Student debating, once a bastion of logic, has been invaded from the left

During my 48 years teaching at Towson University, all my classes involved informal or formal debating: the quintessential activity of academic classes outside and sometimes including the sciences and arts. Sadly, like everything else in academia, debating has succumbed to leftist ideology.

I love debate for its focus on credibility and evidence. It should be teaching the up-and-coming generation of thinkers. However, as James Fishback has noted, judges’ political preferences have come to dominate high school debate.

Under its major sponsor, the National Speech & Debate Association’s website, judges post “paradigms.” The purpose of paradigm alerts is to let debaters know in full disclosure judges’ stylistic biases, say, if they are put off by overly rapid speaking or if they approve of debaters’ apprising their audiences of the relative importance of specific arguments.

But in the last few years, Fishback explains, “Judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common…[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.” In general, Fishback argues, high school debate has been degraded “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say….” One of several examples Fishback provides is a debate judge under whose list of “Things That Will Cause You to Automatically Lose” is ‘Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

Image: A high school debate as envisioned by Pixlr AI.

I can attest that the same is true in collegiate debate, the last place in education I would have expected political bias to interfere with education.

Several colleagues, including one who has both designed debate camps and programs and served as a tournament judge and another who is a major administrator in the National Communication Administration, tell me that, among debate coaches and judges, coaches and judges throw around their biases as a sign of virtue. This is a disheartening and dispiriting sign that we’re seeing the end of the unbiased marketplace of ideas and academic freedom. Worse, this is happening in an activity that, by definition, should be resistant to politically approved outcomes.

Pro-active efforts must be made to ferret out coaches who are destroying the one pristine disinterested collegiate activity and ensure ideological blindness in one of the remaining nearly pure collegiate activities, an activity that also promotes Judge Learned Hand’s admonition that “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.”

Professor Vatz (https://wp.towson.edu/vatz) is Professor Emeritus at Towson University wherein he taught for over 48 years. He is the author of The Only Authentic of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model (Authors Press, 2022) and many other works, winner of many teaching awards, elected to Marquis Who’s Who, and was the longest-serving member of Towson’s Academic Senate, a body dedicated to debate but for the last few years during which it was shut down.