The Future of the National Debate Tournament
by John T. Morello, Mary Washington College

* Speculating about the future of the NDT is a virtually risk-free proposition. I can make whatever grand claims I wish, confident that I can dismiss them if they don't come true or (better yet) not even have to acknowledge errors in my thinking because these guesses will have long since been forgotten by the time the "future" finally arrives. About the only fact of which I'm certain is that I want the NDT to have a future. I attended my first NDT in 1968, and 1997 marks the eighteenth time I'll have ended a debate season participation (in one form or another) at the NDT. I hope the tournament is here for a long time to come.

Whatever happens, my wish is that the NDT will (at the very least) hold on to those features that make a truly distinctive tournament. Having to qualify has always conferred a measure of importance to the NDT that separates it from other tournaments. I've been fortunate enough to have been the Director of Debate at two schools when they earned their first bids to the NDT James Madison University in 1979 and Mary Washington in 1991. Each time, members of the debate team, my academic department, the administration, and the community at large were genuinely enthusiastic about the accomplishment. People who couldn't tell a "perm" from a "turn" easily understood the meaning of having qualified for the National Championship of college debate.

The value of the NDT as an "elite" tournament, of course, resides in the eye of the beholder; what some see as a mark of distinction, others may view as a mere sign of exclusion. The NDT isn't the only contest billing itself as a national championship, and with the end of the tournament season crowded with several "championship" events, it's inevitable for us to think about how these contest stack up against each other.

On the face of it, the NDT has several handicaps in comparison against other season-ending events the tournament is expensive to attend and to run and the event is taking an increasing bigger time commitment from students and coaches. And yet despite those limitations, the NDT has retained qualities those other contests lack its history and its distinction as a qualifiers-only event. As proposals for an open NDT continue to swirl about, I hope we can resist the temptation to make the NDT into a replica of other tournaments. Earning one's way to the tournament distinguishes this debate contest from all others it would be good to preserve that aspect of the NDT tradition.

While I hope some of the NDT's traditions remain intact, I must also confess that I'd also like to see some other "traditional" aspects of the NDT disappear. One of these is the NDT's traditional (and often easy) distancing of itself from concern for the overall health of competitive debate as an activity. I've attended too many NDT meetings where the same refrain was muttered over and over: "it's not the job of the NDT to save debate."

In 1982 and 1983, as a member of the NDT Committee, I tried to encourage my colleagues to face the fact that competition in district qualifying tournaments (and in regional "policy" debate events) was shrinking at an alarming rate. The "numbers" were pretty clear in support of my argument most of responses amounted to some "pimps" of my "cards."

This detachment of concern for the grass roots of the activity had its inevitable consequences fewer teams now actively seek to qualify for the NDT than was the case 20 years ago. It remains to be seen whether or not the recent common debate topic experiment with the CEDA will have a positive effect on the pool of programs seeking to qualify for the NDT. The important point for me is that we stood by and watched as programs dried up, as tournament fields shrunk, and as fewer and fewer new programs entered our ranks. Instead of the kind of creative "bottom-up development" that so many of our affirmative cases advocate, we spent our time creating new ways to redistribute qualifying slots for the tournament instead of trying to boost the total of debate programs interested in trying to qualify.

In the years ahead, I hope the NDT leadership can turn increased attention to the important question of promoting the value of debating as an educational activity. I have to laugh every time I hear campus discussions about "undergraduate research" initiatives. Debaters have been doing "undergraduate research" for years, but our programs are rarely (if ever) mentioned when university administrators start talking about undergraduate research initiatives.

At my college, it's seen as a big deal for a student to write a paper and then present it at a conference. How about the students who construct the equivalent of hundreds of conference papers every year, who do about as much research in one year as required for the average master's thesis (maybe more), and who have to defend their arguments from attack? That's not undergraduate research? It often isn't seen that way because we have done nearly as much as we could to rehabilitate debate's image as a valuable educational activity.

A renewed concern for the educational grounding of debate, then is one other element I'd like to see in the NDT's future. We've spent a lot of time tweaking the competitive dimensions of the tournament, and debates about mutual preference judging, the use of high-high power-matches, and side equalizations have dominated our agenda in recent years. But what about the signs that the educational goals of debate may be giving way to competitive pressures? When you watch a string of assistant coaches march in with the latest "Lexis updates" all cut and ready to read, you've got to wonder if this is more about education or winning. When "eligibility" questions (what's a student? how many years can you debate?) crowd our agenda, you've got to have a concern about whether the professionalization of the activity has sapped it of some of its educational purpose.

When we're reduced to debating the value of confronting judges about their decisions, all of us need to wonder about the educational value of a forum that extols the virtues of intimidation and rude behavior.

Maybe these comments are just one more example of the misguided musing of one of those "District VII dinosaurs." And nothing would make me happier about the future of the NDT than to admit that I was wrong.