations: The Case for Logical, Limited Conditionality,” for example, is arguably the most authoritative work on counterplan dispositions ever written.

2. Contemporary Argumentation & Debate

The official journal of the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA), CAD is one of the most long-standing publications about competitive debate. The full archives of the journal are available on CEDA’s website from 1980 through 2000 with more recent volumes available only from EBSCOhost’s Communication & Mass Media Complete (see below). Articles in CAD cover a full range of issues relevant to competitive debate and include many seminal texts by leading debate theorists like David Zarefsky and Walter Ulrich.

3. The Rostrum (and older articles)

The official publication of The National Forensic League contains a treasure trove of articles written specifically for an audience of high school debaters and coaches. In particular, a series of articles by Dr. David Cheshier published between 1999 and 2003 covers a wide range of topics that are still very relevant to national circuit policy debate theory and praxis.

4. EBSCOhost Communication & Mass Media Complete

Most university libraries and some high school libraries include a subscription to this database as part of their EBSCOhost package. It contains the full text of over 350 journals including Argumentation & Advocacy (formerly the Journal of the American Forensic Association) and many others relevant to debate as well as selected articles from the Conference Proceedings of the National Communication Association, a rich source of leading debate theory work produced during the late 1970s through the 1990s.

5. A Select Bibliography of Debate Theory by Steve Hunt

Last updated in 1997, this essential compilation of citations is invaluable to anyone interested in published work about debate theory. Many of the sources listed are difficult to find, but at least some can be accessed at most university or college libraries. This bibliography is subdivided into sections covering areas/issues like Evidence, Topicality, and Counterplans. It also includes a fairly comprehensive list of publications (both books and journals) that include debate theory articles.

What To Do With Them When You Find Them

1. Read them.

This should be obvious, but it bears emphasizing: the best way to gain a superior understanding of debate theory is to read as much about it as you possibly can. No article is unworthy of your time; even articles that cover topics that are no longer controversial can be incredibly valuable because they provide insight into the evolution of contemporary theories and practices of which most participants will be unaware. Most members of the debate community now agree, for example, that counterplans are a legitimate part of the negative’s strategic arsenal. But why? What motivated the invention and proliferation of the counterplan? What theoretical assumptions provide a foundation for its modern form? The answers to these questions will provide debaters with the ability to think through current theoretical controversies in a much more sophisticated way than the vast majority of their peers.

2. Talk about them.

The development of debate theory has been a dialectical process: someone makes an argument, many others respond, and the back-and-forth continues until something of a consensus is arrived upon. In the same way, an individual’s comprehension of theoretical issues can be accelerated by in-depth discussion with other debaters, coaches, or judges. While some members of the debate community find theory discussions arcane and boring, many are fascinated by them and more than willing to spend hours engaged in a back-and-forth dialogue. Indeed, many post-round discussions have been extended into lengthy dialogues when a theory issue is raised. Debate geeks just can’t help themselves: they love talking about debate. Take advantage of this: engage your friends and coaches in discussions of the articles you’ve read and try to work through the issues “out loud”. This will not only improve your comprehension of the issues, but it will greatly increase your comfort level with verbalizing these arguments.

3. Use them to (re-)write theory blocks.

It is important to write and constantly revise a set of blocks about major theoretical issues. One of the best ways to improve the strength of these blocks is by incorporating arguments found in scholarly articles. In many cases, the authors of these articles intended to persuade their audience (other debate coaches/scholars and students) to accept the validity of their positions. As a result, many articles are written to persuasively respond to and refute the counter-arguments of their critics. By incorporating these arguments into theory blocks, a debater can ensure that they have covered all their bases and that their blocks contain the best arguments others have made on the given issue.

4. Cut them as evidence.

This piece of advice is more controversial: some coaches and judges support the reading of scholarly evidence to bolster arguments about theoretical issues while others scoff at “theory cards” and prefer that debaters make these arguments themselves. While I am a member of the former group, even the most fervent critics of the inclusion of evidence in theory debating will probably concede that there are situations in which such a practice is desirable. For example, many theory articles make reference to outside literature to support their claims; in these cases, cutting the original source being cited to bolster one’s argument can be extremely helpful. Depending on your squad’s feelings about theory evidence, you might choose to cut many or only a few cards. But even a small number of high-quality cards on key theory issues can turn a few losses into wins, so the time investment is most definitely a worthwhile one.

5. Compile/preserve them.

Every debate team should maintain an organized library of theory articles to pass on to future generations of students. Too often, these resources are lost or discarded because someone concludes that they are “just taking up space” or are “no longer relevant”. Unfortunately, this makes it much more difficult to pass on the knowledge you have gained during your high school career to future members of the squad. Even if they share your drive to learn more about debate theory, they’ll be forced to reinvent the wheel and expend valuable time tracking down articles for themselves. Do them (and your squad) a favor: leave behind a “backfile” of theory articles in as good of shape as your topic backfile. Whether this is on paper (in folders or a binder) or electronically (on a hard disk), your contribution will help improve the accessibility of debate knowledge for future generations of students.

