Dear Community, I would like to file a brief report with the membership at the conclusion of my first term as the Chair of Topic Selection Committee.
At the conclusion of last year's summer meetings I was elected by the committee to oversee the development of this year's topic wordings. As someone who had witnessed the last fifteen years of college debate topics I tried to draw upon my best and worst experiences with past topics to improve our process and product. Please indulge several of my observations from the past year's cycle. Reviewing the Process from July 06-May 07 It was, and remains my firm conviction, that one of our greatest challenges in recent years was to move beyond the broad problem area that attracted us to a topic and toward the specific type of policy we wanted to contest. I drafted language and policies that would narrow our problem area stage to one that asked authors to refine the central controversy that gave rise to that policy literature. On such topics as Europe, I emphasized with both the Herculean task faced by the committee (to draft a coherent set of resolutions) and the confusion by the community (regarding the central rationale for our interest in the subject matter). I have felt that if we pushed authors and then the community to vote for a narrower controversy would both limit the task of the committee in our meetings and clarify what the membership should expect to see on the second (wording ) ballot. I was encouraged when we received several good controversy papers this year. I felt as though the tremendous reservoir of community input could be productively channeled to clarify expectations without unduly constraining authors. I would be remiss if I didn't offer thanks to Steve Mancuso for many years of service to the topic committee in general and for specifically raising the standard for topic writing. The move to controversy papers could not have been possible without his effort to encourage the community to write both problem area and wording papers. Steve and Michael Maffie provided another fine service when they submitted their paper on March 1 of this year. This 100+ page document provided a through rationale for the controversy of increasing constructive engagement Middle East. Interestingly, the paper included only one wording recommendation, which I have pasted below. Resolved: the United States Federal Government should substantially increase its constructive engagement, including economic assistance and/or security guarantees, with the government of one or more of: Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Syria. I worked to provide a representative sample of this paper and all of the controversy papers for the problem area ballot. Members likely noticed how we, for the first time, added a direction and nuance to this vote. Schools knew that they were voting for an increase in constructive engagement, democracy promotion, nonproliferation norm compliance, and regulation and control of genetic engineering. This ballot included every controversy paper submitted by an author who recommended their inclusion. We did not exclude a single paper from an author who asked for its inclusion. Schools also knew that these were firm precedents that could not be reversed at the wording meetings. I revisit this process to remind the community that the basic topic stem has been available now for several months. Once the Middle East controversy was selected the community now had the opportunity to examine this singular resolution recommendation and to provide their own suggestions. This year we also built the topic blog as part of the new CEDA topic site to allow a year-round, easily organized, means of community feedback to the topic community. I am fully aware that not ever member of the community has the time or ability to write entire controversy or wording papers. In addition to the traditional means of public meetings and communication with members of the topic committee, this new form provided a very accessible means of providing input. Despite my general dislike of elists, I posted regular reminders of this process on both edebate and ceda-l. One of the most important deadlines was the period roughly a week before the topic meetings. This was the deadline for submission of a wording paper by any member of the community. This was, for me, an important way to ensure that the community could review the controversy paper and determine that perhaps some of the specific dimensions of the controversy could be better explored. Hays Watson and Julian Gagnon both took up the challenge of providing research and recommendations to the committee. Hays argued for the subtraction of economic assistance in some wording options and Julian argued in favor of adding Saudi Arabia to the topic. In both cases we added their work to the topic blog. Both items were added to our agenda and both produced changes to our wording. As with the controversy papers, each one of the substantive contributions produced changes in the process. At the topic meetings we continued the recent trend of web-casting the proceedings, albeit with some technical difficulties. We did regularly update the blog and provided real-time updates on the topic wordings. I view both the controversy and wording stages as successes. The community gained new forums for input and in each case this input was directly responsible for improvements in the final options. At the same time the membership enjoyed perhaps its greatest transparency and predictability with the process. Reviewing the Slate of Topics for 07-08 I am very pleased by the possibilities for the 07-08 debate season under any of the four options. They each reflect sometimes subtle, but in all cases meaningful, choices for the membership. After five days of meetings (between the business meetings and the topic meetings) and a cross-country flight I have neither the energy nor time to engage each of the individual emails, but let me discuss a few prominent features from the slate. We recognize that the challenge of writing a topic that will govern several thousand debates is more strenuous than writing a simple act of prose. We worked hard to