Wall Street Journal Features Debate on Debate

NEW YORK, N.Y. — A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal featured an article by Mark Oppenheimer that was highly critical of current practices in policy debate. Recently, Dallas Perkins — debate coach at Harvard University — responded to the original article in a letter to the editor.

Here’s the debate as it appeared in the Journal.

For Argument’s Sake

You’re at work, your boss isn’t in, and you’ve watched clips of Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin impressions 10 times already. You need something new. May I recommend the YouTube footage of William Shanahan III dropping his trousers, albeit with his boxer shorts on, to Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley?

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Associated Press Photo/Gary Hershorn, Pool
The short Web video of the recently fired debate coach at Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, faux-mooning a University of Pittsburgh professor is spectacular theater. The aging, pony-tailed hippie (Mr. Shanahan) and the angry black woman (Ms. Reid-Brinkley) are facing off over whether Mr. Shanahan’s debaters are racist for asking that Ms. Reid-Brinkley be removed from a debate’s judging panel. As both drop f-bombs in front of the debaters, you can’t help wondering whether conservatives are right about the looniness of campus liberalism.

It used to be that high-school and college debates mirrored, in a salutary way, political debates. In school, young men and women learned to research topics and then debate their rivals, using all the tools of oratory, including sound reasoning and witty flourishes. But scholastic debate today is very different, and its sorry state has consequences for the health of the republic.

Most debate coaches are not mooners like Mr. Shanahan (who actually has a strong reputation), but they are often far worse in important ways. Scholastic debaters no longer aspire to combine erudition and inspiration. And neither do presidential candidates, nowadays. Debate in schools has been undermined from within and without.

The attack from within is the sadder story. As the Chronicle of Higher Education and others have reported, some college debaters now practice “postmodern debate,” in which they argue theoretical questions about the process of debate rather than the topic at hand. In a match this year between New York University and Towson State University, the topic was supposed to be agriculture tariffs, but an African-American Towson State debater used the cross-examination of her Asian-American opponent to ask such questions as “Why did you make a conscious decision to read as fast as you did?” and “Do you think that debate is multicultural?” Later in the debate, according to the Chronicle, the Towson State student read diary entries about having experienced racism on the debate circuit. She and her teammate won.

Predictably, debate traditionalists (like me) are upset about this postmodern turn. A commentator on the National Review academic blog said that the trend toward postmodern debate “shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the increasing politicization of college campuses these days.”

But postmodern debate was not invented at the schools where we expect to find postmodern theory. You won’t find those debate tactics at Yale, where I once coached, or at New York University. Rather, they have a foothold in the debate world of large state schools and land-grant universities, in part as a response to the competitive policy-debate style that emphasizes insider jargon and super-fast talking.

This debating style began in the 1970s as a populist movement against the more traditional oratory that had always characterized both college debate and political speechifying. Rather than try to win points with wit, allusion or elegant turns of phrase, debaters began loading down their speeches with multiple arguments; the expectation arose that one had to meet all of an opponent’s arguments and that to “drop” an argument meant losing the debate. Thus debaters began skipping pleasantries, speaking fast and using ugly shorthand (“D.A.” for disadvantage, for example).

One of the great innovators of this style of debate was Laurence Tribe, the Harvard Law professor, who as a younger man taught at Georgetown’s debate summer camp. (The Ivy League-educated Mr. Tribe’s role in ruining debate is discussed in “The Decline of Debate,” a 1988 New Republic article.) But the most enthusiastic converts to the competitive policy style were scrappy workhorses from high schools and lesser colleges who wanted a level playing field. When debate was about majestic oratory, the naturally charming golden boys, or those polished by prep schools, had a distinct advantage; but when debate rounds could be won with technicalities and sheer quantity of argumentation, then industry could carry the day.

And once debate was unmoored from oratory, once its rules ceased to be about genuine persuasion, what was to stop the rules from changing further, in directions postmodern or otherwise? Policy debate is no longer training young men and women for participation in civic discourse. Is it any wonder that coaches, like the de-pantsed Mr. Shanahan, may not feel bound by the rules of that discourse?

Of course, debaters in a previous age were encouraged not only by the norms of their sport but also by the norms of the political world many of them hoped to join. Compared with, say, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, today’s presidential debates are a travesty. After the last debate, on Wednesday, what voters will remember most is not any eloquent articulations of the candidates’ aspirations, but rather their tiresome efforts to pander to Joe the Plumber. And last week, we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of candidates agreeing not to address each other directly. Tom Brokaw tried to stop Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama when they began actually debating!

Debate at the presidential level, then, is canned and inert. At the scholastic and collegiate levels it is often filled with jargon and speed-talking. Who can blame some kids for going postmodern? When the Towson State student asked her opponent why she had chosen to talk so fast, she was pointing to a real problem, one which Demosthenes, Abraham Lincoln and William F. Buckley would have recognized.

But it’s too bad that her solution is to question the premises of debate; there are other options. The National Forensic League recently introduced an event at its tournaments in which debaters can be penalized for fast-talking and jargon, and it was instantly popular. The New England boarding schools practice parliamentary debate, with the Brits’ more oratorical style as a model. The Ivy League tries to practice parliamentary debate, too, although many of its competitors have bad policy-debate habits picked up in high school.

It’s unlikely that debate will fully recover. Oratory is too battered — in the schools by a misplaced egalitarianism, in national politics by an anti-intellectual populism. It’s a shame. Crowds thrill to Barack Obama’s words, as they once thrilled to Ronald Reagan’s. That both men could be attacked as “mere” orators, as if words did not convey ideas, and as if ideas could not change the world, reflects a cynical side of America. As we debaters would say, Be it resolved: In the battle for good debate, the lesser angels of our nature are winning.

Mr. Oppenheimer is the editor of New Haven Review and the Garis Visiting Fellow in Writing at Wellesley College.

Dallas Perkins of Harvard University responded:

Debate Evolves but Is Still Sharp

Mark Oppenheimer (“For Argument’s Sake,” Taste, Oct. 17) reports on a single academic debate round and leaps to a series of totally unwarranted conclusions about the state of intercollegiate debate in America.

Mr. Oppenheimer’s fears are greatly exaggerated. It is a good thing — not a bad thing — that today’s collegiate debaters are prepared to discuss everything from the nuts and bolts of U.S. farm policy (the current topic) to the philosophy of Heidegger.

Mr. Oppenheimer’s primary complaint is that the debaters speak very quickly, even accusing Laurence Tribe of “ruining” debate in this regard, on his way to winning the national collegiate championship for Harvard in 1961. But Mr. Tribe, with his world-renowned body of scholarship and three dozen oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, shows the power of debate to enhance exactly what Mr. Oppenheimer seeks: “participation in civic discourse.” If Mr. Tribe is Mr. Oppenheimer’s poster child for the impact of debate on seeking style and eloquence, then we rest our case.

Competitive debate rewards rhetoric and humor as well as analysis and research. It continues to be one of the most educationally valuable activities around. And it provides a proven method for high-schoolers everywhere, even in failing schools, to develop the skills necessary to become successful college students and professionals.

We are surprised that Mr. Oppenehimer apparently has so little faith in the marketplace of ideas that he is unwilling to tolerate the kind of free-wheeling, unencumbered, and enthusiastic discourse that competitive debate has always embraced.

Dallas Perkins
Coach of Debate
Harvard College
Cambridge, Mass.

(The letter was also signed by national collegiate debaters Greg Rosenbaum ‘74; Jonathan Massey ‘85, and Rebecca Tushnet ‘92.)

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