My agreement with Roy’s initial post was not intended as an indictment of new affirmatives. Instead, I think the proliferation of poor-quality new affirmatives at season-ending tournaments reveals something important about the state of our activity. In particular, the following questions come to mind:

1. What does it say about the way we are teaching our students that breaking new affirmatives is seen as so strategic at end-of-the-year championships? Why is it that students feel that they have a better chance of winning when they break even a poor-quality new affirmative than they do when reading one of their existing affirmatives?

2. Does this represent a positive or negative trend? What should we be doing to nudge the competitive advantage toward a style of debate that rewards engagement with the topic literature and the opposition’s arguments more than evasion and trickery?

I don’t think it was Roy’s intention to “call out” those teams that consistently broke new affirmatives at this year’s TOC or to discourage teams from reading new affirmatives in the future. As I have written, there are certainly strategic benefits to breaking new cases and it is good to encourage students to invest the effort required to write a new case and prepare to defend it.

But why is it that so many students feel that breaking a new affirmative is so strategic? Scott does a good job of assessing the typical negative strategy: most 1NCs are terrible, abusive, or not about the case while only a few are well-researched and specific. This is something we should be ashamed of, but these negative strategies win debates.

Why? For the same reason that poor-quality new affirmatives are perceived as strategic: because the quality of evidence comparison and the level of scrutiny applied to evidence in most debates is exceedingly low. Even if they are initially taught to question the sources of their opponents’ evidence and to make arguments about sources in the round, debaters quickly learn that this discussion of evidence quality will not be rewarded nearly enough to justify the time investment.

Judges routinely resolve these debates with a kneejerk appeal to “evaluate the warrants”: “the neg wins that the aff’s solvency author is a quack with no qualifications who is writing on a blog, but if that’s the case, the neg should be able to beat the warrants, and they don’t have any cards that disprove the aff’s author.” In an attempt to ensure that no legitimate sources are excluded, most judges have taken an extreme position, whether implicitly or explicitly: so long as it is published, all sources have equal credibility—only the warrants of the evidence presented to support an argument matter, not its publisher.

This is an intuitively appealing position: learning to keep an open mind, after all, is one of the primary benefits of our activity. Nonetheless, there is a difference between keeping an open mind and refusing to critically evaluate sources of evidence. Students that participate in policy debate—especially at the national level—learn research skills that put their non-debate peers to shame. But in an important way, debate students are being taught to be poor consumers of information. One of the first things that middle school students learn when writing their first research paper is that the source matters. There is a wealth of information on the internet about the evaluation of information sources, and teaching students how to think critically about the information they consume is one of the most important jobs of our education system. At this point, almost anyone can find almost anything on the internet; very few people, however, can effectively separate the wheat from the chaff. Our goal as educators should be for debaters to be part of that latter group.

In the context of the SPS article controversy, Scott writes:

If you are aff you should have a solid defense of your case that comes from peer reviewed journals and is written by qualified authors. You should also be able to explain why evidence that does not meet rigorous academic standards should be discarded- if you can’t you will lose to way more University Wire/Sac bee cards than cards written by other participants. Part of the reason this is a problem is because of the delcining standards of what constitutes evidence, the “cult of evidence” that thinks any card auto beats an analytic, and because debaters are taught to just read cards and not critically think and deconstruct arguments ( a definate failing on the part of coaches).

This is all true. The implication, however, is not that we should ignore practices that we find unethical simply because we have done a poor job of teaching our students to critically evaluate evidence. (I will discuss more about the issue of coach-generated evidence in a future post.)

The “cult of evidence” results in a feeling on the part of debaters that they must have a card about every possible argument. “What if they say XYZ and I don’t have a card?!?,” the 2A will gasp before a big debate. The concern, it is important to note, is not about the opposition having a good argument that the affirmative is unprepared to answer. A well-prepared affirmative team that has read the books, journals, and think tank articles about their case should be prepared to defend it even if the negative makes an argument for which the affirmative does not have specific evidence. But because we are teaching our students that evidence is evidence and that you’ve gotta have a card, we are fostering a culture that devalues smart analysis and incentivizes a race to the edges of the topic. Why know more than your opponents when you can just find something they don’t know about?

Great debates do not occur when teams avoid engaging their opponents. As educators, we should do all that we can to ensure that more great debates occur. A necessary part of that process is to nudge the dominant argument culture away from “the cult of evidence” and toward “the cult of intelligence”. It’s cool to know a lot about the topic, and we should never let our students forget that.

There is nothing wrong with competition; it is, in fact, the reason that we all work so hard at something as educational as debate. My claim is not that we need to suppress our competitive impulses. Instead, we need to be cognizant of the practices our competitive impulses are pushing us toward and question whether they are practices in which we should take pride. If “being strategic” currently results in un-educational debates, then we need to consider how to alter teams’ strategic calculations in ways that result in more educational debates.

The solution to poor-quality new affirmatives, in other words, is not to insist that teams stop reading poor-quality new affirmatives: it is to change the way the game is played in ways that remove the incentive for teams to read those affirmatives. In my opinion, this means doing more to emphasize critical analysis of the sources that are cited as evidence in debates.

