The Death of the Academic Debate
Debate has always been an important aspect of academia, but logic has been replaced with emotion in some cases. In other words, debate is no longer debate.
John Hinderaker of Powerline reports.
The War On Standards Comes to College Debate [with comment by Paul]
Paul has been writing about the war on standards in various aspects of our society, generally as a means of advancing the interests of minorities (or purporting to advance them, anyway). Now it appears that the decline of standards–indeed, the abolition of any standards at all–has come to the world of college debate. The Atlantic reports:
These days, an increasingly diverse group of participants has transformed debate competitions, mounting challenges to traditional form and content by incorporating personal experience, performance, and radical politics. These “alternative-style” debaters have achieved success, too, taking top honors at national collegiate tournaments over the past few years. …
On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled.
The War On Standards Comes to College Debate [with comment by Paul] (Powerline)
Comments
[…] Via College Insurrection […]
Ridiculous! They should not have won anything. Instead, they should have been disqualified for their inability to offer a coherent argument in support of a valid thesis addressing the topic. You can’t just decide to change the topic as you feel.
Academia is dead, killed by the gods of affirmative action and diversity.
After thinking this over, I decided to return to this topic because this issue is more than about the end of academic debate. At its core, the students’ behavior was as supremacist and as rejectionist, as they would likely claim, is Western culture and civilization vis a vis other people’s and cultures.
In rejecting the standard debating format and asserting their own, they are saying “this is how black people debate,” and drawing a clear and hard segregationist demarcation line. They are “Otherizing” themselves. It matters not that they have no historical precedent, besides the maudlin rhyming and fantastical drivel of Jackson, Sharpton, and Farrakhan, for blacks engaging in their kind of absurd debate; what likely matters to them is that, instead of meeting the debate standards of Western civilization’s “DWM’s”, they are demanding that “DWM’s” give way to them.
And, so, cold logic, reason, and well developed argumentation is supplanted by a new and false standard of a piece with the racial demonizing of the SAT’s because some people don’t want to do the work of studying for it.
This new standard is, to use the codes of the left, “exclusive” rather than “inclusive”, and that is deliberately so. Blacks, they are asserting, can only debate with other blacks or with those Others who are willing to steep themselves in, what these students likely perceive to be, “black cultural rhetorical styles”.
In this way, they have set themselves up for failure, and will earn the contempt of their peers in the diaspora for their inability to function in a certain rhetorical context without appealing to race.
As I said before, they should have been disqualified. Either you can reason or you cannot; either you can utilize logic to present and defend your claims, or you cannot. Emotion is but one of many tools to be used within the logical structure of debate.