consult several independent professionals with extensive in the discipline of grammar and devoted most of our third day's session to grammatical issues. We vetted issues of capitalization, punctuation, the use of hybrid singular and plural terms and many other items. What we found is that every one of our phrases is consistent, if not preferred by grammatical rules. There may be other ways that would be preferred by a strict grammatical design, but those perspectives would hamper our competing goal of designing a statement to guide intercollegiate debates. It was repeatedly considered, for example, that the listing of nations after the colon would be cleaner from a grammatical sense if the sentence ended with that list. The reason that each topic interrupts the sentence with the list and then returns to the types of engagement is specifically designed to encourage argument practice directed only at those countries. We also considered and received support for the use of the singular 'a' and the (s). We felt the flexibility to be both potentially singular and plural was necessary to allow debaters to pick the number of guarantees they wanted to discuss. These are moments where our sentence use is the optimal mix of grammar and argumentative practice. For those who have found a 'better' grammatical interpretation I would only ask that they also consider the unique agenda setting role of this sentence. We also recognize that topic should be as simple as possible to express the type of ideas that would like to see debated. Brevity is preferred over length of sentence, all things being equal. There was early discussion of reducing the sentence to only the specific acts of constructive engagement (i.e., economic assistance or security guarantees). Those topics would more closely resemble past foreign assistance topics (i.e., the USFG should substantially increase economic assistance to one or more of the following: ....). Hays provided the agenda item in favor of a security alone topic. I asked the assistance group to consider an assistance only topic and they did not recommend such an approach. I was one of the many voices opposing the change to simplify by removing constructive engagement because it fails to grasp the essence of this controversy. This controversy is not about the bilateral and unconditional provision of American economic or security cooperation. Constructive Engagement is a profoundly diplomatic term designed to produce certain outcomes by leveraging the tools of statecraft. This foreign approach, despite favor in several recent administrations (Regan with South Africa, Clinton with China and Carter with Syria) is antithetical to much of the current administration's foreign policy. I have seen concern about embracing the diplomatic dimensions of this topic. The prospect of nations refusing our assistance or offers may be unsettling to some, even though many of our recent aid or trade topics have struggled with this dilemma. I am very, very excited that our students will be encouraged to consider the tools of American foreign policy not as universal and all-powerful. There is ample discussion of the term 'offer' in foreign policy literature and, in fact, is often the most used phrase. I would contend that many of the proposed affirmatives would be very significant the moment they are offered. This is a tremendous moment for our students, and our country, to consider if diplomacy might produce a more peaceful and less violent world. I view that the educational benefit is sufficient to move away from our comfort zone of simply providing some product or funds to another nation. The other primary 'complication' that our wording efforts produced was the decision to fragment the term security guarantees. I know that the phrase 'a trilateral security guarantee(s) with Israel and/or a bilateral security guarantee(s)' has a certain inelegance at first glance, but forgive my indulgence to explain why this is a very important phrase. Beginning with the Manuso/Maffie paper there was some unease about how much to separate affirmative and negative ground through the US relationship with Israel. The controversy paper acknowledges the solvency benefits from allowing the affirmative to directly act with Israel and Hays' paper made such a recommendation. At the same time, the original paper recommended against including Israel as on the nations explicitly included in the topic because it might provided a tremendous advantage to the affirmative (at the expense of central negative ground) and also make the topic potentially bi-directional (because the US could negotiate a security guarantee with Israel to protect Israel against Iran or strike an opposite deal directly with Iran). Part of the value of a central controversy is to allow certain conceptual questions to organize debate for the year. A topic where most affirmatives would attempt to enhance American negotiations with a number of states potentially hostile to Israel does carve out a way for negatives to always view the debate through the lens of American-Israeli relations or politics. This concern was ultimately balanced against the need to include some of the most sophisticated and articulate solvency literature. There are many discussions of negotiations involving Israel, the US and another Middle Eastern state. I know I appreciated the input from Heather Walters on this question when she forced us to confront the reality that in much of the Israel-Syria literature regarding the return of the Golan Heights it was ultimately Israel who would need security grantees. If the nation that ceded territory was not also provided additional assurances for its safety it seems like a potentially fatal flaw in this central element of the topic. To bridge this divide we borrowed the trilateral language from the diplomatic history of American relations with Israel and the Palestinian people to provide this compromise. The affirmative could act directly with a nation beside Israel, but if it wanted to directly negotiate with Israel it would be required to include another state. This compromise does sacrifice the brevity of the phrase, but it does so to not