Tuesday March 21, 2006

Not So Great Debate

When I read the story in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the debate team at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University being the best in the country, I was skeptical. I figured either the landscape of college debate had changed radically since I inhabited it almost two decades ago, or the story was bunk. It turns out it’s bunk.

While it’s true that Liberty will have the most points in the overall rankings compiled by both the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and the National Debate Tournament (NDT)—policy debate’s two overlapping authorities—those points don’t mean much. When I debated for Miami University in the late ’80s, CEDA and NDT were separate, and NDT didn’t have such rankings. (At least as far as I remember. If they existed, we ignored them.) It had a tournament, and winning it was all that mattered. Northwestern, a power in my day, also won it last year.

Liberty, however, only qualified one two-person team (top programs routinely qualify two or three), and they went 3 and 5 and didn’t make it to the “out rounds,” the bracket of 28 from which the ultimate winner is determined. As Ed Brayton, who must be a former debater, details here and here, Liberty hasn’t made it to the elimination rounds of the National Debate Tournament since 1997. (For comparison, Northwestern has won the tournament five times since then.) In fact, Liberty’s best varsity duo only ranks 81st in the country by winning percentage. (Note: Actually, now that I look at it, those appear to be old numbers. According to the most recent data, which you can dice any way you want to here, Liberty’s top team is more like 65th. My apologies.) Almost two months ago, this post led to a long discussion on Brayton’s blog—including a response from one of Liberty’s coaches, who defends the points system as a measure of educational worth—that the Times Magazine might have benefited from.

So where does that number one ranking that has so impressed the Times, Newsweek, and CBS News come from? The rankings cited by all three count results from all tournaments, even second-tier affairs, and at all levels—including novice and JV, which are (as they always have been) irrelevant when you want to talk about top debate schools. Many debate powerhouses don’t even have novice or JV teams. Essentially Liberty is doing what debaters call “spreading,” where you try to put out so many arguments your competitor can’t respond to them all. They’re flooding weak tournaments with junior squads and raking in the points. And even with a featherweight schedule, Liberty’s varsity debaters only made it as far as the semifinals twice in fourteen tournaments this season. That’s right. The team to which CBS News attributes “a national title” hasn’t won a single varsity tournament. Hasn’t even placed.

Is it it fair, then, to say that Liberty “consistently produces one of the nation’s great collegiate debate programs,” as the Times Magazine asserts? Hardly. That’s like calling the best Division III basketball team the NCAA champion, unless of course you’re Liberty’s PR department—or a reporter in search of an angle.