At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed
At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.
THE NEXT GENERATION IS ON DANGER….
High school debate threatened by ‘viewpoint censorship’: James Fishback
PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: James Fishback, is founder and executive director of Incubate Debate, the largest and only no-cost debate league in Florida. Incubate serves thousands of middle and high school students across the state, believing that open debate and free speech are essential.
My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions, and think outside the box. It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter. And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) nationals, sixth at the Harvard national, and was runner-up at the Emory national.
After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami. There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.
First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze—perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis—she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA. That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not “spread”—speak a mile a minute—debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes “impacts”—the reasons why an argument matters—debaters adjust accordingly.
But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
How does that sophomore feel as she walks into her debate round? How will knowing that information about the judge change the way she makes her case?
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BIO: James Fishback, founded Incubate Debate in 2019 after serving as a volunteer debate coach in Miami-Dade county for two-years and competing in high school debate for four-years in Broward County.
Both were incredible and eye-opening experiences, but ones in which he recognized tremendous issues that prevented many students from participating in and reaping the benefits of debate.
In 2019, he started Incubate Debate, with the goal of making debate accessible to students of all socioeconomic backgrounds and political beliefs. Over the past four years, Incubate has welcomed thousands of students from all over Florida to its tournaments, workshops, and camps, all at no cost.
Incubate is built on the principle of making debate easy to learn, hard to master. Through our proprietary debate formats (TownHall, Roundtable, Tribunal), Incubate is easy to learn: students get a basic understanding of the rules and processes fast, but it is hard to master because it demands a high level of skill, knowledge, and practice to be successful.
Mastering Incubate’s challenging, yet accessible style of debate requires dedication and a willingness to continually strive for improvement.
James was born and raised in Davie, FL.
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James Fishback, is founder and executive director ofIncubate Debate, the largest and only no-cost debate league in Florida. Incubate serves thousands of middle and high school students across the state, believing that open debate and free speech are essential.