The Decline of Debate: PULL IT ACROSS YOUR FLOW
Author: MICHAEL MCGOUGH
Publication: The New Republic

Mention high school debate to most Americans and the image evoked is a pleasing one: fresh-faced youths out of a Norman Rockwell scene expostulating in breaking voices about the meaning of democracy and pleading with the audience to reject the contentions of "our worthy opponents." Inform them further that thousands of high school students take part in interscholastic debating, and that top debaters are courted by elite colleges and law schools, and you've spawned the hopeful impression that here is an oasis of liberal learning in the intellectual desert charted by Allan Bloom and William Bennett.

It is, alas, a debatable proposition. If the meaningless sound bites traded at today's presidential debates represent one regrettable oratorical extreme, then the current condition of high school debates represents the other. Let me take you to a typical high school debate tournament, at which two-member teams from around the country square off on the "public policy" proposition that they will wrestle with all year. High school debate topics are worthy and boring enough to come from the MacNeil-Lehrer playbook; this year's question is whether the federal government should maintain a program of retirement security for the elderly.

The debate is already in progress, so you let yourself in quietly, fearful of interrupting one of the speeches. But no one is speaking. Instead, the two pairs of debaters, hedged in by prodigious file drawers and briefcases, sit at desks scratching an legal pads as the "audience"-- single judge--inclines scribe like over her own notepad.

Time passes until one of the debaters at last rises from his desk, legal pad and sheaf of index cards balanced on his arm. You brace yourself for a burst of eloquence--certainly the boy has had plenty of time to prepare--but when he speaks it is sotto voce with eyes cast downward. "I'll start with the D.A.s," he says, "then go back to the--P.M.N. and. finish with solvency." A pause follows, during which the other debaters and the judge nod~ knowingly; and consult their legal pads. Then, suddenly, our speaker shifts into drill-instructor mode and shouts: "Realize that the Affirmative has dropped all of our DA.s, therefore they lose. Now go to the B(1) subpoint." That's the last:'sentence you can make out; as he presses on, the boy increases his speed until he sounds like the motormouth in the Federal Express commercials. Adding to the robotic effect is his habit of constantly raising and lowering his right arm' in order to scoop up his index cards.

I exaggerate but only a little. Some debaters manage to make themselves understood despite the machine-gun delivery. And such is the effervescence of youth that even the most jargon-clogged debate can suddenly turn frisky and familiar, as when one of the debaters I recently heard warned that if a certain policy were implemented, "the Soviet Union will freak out of their minds!"

Overall, however, the effect of a high school debate on the unwary spectator is usually one of bewilderment. Today's budding Buckleys traffic more in bizarre jargon than the telling bon mot. A "D.A.," for example refers to disadvantage," a term of art for a negative consequence of the adoption of the Affirmative resolution. "P.M.N." stands for Plan Meets Need. "Solvency" is a reference not to financial security but to the ability of the affirmative plan to "solve" a problem. But don't expect, contestant to translate these terms for you. In today's high school debates, the object of the exercise is to beat "your opponent,

It wasn't always thus. In the mid-1960s, when I was a fledgling debater for a Catholic boys' school, debate was still an exercise in communication. True, in most of our contests we debated before a judge rather than an audience, and, like the current generation, we made our points with intricate arguments (or so we thought) buttressed with evidence from experts; then as now, debaters were recognizable by their file boxes bulging with "quote cards." We also observed various conventions that formal debate borrowed from law and the social sciences. If we were arguing for the Affirmative side, for example, we knew we had to make a "prima facie" case for adopting the change spelled out in the debate resolution.

But the conventions' weren't allowed to overwhelm the fluency and intelligibility of our speeches; they were, rhetorically speaking, the skull beneath the skin. When we began a speech, we said, "Good morning" as if we were talking to real people; we referred to "disadvantages," not "D.A.s"; and we looked at the audience, even if it was an audience of one.

What has happened in the ensuing 30 years? Like a good debater, I offer the testimony of an expert. John E. Kennedy began his debate career humbly, as my partner at Pittsburgh's Central Catholic High School, before soaring to heights I never achieved as a high school and college debater and as the debate coach for our old high school. Kennedy, who now teaches public speaking at the university of Pittsburgh, sees the transformation of debate as a case study of what happens when form comes to dominate content. "After observing what happened in debate," Kennedy says, "you can. understand how things like the baroque and rococo movements in art occurred, or the growth of bureaucracy in organizations."

KEY TO the metamorphosis was the "flow pad." even in my day, high school debaters tracked the "flow" of arguments on legal pads or, more flamboyantly, on artists' sketch pads. Still, the emphasis was on oral persuasion and a good memory. But beginning in the early 1970s, Kennedy recalls, "what you could get on paper became the important element in the contest."

