Making debate more inclusive for the student-veteran debater.

• Author: Sciullo, Nick J.
• Position: Essay

Introduction

Debate is a powerful co-curricular activity that affords participants the opportunity to explore questions of identity as students debate propositions related to public policy. As many debate participants know, this opportunity can be challenging for members of traditionally marginalized communities, who struggle not only for recognition and understanding in everyday life, but also during debate rounds, in squad rooms, and in other social spaces. While debate educators have begun working on issues of identity and inclusion relating to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, the challenges facing another group, military veterans, have not been addressed. That began to change during the 2013-2014 tournament season, when the Georgia State University team of Luke Floyd and John Finch debated veterans' issues in academy, in broader society, and in debate itself. Their advocacy in the National Debate Tournament/Cross Examination Debate Association (NDT/CEDA) debate circuit paved the way for including veterans' in competitive debate.

In this essay, I discuss some of the practical aspects of making student veterans feel welcomed and included in intercollegiate policy debate. I also highlight some of the ways the GSU team of Floyd and Finch, and I as their coach, worked through some of the issues facing student debaters who have served in the military. My concern is that the debate activity has been--and continues to be--insufficiently reflective about how the issues of war and peace so common in debate affect people who have been deployed or who have relatives who have been deployed to war zones. It has become all too easy in contemporary policy debate to describe hyperbolic scenarios of nuclear war and human extinction without ever thinking about those who actually have been involved in war. Soldiers and veterans are uniquely affected by many of the issues prominent in debate, particularly those resolutions that focus on military interventions, democracy promotion, national security policy, and other war-related issues (Brown 2006; Carlton 2012). In this article, I weave together theory and practice to consider how we might help student veterans participate more fully in the debate activity. Student veterans are marginalized in competitive debate. I contend that we must do more to welcome veterans into the activity. This would benefit veterans by giving them an important outlet for advocacy, and it would improve the quality of policy debates by bringing lived experiences to debates over international relations, military policy, and war. Debate is often heralded as inclusive and welcoming of minority voices. Yet, without including student veterans' voices, the activity cannot live up to those claims.

Marginalization and student debaters

Non-traditional forms of debate, focusing on the lived experiences of those participating in the activity, have become part of a larger movement to make debate more inclusive and welcoming for traditionally marginalized groups. Important efforts by teams too numerous to mention have centered on issues of race in the debate activity, and these efforts have helped create space for students' lived experiences in the debate round. The efforts of these "race teams"--a term sometimes used derisively but at other times with respect--have proven valuable precursors to more recent efforts to bring issues of veteran identity into debate. Debaters who have argued about race in both ontological and epistemological terms have helped expand conversations in the debate community in meaningful ways. They also provide some grounding for addressing the challenge of including more student veterans in debate.

Luke Floyd, then a corporal and now a sergeant in the United States Army, served one tour in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) before enrolling at Georgia State University. Before his deployment, he had spent two years at College of Idaho, where he had participated in parliamentary style debate. There he debated under the auspices of the National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA), which follows a traditional model focusing on stock issues, plans, and advantages and disadvantages. John Finch did not serve in the military, but his father was in the U.S. Air Force. This experience significantly shaped his relationship with his father. Prior to coming to Georgia State University, Finch participated in traditional policy debate in Georgia, debating mostly case, counterplans, and disadvantages. These histories provided the basis for arguments grounded in the lived experiences of these two debaters, and for a significant discussion of veterans' issues that came to a head in the NDT/CEDA national qualifiers of 2014.

Of course, traditional cross examination debate rounds usually revolve around a not-so-carefully selected menagerie of commonly cited authors, both policy experts and theorists. Names like Slavoj Zizek, Martin Heidegger, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida have become common in contemporary policy debate. Walter Russell Mead, Robert Kagan, and Thomas Bearden are also popular authors. Debate round after debate round hinges on these common authors, who are stitched together with other sources to make arguments about racism, sexism, Marxism, economic collapse, or nuclear war. Leaving aside the problem of stitching together authors who otherwise might not agree with each other at all, debate rounds have tended to deemphasize the debater and overemphasize the evidence. This has left many debaters disenchanted with the activity-and rightfully so.

Debate has always been about a combination of logos, pathos, and ethos. It is not simply about whether an argument is true or formally valid, but about what the debaters need to argue in order to convince the judges. Furthermore, although policy debate typically regards evidence as something taken from a newspaper, academic journal, book, or blog, this does not mean that narratives, personal experiences, and beliefs (narratological, phenomenological, and doxastic reasoning) should be excluded as forms of evidence. Nor does thinking more critically about elecutio and actio mean that inventio and dispositio can be ignored or excluded from how a judge evaluates a debate round. Balancing the modes of proof requires honoring all of these forms of reasoning and advocacy.

On its face there is nothing wrong with the traditional form of policy debate. The piecing together of multiple authors to make complex arguments about public policy and philosophy is an intellectually challenging task that benefits many debaters. It is also useful to learn about the neoconservative politics of Robert Kagan, or the Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxist politics of Slavoj Zizek. Some debaters master whole bodies of complex scholarly literature on geopolitics and other subjects. Traditional forms of debate, whether they focus on public policy or veer toward kritikal (critical) debate, involve grappling with the writings of some of the smartest people in the world. But as rewarding as this pursuit may be, it remains in many ways divorced from debaters' lived experiences. For those debaters who have had little opportunity to share their own stories in other forums, the debate space represents an opportunity to speak the self...