Tournament Results
This weekend, Parli debaters competed at Stanford and Brown University tournaments. Congratulations to Dublin’s Harveer Saini and Suhani Gupta for winning the 39th Stanford invitational in the TOC Qualifying division.
Congratulations to Horace Mann’s Michelle Grinberg & Ian Allard-Neptune for winning the open division of the first annual Brown University Invitational. I had the pleasure of judging at the Brown tournament and it was a fantastic experience. A notable topic: THBT horizontal mergers should be heavily restricted. Certainly a brain-bender!
- Nate Berls, NPDL Curriculum Director
Photo by Caroline Kramer / The Dartmouth
As a High School Debater, Should You Compete in College?
Kevin Chen, junior at the Nueva School, NPDL Correspondent
Although in most people’s minds “competitive debate” conjures up images of high school students giving podium speeches to their peers during club hours or forcing their parents to drive them to weekend tournaments at dawn, debate can be just as big a part of collegiate life as in high school. This rings especially true for parliamentary debate, as the often localized event is suddenly expanded to a truly national scale with more than 300 participating schools. APDA and NPDA (American and National Parliamentary Debate Association, respectively) make up the core of college parli, with several thousand active debaters. The NPDA is the larger of the two leagues, with stylistic features similar to high school NPDL debate.
I asked three college debaters their thoughts. Timothy Zhu is a third year at UC Berkeley and a coach for the Nueva debate team, Brenna Seiersen is a graduate student at UC Berkeley who coaches the Cal college parli team and Campolindo team, and Rohan Sachdev is a second year at University of Chicago who coaches for the Nueva school.
Tell me a bit about the type of debate you do.
Rohan: I do American Parliamentary Debate. It is similar to what you are used to; the main difference is the way that topics are decided. One [type] is motions: we are given a topic and assigned a side of that topic. The other is called cases debate: the team assigned to Gov gets the opportunity to decide on a topic, and they have a predefined PMC written ahead of time, whereas the other team has to spend the 15 minutes prepping.
Brenna: The [only stylistic] difference between college and high school debate is that NPDA allows team prep. The debates, especially at the university level, are quite technical. These debates are going to be very, very fast, with critical arguments and theory. Even when they talk about policy, they’re going to have interesting arguments. I also have insight into community college NPDA, which is stylistically different [from university]. In terms of style, it’s slower, with emphasis on presentation. You don’t really have kritiks or theory, since many of your judges are speech coaches. Also, it’s definitely a mandate to wear suits, unlike university parli.
For APDA, who arbitrates the fairness of cases, since the affirmation can propose anything?
Rohan: There's a sort of an inbuilt theory mechanism to deal with this. It's called tight calling. The thesis is that if the Opp team believes that the Gov case is too strong, they can do what's called a tight call, which says “this isn't fair, we should switch sides,” Then the Opp defends the Gov case and vice versa.
What was your favorite pre-prepared APDA case?
Rohan: My favorite case to debate is about the IRA. In Irish history, at the end of British colonization, there was a guerrilla force fighting against their occupation during the Irish Civil War. At the end of the Irish Civil War, the treaty enshrines that Ireland exists as a free state, excluding approximately six northern counties which were to remain under control of the United Kingdom. There was a part of the IRA that decided that they wanted to continue fighting against the treaty. The case talks about the Irish Catholic Church's reaction to that, because they chose to excommunicate those people who continue to fight. [The case] considers their motivations, their interests, etc.
How much time do you spend preparing for debate in the average week?
Tim: Well during break before [tournaments], we did a round a day, about two hours. But in a normal season, we’re not that diligent about practicing.
Brenna: I probably do around two practice rounds a week, and spend time outside of that writing files or doing prep drills. Sometimes during class if a lecture was really boring, I just take out my computer and start writing files.
How is the tournament experience? Is it any different from high school tournaments?
Tim: They’re almost all travel tournaments. A couple, like University of the Pacific, were local. But we’ve flown to McKendree, UT Tyler… I’ve gone to three tournaments my freshman spring, one more recently, and two more this semester.
Rohan: The least committed members of the team will go once a quarter. The most committed members of the team, which I would say I'm probably one of, will aim to go two or three times a month. In terms of how the competing experience is different, I'm doing a lot more traveling. I'm taking at least a two hour flight most weekends and getting up usually at about four or five a.m. on a Friday morning, competing through Friday, competing through Saturday, and then [getting on] a morning flight back.
How does the circuit differ from the high school level?
Brenna: I know that pre COVID the circuit was quite tight knit as people were close friends with people from other teams, but you also had huge rivalries. I would say that now, friendships are more rare. Teams are more hesitant to socialize with other teams, but the experience is generally positive. We don't have a lot of drama on the circuit, more like friendly acquaintances.
Rohan: I would say a large proportion of people do high school debate because they want to get into college. In college, there really is no similar motivation. There's some networking benefits, but if you're getting up at 4 a.m. on a Friday morning to go to a tournament, odds are you care about debate more than checking a box, so everyone cares a lot more about debate at the college level.
How has debating in college shaped your social life?
Tim: The NPDA circuit is fairly small, so you see the same people very consistently, and you hit the same people at tournaments. If you're on the circuit for a while, you get a lot of opportunities to meet people from other schools. Everyone is so nice on the NPDA circuit nowadays.
Brenna: When I was in community college, I would say that my main friend group was my debate team. We had a really dedicated team room on the [Diablo Valley College] campus, so it was normal for most people on the team to always be there in between every class. Now that I'm at Berkeley, thankfully my social circle isn't just the debate team, but I'm still super close to my team. Because I mean we're traveling together quite often and we're cooped up in little hotel rooms or Airbnb's together.
Rohan: Some people come with predefined cases that they want to talk about, so some people know a lot about African IR, some people know a lot about random TV shows, etc. It really does create a diverse community of people that know a lot of random things and engage with their interests in good faith. We get very close when we're competing because we're having new experiences [when we’re] traveling.
Would you recommend doing college debate for a current high school debater?
Tim: Yeah. Debate for me has a massive skill ceiling, and the amount of knowledge you can gain is incredible. I would probably not do NPDA if you don’t care about winning. I feel like to participate in this competitive event, you need to know things to avoid losing instantly to something like one-off spectral politics. If you want to win, there’s a lot of ways you can improve—get faster, memorize positions to set yourself apart from other people on the circuit.
Brenna: Yes, absolutely. I think that people who have a background in high school debate often find a lot of success in college debate as well.
Rohan: I think it depends. There's a moment in your life where you feel like you're done with debate, and the returns start to diminish. The type of person who would like APDA is someone who has a very specific interest and wants to continue learning in a way that debate provides. The question is really: Does debate provide you with more value than whatever else you could be doing? The average person could learn a lot from APDA, but it’s up to the individual to decide if it’s worth their time.
Kevin Chen is a current parliamentary debater, junior at the Nueva School, and National Parliamentary Debate League Correspondent.
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