Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Congratulations to my buddy Will Repko and the Michigan State University debate team for winning it's third National Debate Tournament in the last seven years. They were seeded 3rd going into the tournament, second after the preliminary rounds and beat Northwestern on a 5-0 decision in the final round to win the championship.
An incredible accomplishment, especially when you consider that MSU generally does not get the best high school debate talent in the country, not by a longshot. The top high school kids typically go to Harvard, Dartmouth, Northwestern, or Berkeley. Will takes mostly 2nd tier high school debaters and turns them into national champions.
Attention, Liberty University: This is what the real #1 debate team does.
All I can say is: Go, Speed Racer, Go.
Comments
These posts always remind me of my college roommate John, who was on Will's team around 99-01. Those kids worked their asses off, he didn't come back to the room till 5 am some nights, more often than not with delicious Georgio's pizza in tow. Gods I miss Georgio's!
Posted by: Rob Monkey | March 24, 2010 4:05 PM
It's incredible to me that those kids manage to go to class with all the work they do for debate. College debaters put in at least as many hours on their activity as football or basketball players do, probably more. And yet they are typically also the top students at the university. I don't know how they do it.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | March 24, 2010 4:09 PM
maybe you can get them to debate this fool
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/do-you-only-live-once-exp_b_508440.html
oohh my life-force lives on when I'm dead.......
and I have proof! because my sister is senile so her life force went somewhere!
Posted by: Kevin (NYC) | March 24, 2010 4:40 PM
Are any of these debates recorded on video? I know very little about debate except a documentary a saw about a year ago featuring a new style by two high schoolers.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 24, 2010 6:00 PM
Will their celebration be better or worse than the 1992 Pittsburgh Penguins who broke the Stanley Cup by throwing it into Mario Lemieux's pool?
Posted by: Ryan | March 24, 2010 6:23 PM
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 24, 2010 7:19 PM
#4
Anyone unfamiliar with competitive debate must first realize that it has no relation to the vulgar concept of debate as seen on TV. Modern debate resembles these debates as opera resembles real life - both are incomprehensible to the intelligent but untrained layman. [But operas are slow whereas debate is fast - see the costume in the post.]
Here are a some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui8XXE1friM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT8t4liEHwU
There's a subset of debate (started/first prominent at Louisville) in which every topic is discussed in terms of racism.
From http://louisville.edu/debate/media/videos.html
see http://louisville.edu/television/debate/debate.WAKE.aff1.asx
Ed's not a big fan of this style http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/05/the_louisville_project_1.php
I suppose in today's society where the idea of reasoned, rational debate is held in low regard (see almost 99.9999% of all political debates), competitive debate is as relevant as any other form.
jah
Posted by: j a higginbotham | March 25, 2010 12:22 AM
That first video linked to above is from MSU's first NDT championship in 2004, the final round between them and Berkeley. The second one is from 2006, MSU's second NDT championship.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | March 25, 2010 12:33 AM
At the risk of committing a rank heresy, I don't really understand the American "policy debate" format. It just doesn't seem to me like one is practising the art of persuasion if one just rattles off a series of arguments as quickly as possible in a barely-comprehensible monotone. I don't mean to diminish the impressiveness of MSU's achievement - being national debate champions in any style is a massive accomplishment - but I can't help but prefer styles such as British Parliamentary or Australs-style where one's ability to engage with an audience is taken into account together with one's argumentation.
Posted by: Dan K | March 25, 2010 5:08 AM
I agree with Dan K to a certain extent.
I did both policy and mock legislative debate (encompassing a number of things, including Model UN, Model Congress and a couple other formats) in college, and I typically found the mock legislative type debate to be more fun for me personally.
I will note that Policy debate is often seen as the "main" college debating event.
Posted by: Ben P | March 25, 2010 9:13 AM
Policy debate is the traditional form of US debate. There have been other forms that have developed (CEDA "value" debate, Parliamentary in a couple of forms, Lincoln-Douglas). Most of these secondary forms have developed as a response to perceived "abuses" of policy debate. Whether they are abuses depends on perspective. Policy debate is incredibly fast and the average person--average in the sense of not having much exposure to the activity--can't follow the arguments. On the other hand, the same "average" folks can't follow higher order theoretical discussions in either the sciences or the humanities either (due to content, not speed). I hesitate at the sports analogy, but the average person also can't step right in to college athletics either. Competitive debate is that, it is competitive and students develop strategies to help them win. Research, briefs, backfiles, and speed drills are strategic choices, as is the Louisville project (hip hop, racism, and kritique). I'm a rhetorician via degree and practice, but I think assuming that debate is about the "art of persuasion" is only one way to think about the activity, and clearly not the dominant perspective by the practitioners of debate.
As a debater I go too far back, oftentimes. We still copied our evidence onto index cards and then piled them on top of each other for our speeches. As a coach I bridged many of the shifts in practice and I'm not always happy with the activity, but I still think that it is by far the best preparation for classes (I often took classes that were related to the topic, it made me a better debater and getting good grades wasn't hard) in that it taught me how to make a compelling argument and understand the relationship between claims, evidence, and analysis, and it taught me that going to the library was a fun thing. Consequently, I was always better and more quickly researched in my classes than were typical students.
Congrats to Michigan State but I have a little pang for Northewestern given the recent passing of their fantastic former coach Scott "Duck" Deatherage.
Best,
Dave
Posted by: David Worthington | March 25, 2010 9:57 AM
"... assuming that debate is about the "art of persuasion" is only one way to think about the activity, and clearly not the dominant perspective by the practitioners of debate."
