I was wrong: high school debate might not save America after all.

Is there any institution left that can bring us all together?

A year and a half ago, I wrote what might be a terribly naïve column for The Washington Examiner titled “High school debate can save America”. Hyperbolic headline aside, the underlying premise was one I hoped desperately to be true: that by creating a culture where people listen to a wider range of perspectives, our republic could be strengthened. As a former high school debater myself, I felt strongly that if more young people were encouraged to contend with ideas outside their comfort zones, over time would we develop a healthier democracy.

From my September 2021 piece:

As someone who studies young people’s political views, I often hear older people express concern about the next generation — that they lack critical thinking skills, that they’re being indoctrinated, and so on. And the data do show young people picking up the polarization they hear from their parents.

The good news is we now know what can be done to reverse that polarization, and it is already available to at least some high schoolers across the country. Why not make it available to more?

I really thought high school debate was a cure for what ailed us. I encouraged people to support high school debate charitably. I believe strongly that debate can open doors and open minds.

So you can imagine my horror when my inbox filled yesterday with this

The Free Press

piece by

James Fishback

chronicling some genuine insanity going on in the world of high school debate, specifically in policy debate judging at the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA), the nation’s foremost speech and debate organization.

The first anecdote he gives is pretty jaw-dropping:

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

Fishback compiles a wide array of examples where judges make plain that they have already decided what they think, and if a student’s viewpoint is even remotely close to mainstream centrism much less conservatism, you’re done.

I think it is important to level-set here for anyone who isn’t steeped in the world of how high school debate works. For some background: I competed for most of my time in high school, and have volunteered periodically over my years as a graduate.

Of course you should own a business suit when you’re in high school.

Generally, when a high school debate team goes to a tournament, they must provide a certain number of judges. For every, say, five or six kids entered, you need someone who can sit in the back of the room and evaluate speeches or rounds. These are often volunteers, parents of competitors or former debate students who are still around town and free for the weekend. I remember occasionally dragging my parents to competitions to help our team fill our judge slots, and even though parent judges would get some basic training in how debate worked, it was intensely intimidating to many of them.

The type of debate Fishback is writing about here - policy debate - was one of the most intimidating of them all. Maybe it has changed since the early 2000s, but my recollection is that it mostly involves rattling off huge volumes of complicated evidence, barely breathing, certainly nothing like an untrained observer might think of as “debate”. (The opening scene of the film Rocket Science offers a peek into what I’m talking about.)

The rules around who wins and who loses policy debate are not easily accessible to a parent or guardian just popping in for the weekend. Policy debate judging panels, therefore, are likely to over-index for those “former students back in town for the weekend” types, supremely convinced of their own brilliance because now they were in college. I am sure that there have always been newly-minted undergraduate Marxists popping into tournaments to declare high schoolers to be their intellectual inferiors.

To Fishback’s credit, he also notes that many, many judges out there have not given into this madness. I mean, not too long ago, they let me of all people judge. I was honored to judge the final round for NSDA’s National Tournament Student Congress in 2020, which miraculously went on in the midst of early COVID-19 lockdowns, taking place entirely over Zoom. I found the experience pretty uplifting and rewarding.

Before judging the round, I was required to participate in NSDA’s “Implicit Bias Training”. This was a new development from my own days as a competitor. The training largely consisted of things like consciously avoiding marking a student lower for poor Zoom lighting (this could disadvantage students of lower socioeconomic status) or their attire or the pitch of their voice (this can disproportionately lead to lower marks for female debaters). I recalled the ballots I got from some judges from my high school days criticizing my clothes or saying I sounded “squeaky” or “shrill”; I half-wished those judges had gotten this training back in my day, while also being grateful for the bulletin board material those ballots provided as I built my career as a speaker and TV commentator.

All of which is to say, I wondered if perhaps The Free Press piece involved a little “nutpicking”, seeking out the most ludicrous examples possible.