I … hope … everyone agrees that it is becoming increasingly more common for affirmatives to be afraid of defending their “house.” We do a disservice to the debaters and the quality of the debate if we allow this to continue. If you are a coach challenge your kids to find the best possible aff and learn everything about it. If you are a student, work hard, debate is most satisfying not just when you win but when your pour your heart out defending something and the work you’ve done translates into overall success. Judges, be willing to disregard bad evidence, be sympathetic to good smart arguments made by a team even if not evidenced. Winning is obviously an important function of debate, but if debate becomes a race to the bottom of crappy affirmatives what is the point? We change topics yearly to learn about different arguments and issues, why then do some of the most important rounds and major tournaments ultimately get decided on generics that can be read year round vs unsustainable new affs?

I agree 100%. One thing that I feel is important to add is that teams are far too afraid of negative teams finding the silver bullet negative strategy, especially at a tournament like the TOC where hired gun researchers are given way too much respect in terms of their ability to change the game. If you have been read an affirmative before and you are confident that it is based on sound arguments and quality evidence, chances are good that other squads have spent some time researching it, too. Between your research and theirs, it seems exceedingly likely that the “silver bullet” strategy would have been uncovered if it did indeed exist. If you haven’t found it and you haven’t heard another team read it, the most likely reason is not because the collective research ability of the high school community is poor but because no such strategy exists.

What is the silver bullet strategy against an RPS affirmative? Is there really something written that Sovacool and the other aff authors just haven’t thought about and therefore haven’t written a response to? If you read the journals every month and subscribe to RSS feeds for the major search terms relevant to your case, do you really think you’re going to miss the big new thing that came out and which the negative will catch you unprepared for?

The only reason to be afraid is because you lack confidence in the quality of your preparation. Maybe you haven’t kept up with the journals and you haven’t read all of the latest articles about your case. If that’s true, then you don’t deserve to win affirmative debates against negative teams that have worked hard to prepare to engage your case… maybe you should be reading stupid new affs that the other team will be unprepared to debate. But that is the debate equivalent of the trick play and an explicit admission that you are not as good as your opponents and that they have outworked you. If that’s an admission you’re willing to make, then so be it. But every team should strive to be the most prepared team possible when it comes to their affirmative(s), and you should feel a sense of shame and disappointment with yourself if you don’t think that’s the case.

This is decidedly not an argument “against” new affirmatives. There are times when it makes sense to try to catch the opposition off-guard with a case that you haven’t read before, and sometimes it even makes sense to read a new affirmative only once based on the teams that you are debating. But breaking new affirmatives that lack the credibility to survive even minimal negative research is an unfortunate but growing trend. If season-ending championship tournaments become battles between terrible new affirmatives and generic critiques and process counterplans, what does that say about our activity? Instead of pushing our students to become experts in the issues that they discuss throughout the season, it seems in many ways that we are telling them to forget what they’ve learned because, as critics say about Billy Beane, “that [stuff] doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

The obvious rejoinder to this line of reasoning is that the poor quality of these new affirmatives should make it easy for the negative to win. While I agree with this principle in the abstract, it doesn’t seem to play out that way in practice because of the approach that a majority of judges take. As Roy argues:

Debaters are not good at calling people out for reading bad evidence and judges have become too comfortable saying “Yeah well I agree it might not be qualified, it might be from a random blog, but I mean they’ve got a card.” It used to be only at the NDT in college that judges would use the “well they have a card” guise for making decisions, but this has now reverberated to almost every debate judged. We’re told not to believe everything we read on the internet, but it seems like in debate rounds a place for intellectual discussion on issues we often settle for evidence from people who are less qualified then the kids debating on the issue. Debaters CALL OUT TEAMS FOR BAD EVIDENCE read. Judges BE WILLING TO SAY THAT DESPITE HAVING A CITE, TAG, AND URL, THE TEXT READ IS NOT EVIDENCE.

I’m probably one of the best judges one could find for these kinds of approaches/arguments (“their ev is garbage,” “this doesn’t make sense,” “prefer qualified academic scholarship,” etc.), and I constantly tell students that they would be rewarded if they were more diligent about taking this kind of approach. Even “mainstream” cases (e.g. not stuff about alien invasions of Iraq to steal antigravity technology) often contain “evidence” that I would gladly disregard out of hand if only the negative challenged it. The Bearden card? If the neg says “he is unqualified, he said it is already too late, and he said that our only hope is zero point energy,” then it goes away. “Still evaluate his warrants” is stupid in the worst sense of that word and an excuse for judges to avoid making judgments (which, of course, is the function of the judge) about what counts as evidence and what sources should be relied upon when crafting policy.

Debaters would be pleasantly surprised by the reception they would receive if they made a bigger deal out of source quality in their debates. While there is certainly a segment of the judging pool that adheres to the “but they’ve got a card” school, I do not think that it is the majority (or even close to it). In front of most judges, arguments about source quality and author credibility will receive a very favorable listening—in many cases, you will be preaching to the proverbial choir. Remember, judges are the ones who have to listen to terrible evidence over-and-over again. After not very long, it gets old. Take advantage of that and challenge your opponents to justify the evaluation of the things they submit as “evidence” and you will win a lot more debates.