I take your point that it is natural that there are a wide variety of perspectives on what a debate should look like (we are certainly better off with a plurality of styles from which to choose). However, I think that claiming that debate-as-persuasion is "clearly not the dominant perspective by the practitioners of debate" is somewhat U.S.-centric. British Parliamentary style has many adherents globally (evidenced by the fact that the World Universities Championships, which uses this format, draws around four hundred teams from all over the world every year), whereas policy debate is hardly practised outside of the States. If what you say is true, however, I think that it's interesting how the U.S. has diverged from the rest of the English-speaking world in this regard - no doubt some of the snobbier members of the Oxford Union would look down the lengths of their aristocratic noses at policy debate as an exercise in how fast one can read one's debate prep file. As for myself, it's not to my taste, but I do think that there is much to be gained from being well-researched (as Mr. Worthington points out), and the fact that policy debate encourages that is great.
Posted by: Dan K | March 25, 2010 10:54 AM
I think a lot of people have DanK's reaction to policy debate because it seems so detached from the real world -- and it is. No one talks that way outside of a competitive policy debate, even debaters. They don't see the eloquent speeches they're expecting or that they see in every other context, so they don't see how it has worth. Yet policy debate has helped a great many brilliant and successful people become brilliant and successful people, so how is it doing that?
I think the primary answer is sheer knowledge. Data. The research process is incredibly intense. It's been said that every year of debate is the equivalent of getting a master's degree in that year's topic, and I think that's about right. You get inside an issue in tremendous depth and detail, something that exists in no other activity other than grad school. After four years of high school debate and four years of college debate, you have the equivalent of 8 advanced degrees in terms of really deep knowledge and understanding of each of those subjects. That is absolutely the basis of my ability as a generalist to understand and write knowledgeably about so many subjects, because in my time in debate I did incredibly intensive research on poverty and unemployment, elementary and secondary education, global arms trafficking, water quality, agricultural policy, foreign policy in Latin America, elderly and retirement policy, prison overcrowding and space exploration. Every one of those subjects broke down into 30 or 40 different sub-topics and I had to be prepared to argue and answer arguments on every single one of them. There simply is no other activity that can give you such a deep understanding of so many different subjects.
There are other benefits, of course. The confidence you get speaking in front of an audience and defending your position is something very few people have (public speaking is typically the #1 fear in any poll on that subject). The real answer to the question of why I wasn't terrified going on Rachel Maddow is that I was used to speaking and making arguments in public literally since I was 14 years old. The ability to break down an argument logically and to think strategically are very important, particularly learning to do them at the speeds you have to do them during a debate.
Policy debate is a high speed, high intensity intellectual clash with other really smart people. There are other ways to get those benefits, including other forms of debate - parliamentary, Lincoln-Douglas, etc. But I don't think any of them have quite the intensity of policy debate - which doesn't mean they aren't fun and valuable in their own right.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | March 25, 2010 11:05 AM
I, too, copied my evidence onto index cards in four years of high school debate and a year for MSU back in the dark ages well before the Internet. I can say without hesitation that debate experience gave me knowledge, discipline, perseverence and -- something that really helped me in my career as a journalist and communicator -- the ability to see and argue all sides of an issue. It also taught me that the contest doesn't always go to the swiftest, or the smartest ... but often those most willing to engage.
Posted by: Mark Fellows | March 25, 2010 11:40 AM
Ed - I see no links in your blog post. Perhaps you intended to embed some links but inadvertently didn't. I tried three different browsers and no provided links. I will review the links @ 7.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 25, 2010 2:57 PM
Michael-
I was referring to the links in comment 7.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | March 25, 2010 3:43 PM
Dan K,
You say: "I think that claiming that debate-as-persuasion is 'clearly not the dominant perspective by the practitioners of debate' is somewhat U.S.-centric." Well, yes, that's why I start the paragraph indicating that policy is the traditional form in the US.
I agree with all that Ed posted in #13 and at the same time, my favorite debate to use in my argumentation classes to illustrate form and content is the 1961 final round on health care, which featured Lawrence Tribe with his partner Gene
Clements against King's College Frank Harrison, and Peter Smith. (The topic was, ironically enough, a need for national health care in the US; Tribe and Clements won the debate, as affirmative). It is a magnificent debate that resists speed and, in my view, engages in the "art of persuasion." But it predates many, many changes in technology and philosophy of (American, nay, US) debate. It would fit with the best of the international Parly community and the round itself, including many of the arguments, is still quite relevant today. Unfortunately, it is no longer posted on the NDT website, I've inquired but no reposting yet.
Cheers,
Dave
Posted by: David Worthington | March 25, 2010 7:35 PM
@Mr. Worthington: Sorry. I didn't realise you opened with that sentence in order to set the discussion in the U.S. Mea culpa.
I agree (as I said before) with you and Mr. Brayton about the value of getting high schoolers to do rigorous research; often, when coaching high school debaters, I find that their knowledge of many important issues is superficial at best - even if they're one of the dozen or so kids who get selected to try out for our national team. Perhaps there is something to be said for not allowing any one style to dominate a debating circuit, since each style encourages different good habits. Of course, this kind of diversification is much more easily accomplished in the States, where the human infrastructure for debate competitions seems somewhat more robust (as compared with South Africa, where I'm from).
Posted by: Dan K | March 26, 2010 5:12 AM
Public speaking was my #1 fear as well. In high school, that was the only class I failed. I passed with As in AP History, AP English, Physics, etc. However, I was scared to death to speak. In College, I went into business and realized that if I was going to work in business then i would have to learn to present and speak. I volunteered to speak in every classroom presentation, while everyone backed away. I went to WMU, and for a year as a Junior, I presented no less than 2 times a week for class. I became very proficient and poised in presenting. The best choice that I ever made. I wish, in hindsight, I went into debating. Like typing, public speaking / presentation, should be a course that is required by every College student.
Posted by: DPSisler | March 26, 2010 8:44 AM