But then I popped over to the NSDA’s website and it was easy to see how student might come to the impression that the organization, not just a few rogue judges, might not think too highly of right-of-center arguments.

In Student Congress, my old event, students debate bills that are extremely simplified (one page only!) versions of real proposed legislation. Some students would bring legislation pushing for conservative priorities, some for more progressive priorities. (Shout out to perennial favorites, “A bill to privatize the U.S. Postal Service” and “A resolution to repeal the Cuba embargo”.)

I took a peek at the bills accepted to this year’s national tournament docket. Postal privatization and Cuba embargo are still hanging around as topics all these years later. But in total, they’re largely progressive bills. OK, that in and of itself isn’t necessarily a huge deal; students are generally encouraged to be prepared to argue both for and against each bill on the docket. But really? Nobody wanted to submit anything else even remotely plausible as a conservative bill?

Then there’s NSDA’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) materials. Conservative politicos have put DEI in their crosshairs, arguing that while words like “inclusion” might sound nice, DEI itself is just a way to smuggle a garden-variety progressive ideological agenda into as many institutions as possible.

In their checklist for how to have an inclusive tournament, NSDA does suggest a variety of sensible and laudable things, like measures to make sure that students don’t have to be wealthy to attend, or ways to convey that harassment is not to be tolerated.

But they also offer the recommendation to “Utilize diverse sets of tournament materials for Extemp, Congress, and/or Impromptu” with a link to a page of materials.

What do they mean by diverse sets of materials?

Take the “Diversity and Inclusion Congressional Legislation Packet” recommended for classrooms: it is a caricature of what Republicans claim DEI is really all about. The “Diversity and Inclusion Extemporaneous Materials” largely start from the perspective that the progressive viewpoint is correct or is obvious. Questions like “How can the U.S. government address environmental racism?” make up the bulk of the list. To the extent conservatism or right-of-center ideas are even acknowledged, it is either through the lens of elections (“How can Republicans win more Hispanic voters?”) or extremism (“What is behind the rise of nativist, white-supremacist movement in conservative politics?).

I am sure the NSDA would argue that students are not expected to take a particular side of the question. I hope that, in practice, this is true. But surely, a sixteen year old could be forgiven for getting the impression that, when everything sent their way comes from a left-of-center view point or starts from the premise that the progressive view is right and conservatism is only welcome in the negative, maybe voicing conservative views isn’t worth it?

If students feel like the institution running the tournament has picked a side, doesn’t really want conservative perspectives - and it isn’t hard to see how they might get that message - that’s a problem. That’s why an organization like the NSDA needs to get out there right now and address the criticism that they’re no longer living up to their values of free and open debate.

Because here’s the harsh reality of what’s going to happen if they don’t: red state Governors are going to put a big target their back. The National Speech and Debate Association (formerly the National Forensic League), founded in 1925, is approaching its 100th year in existence, but competitors and alternatives are out there. Fishback, the author of that Free Press piece, has launched a competing debate league of his own. The Florida Debate Initiative is growing, has big ambitions, has been around for a decade and has support from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s education department.

We are already living in a country where nothing is untouched by division. American traditions and common cultural experiences are increasingly mired in culture war drama. Suddenly shopping (or not shopping) at Target becomes a statement about how you feel about transgender kids. The Los Angeles Dodgers just went from being declared anti-Catholic to being declared anti-LGBTQ+ and back again at whiplash inducing speed. Bud Light, Disney, on and on, formerly nonpartisan brands and institutions wade or accidentally stumble into the culture wars, get burned, chaos ensues, our national division worsens.

High school debate is literally a space for debate. It is supposed to produce Josh Gads as well as Neil Gorsuches. If it fails to live up to that promise and is no longer one of the few remaining places that brings together a wide range of viewpoints for civil discussion, we are in big trouble.

I thought high school debate might be the thing that would unify us. Now I’m worried we might end up with the opposite: different high school debate leagues for red states and blue states altogether.