What Fox News gets wrong about high school debate

High school debate is, notoriously, a niche activity. It’s an incredible educational endeavor that changed my life and countless others, but even I — now a head coach of a program in Iowa City — have to admit: it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. While it’s an activity that generates lots of important discussions among its participants, those conversations seldom breach containment beyond student newspaper filler copy and the dust-gathering end of school trophy cases.

I was surprised, then, when a friend asked me out of the blue, “Hey, I think I heard something about debate on the news lately. I don’t remember what, though.”

In excitement, I flew to my keyboard, entered “National Speech and Debate Association news,” looking for whatever headlines might mention the organization which oversees virtually all of competitive high school debate and runs the National Speech and Debate Tournament I had just returned from coaching the week before speaking to this friend.

The first search result came from Fox News: “Ted Cruz goes off on far-left student debate judges.”

Not what I expected, but alas, I decided to see what the former presidential candidate and sometimes beard-sporting GOP leader had to say about my favorite extracurricular activity.

Turns out, he caught wind of an NSDA-registered judge’s paradigm — a publicly posted description of her judging philosophy, meant to help kids know the mindset of their judge going into a round — that said she was a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.” The judge in question happened to be a 2019 National Champion in her event.

For the record, I have chosen not to name any judges in this column. I know most of their names, and in fact I know many of them personally. If this were a news article, I would prioritize the public’s right to know who said what, but since this is a column about an activity that doesn’t exist to my knowledge in Union’s coverage area, I’ve chosen to respect their privacy instead. My own paradigm is linked in the online version of this article, for those interested.

According to various news outlets, the judge on Cruz’s mind said she “Cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door,” when casting ballots, adding “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest [sic] capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”

The senator balked.

“’Unless you argue for communism, you will lose,’” he said in an episode of his own podcast, according to Fox. “That's not debate. That is indoctrination."

On the one hand, the former Tea Party poster child is onto something. This judge’s mindset contradicts much of what makes debate valuable.

First, some background:

The “Kritik,” also known as “The K,” (spelled funny because debaters already have an abbreviation for another type of argument that starts with a “C,” the counterplan,) is a popular type of argument in the policy and Lincoln-Douglas debate formats. It takes issue with the underlying assumptions made by another team, rather than the direct consequences of their plan’s implementation.

It’s a common type of political argument. If, for example, an affirmative team says abortions should be classified as an essential health service which insurance providers must legally cover, the negative team could take issue with the risk of overburdening insurance companies, or indirectly raising prices for those who are uninsured.

Alternatively, the negative might read a kritik about how abortion procedures dehumanize fetuses, why that might be a bad assumption to make, and how to correct that mindset. Such an approach is certainly the more accurate reflection of real-world debates on abortion policy in the U.S.

The capitalism kritik, or “Cap K,” is perhaps the oldest argument of this type in the debate community. If a team pitches their plan to fix the economy or employ more people or prevent political uprisings, the negative might criticize the assumption that the capitalist status quo is a good system to uphold in the first place.

The Cap K is a wildly popular argument not because every coach in the world is somehow brainwashing students to use it, but because communism as a philosophy was more or less designed to disagree with as much of Western political thought as possible. That means it can be used to refute just about any American policy proposal, which is exactly what debate students are asked to do.

While judges can disclose their preconceived notions in paradigms online, these are typically used to inform students of who they’ll need to convince, not as a place to impose arbitrary rules. Theoretically, in debate, the only hard “rules” are the order of speeches and how long they last. Everything else, from the appropriate topics to what arguments are “allowed” can be argued by participants within the round. To ensure that it’s a fair competition, judges are expected to evaluate only the arguments made in round, discarding virtually any information they know from the outside world.

All of this is to say: if a judge chooses to, “Never vote for (pro-capitalism) positions/arguments,” they’re doing a disservice to debaters. While there are anti-capitalist ways to answer the Cap K, (i.e., ”Our plan is better for the working class,“ or ”The plan doesn’t uphold capitalism,“ etc.,) the much more straightforward response is usually to argue that capitalism is good and communism historically doesn’t work.

Say what you want about the merits of these arguments. Debate rounds, like real world politics, are as much about facts as they are about strategy, and when you deny that strategic choice to teams, you make the game unfair. Such judge philosophies don’t just shut pro-capitalist arguments out of consideration, they leave anti-capitalist ones untested by the pluralistic arena that is a high school debate tournament.

Conservative news outlets took Cruz’s quote and ran with it, at an angle of, “High school debate is hellbent on brainwashing your kids instead of testing ideas.”

Writing a column picked up by the New York Post, Incubate Debate founder and former debater James Fishback reached a similar conclusion. He cited a judge whose paradigm said they’d automatically vote down a team for “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal,’” and another who wrote, “I will drop America First framing in a heartbeat.”

Fishback said these judge philosophies amounted to indoctrination.

“Once students have been exposed to enough of these partisan paradigms, they internalize that point of view,” he wrote in his own column.

Sure, I also don’t love these politically contentious judge philosophies. But proof of some indoctrination agenda is a wild conclusion to jump to, based on a few carefully picked paradigm cherries.

For what it’s worth, the debate community does generally lean to the left, in my experience. While there are plenty of exceptions, it’s a niche activity that’s inherently more likely to exist at big schools, which means participants mostly live in population-dense areas. It also seems to attract kids for whom academic achievement is a priority and perhaps an expectation of parents who themselves received higher education. It tends to attract students from LGBTQ+ and minority communities, many of them seeking the persuasive skills to better advocate on their own behalf. All of these demographics disproportionately lean left in every accurate poll of the American public ever taken.

But the problem of imposed bias is hardly limited to progressive judges.

At the National Speech and Debate Association Tournament in Arizona earlier this month, my students got an email telling them where to go for their next round, and who their judges would be. One judge’s paradigm said he would vote teams down for leaving to use the bathroom mid-round, which feels arbitrary, intrusive, and more than a little unreasonable.

Another judge at 2023 Nats wrote, “I am fine with all arguments except for theory,” referring to arguments about the unwritten procedural rules of a debate. Yet another said she refused to evaluate kritiks of any kind, writing, “If your (speech) has a K, you're going to lose.” Both of these are on-par with “I … never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments,” at least in terms of how restrictive they are for debaters and their argumentative choices.

On the one hand, debate teaches participants to know their audience and persuade them regardless of differing views. Overbearing paradigms do ensure students walk away with that skill, but not more so than the fact that sometimes you have a judge from Texas, or who is Black, or has military experience, or used a write-in ballot to vote for Bernie Sanders’ in the 2020 presidential election. There are 47,168 judges with paradigms listed on Tabroom.com at time of writing: probably more than enough to ensure diverse opinions without imposing arbitrary restrictions on what arguments are or are not acceptable.

Indoctrination is, frankly, not a huge risk for this activity that teaches kids the value of doing their own research, thinking for themselves and challenging the worldviews of themselves and one another. Specifically, debate sometimes pushes students to make arguments they personally disagree with, a monumental exercise for both their advocacy skills and their ability to understand opposing views.

Rather, the issue is that many judges refuse to embrace debate’s culture of critical listening with their own actions. As in real life, people expect open-mindedness of others, but won’t commit to it themselves, especially when they’re in a decision-making position.

Outside of debate, it’s a problem that I consider a leading cause of political polarization. Everything looks like indoctrination when you refuse to grapple with facts that contradict your worldview. And the debate-kid mindset is perhaps the most effective way to overcome this confirmation bias: if you can’t walk through your view on something with a fact-based, logically coherent explanation, then your worldview is flawed. And if someone else finds that flaw before you do, you lose. Depending on the judge, that is.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com