fundamentally alter the literature base on either side. It allows debaters to mirror the incredibly significant trilateral Camp David and Oslo accords which changed the political landscape in the Middle East so much that it consumed two the architects in political violence form their own people. No one is operating under any illusions that these types of affirmatives are easy to defend, but they seem too important to ignore. I also wanted to speak to the sensitive question of the public relations and recruiting role of our topic. It should be a source of pride for our members to recruit new students and appeal for greater administrative support by reference to the significance of our topics. This was one of the primary reasons I wanted to move to controversies. Every single CEDA school has been able, and will be able, to point alumni, administrators and potential students to the www.cedatopic.com website which has, for the last few months, prominently featured the controversy phase and paper. I realize the resolutions now modify this approach, but for administrators, I would hope that we explain that we have both a short title and a more nuanced approach. I enjoy the analogy of the basic course title listed in a university catalog and the more detailed element found in a course syllabus. The university could not function without a short-form and a longer-version and I am not sure if we can either. If anyone has interaction with their administrators who are not satisfied by an explanation of the controversy area and resolution as a collective effort I would be more than happy to provide a version of this letter to any such officials. We also have the question of new student recruitment. After many years in this community I fully appreciate the role that new student development plays in our community and also appreciate that I would not pretend to be an expert on such matters. I am sure there a number of factors that go into retention and recruitment including topic complexity, argument practice diversity, economics, and the foundation of the subject matter. I can only provide two ways that I recognize that we are providing an open door via the topic. First, the representation of the committee must be broad enough to reflect a variety of viewpoints. I am very satisfied that our committee has many different types of programs and regions represented by the faculty and student representatives. Second, as Sue Peterson has explained more effectively, member institutions may earn CEDA points and fully work within our organizational structure by hosting events with modified topics. She mentions the California rookie debates comprised mostly of students from argument classes with no prior forensics experience. These tournaments have used only certain portions of the topic at a time to allow students to ease into a new topic. I firmly believe this is consistent with our education mission to tailor educational programs to the needs of our students. I will also extend an offer here to help any program or tournament help craft such a specific approach. Conclusion With the support of the topic committee, I have agreed to serve another term as the chair. I announced the end of our role in this process because after months of community and committee work it is now time for member schools to make their decisions. As we begin looking toward the slate of controversies for 08-09 I once again invite anyone to provide input about ideas for those topics or means of furthering community input. I am deeply committed to a process that helps manage the tremendous diversity that our community reflects when it approaches a topic. My final thought is that in many comments, and in recent reform proposals, I have seen discussion of moving away from a committee model and toward greater centralization of authority in the power of authors. This approach believes a single author (or authors) is best in a position to get the topic 'right.' I will admit this approach seems to have intuitive appeal. Can't someone just get it right and let the rest of 'us' enjoy the rewards? When I discuss this process with folks it is amazing how often we place ourselves in the role of 'someone' who will have all of the answers. The process seems to break down when you consider that our community has very different views when we aren't the ones approaching a topic. It is very comforting to be in the 'someone' role and very disturbing to be in the larger 'us' when you don't agree with the ideological or pragmatic expressions. In many ways our current binding controversy process provides a great deal of author input and still provides a democratically elected committee of eight faculty and one student the ultimate responsibility This year's authors were very cooperative and they might even suggest that despite their extensive paper the committee process, however unsightly to some at home, improved their product. Anyone who has ever served on a committee realizes they aren't often fun to watch. What they do uniquely providing is a means of keeping something as important to this community as our topic in the hands of accountable officers. I close in that fashion because ultimately all of our efforts come from elections. If have read the above commentary and still feel disempowered I encourage you to chat with me about reforms. I hope between the blog, the two stage process and the open meetings we can be responsive to anything offered before and up to the meetings. If that doesn't resolve your concerns you should consider running for topic committee. I know first-hand how much of time commitment this process is away from other professional and familial responsibilities so I don't harbor any illusions that the only means of participation is holding office. In the end we need your input and we owe many thanks to the members of the community for their service. Thanks for reading. Gordon Stables, Chair - CEDA Topic Selection Committee Gordon Stables, Ph.D. Director of Debate Annenberg School for Communication University of Southern California Office: 213 740 2759 Fax: 213 740 3913 http://usctrojandebate.com
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