A seminal figure in this transformation, Kennedy recalls, was Laurence Tribe. TNR readers know Tribe as a media savvy constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School and nemesis of Robert Bork. Kennedy remembers him as Larry Tribe, the champion debater for Harvard who played mentor to Kennedy and other star high school debaters at a summer debate workshop at Georgetown University. "What happened with Larry Tribe," Kennedy recalls, "is that by being able to wed his analysis to notes that would allow him to keep track of oral argumentation and copious amounts of evidence and research, he was able to convey much more information in a more precise manner." The logical extension of Tribe's approach, Kennedy says, was a tactic known as "the spread"-as in spreading your opponent thin by loading your speech with so many arguments (all duly noted on the judge's "flow pad") that he can never adequately refute them all. Debate speeches were on their way to becoming the oral equivalent of lawyers' briefs, complete with "cites" and insiders' jargon.

Now the power of the flow pad is what moves most high school debates. When a debater claims to refute one of his opponents' arguments, he exhorts the judge to "pull that across your flow." Kennedy remembers one memorable debate in which a speaker cited a potential war as one of the D.A.s--disadvantages, remember?--of a particular Affirmative proposal. "So pull those dead bodies across your flow," the debater urged.

The bizarre debate round described above should now make sense. A long interval between speeches--"prep time"--isn't a problem because the real debate takes place on the notepad, not at the podium. And once a debater finally struggles to his feet, there is no time to waste on pleasantries like "Good morning"; a more useful introduction is a preview of where the speaker plans to go with the flow. Then it's on to the speech proper. Since everyone in the room is, taking detailed notes, it's unnecessary to refer to a previous argument as-anything but "B(1)." (Sort of like the prison inmates who knew each other's jokes so well that all a prisoner had to do' was say "No.34" and his cellmates would collapse with laughter.) The velocity of the argument starts to increase--as it must do if the other team is to be well and truly "spread." A current debate textbook notes that "accomplished intercollegiate debaters"--the role models for high school contestants"--speak at an average rate of nearly 270 words a minute."

Quantity of arguments, however, comes at the expense of quality. A practiced "spreader" will cram a multitude of arguments into a four or eight-minute speech,-- some of them based on mutually exclusive accounts of reality. (Like lawyers, debaters often "argue in the alternative" or, as the debate theoreticians put it, they "hypothesis-test." And debaters have no compunction about throwing in the rhetorical equivalent of the kitchen sink say, a claim that establishing a new retirement program in America would trigger a nuclear war by bankrupting the economy and forcing a president to seek support in provocative foreign adventures.

Why make such a potentially embarrassing argument? For one thing, the other team might be "spread"' So thin by your other arguments that it will forget to respond to this one, awarding your team the issue when the final reading of the flow sheet is made. Equally important, the absurdity of the, argument won't be held against you. In the surreal world of abstraction that is debate, one argument is as good as another-provided that it is supported by a "quote card" from an expert. Conversely, any assertion, however self-evident, that cannot be so corroborated is suspect. As the debaters say, "It ain't hard if it ain't on the card."
 

THE SPREAD technique may work within the confines of the classroom, but it's not much use when you're speaking to the local Rotary Club or the Democratic Na tional Convention. As a result, high school debate is experiencing something of a counterrevolution. A new competitive event, known as Lincoln-Douglas debate, encourage students to debate questions of value instead of trading Xeroxed blurbs about the "D.A.s" of this or that public policy. Even with traditional "policy" debate, there is modest rediscovery of communication skills. I was pleased on a visit to the Georgetown workshop, to hear an instructor tor actually telling one debater to stand up straight.

There also, seems to be a growing emphasis on quality rather than quantity of evidence, which often comes not from debaters' original research but from handbooks that provide prefab evidence. David Cheshier, director of Georgetown's summer high school debate workshop, admits that many debaters used to quote World Marxist Review as freely as Foreign Affairs. That, he says, is changing.

But to revive debate's role as an exercise in communication, Kennedy proposes a more radical reform: using outsiders as debate judges. The "debate community" is so inbred that many judges are themselves college debaters or ex-debaters, and thus votaries of the flow sheet. Kennedy believes that debate speeches would become a lot more accessible if winning a trophy depended on explaining the "D.A.s" to the sort of people who ultimately will decide whether Dukakis or Bush was more persuasive ir their debates.

Try selling that proposition to the debate establishment Says Cheshier: "The issue is this: Should students who devote all that time immersing' themselves in these arguments be judged by people who don't have a very sophisticated understanding of these arguments? The prevailing feeling is that they should not."

The resistance to "lay" judges points up a dirty secret about debate: a lot of its attraction is based on snob appeal. Asked to describe high school debaters, Cheshier notes that "intellectual competition turns them on. They're the same kind of kids who would play fantasy games and war games." Debate as "Dungeons and Dragons"? It's not that farfetched a notion when you consider what debate and D&D have in common: arcane lore, a premium on quick thinking, and the thrill of combat in an imaginary universe. Between rounds at the Georgetown summer workshop, I chatted with a voluble tyro from one of the country's debate powers, the Bronx High School of Science. Did he enjoy debating? Sure, he said, "but it has nothing to do with the real world."
 

MICHAEL MCGOUGH

Michael McGough is editor of the editorial page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.