Fifty years of the National Debate Tournament.

• Author: Hynes, Thomas J.

My own debate career spans but the last twenty-five years of the tournament - and is without the benefit of a personal narrative that might be provided by a few of my colleagues - say Professor Willard. My experience with the early "West Point Years" is limited to reading final round transcripts, and to listening to legends who share tales of long-ago debates late into the evenings at coaches' "seminars." It is to changes as well as continuities over the last 50 years of NDT debate practices that I address this essay. The evolutions and revolutions in debating are the products of debate's own adaptations to changing educational, political, and intellectual climates.

Initially NDT debate focused on problems of the world that were represented in the New York Times, and on occasion, The Washington Post or Time. In the first decades of the tournament, debate centered on the relative importance among public issues, the alleged causes of civic problems, and solutions that might be advanced to redress them. "Radical" innovators limited themselves to altering the structure of case formats by introducing such novel concepts as the "comparative advantages" case. Some even argued that all an affirmative had to do was to prove that gains were "on balance" superior to losses in order to affirm the resolution.

One of the features of the "common sense" period was a relative consensus over shared values within the debate community. For example, debaters would frequently disagree over the extent to which poverty was harmful in the United States, but it was rare to see dispute over whether poverty per se was a social evil. There were few macro-economic or socio-religious reasons offered to confound a sense of common social goals. It was not until the early 1970's that key questions about social and cultural values entered into the NDT. Such questioning came in an unusual way: through a contest over the criteria for judging debates.

Until the mid 1970's, NDT debates proceeded largely unaware that any decision model was at use - occasional journal arguments about the conservative quality of stock issues reasoning not withstanding. Spurred by competition, debaters began to expand the activity by defining criteria for assessing argument. The criteria became shaped into various roles for the debate judge. Advocates asked the judge to be: a forensic educator who exercised the right to determine who had done a better job of debating; an administrative decision...