At high school National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) tournaments, students who seek to win are forced to rethink their arguments based on the personal ideologies of their judges.
According to an article recently published by The Free Press, national debate competitions have grown increasingly more unstable in recent years as political ideologies have taken hold of the judging circuits. Students can sometimes gain an advantage by tailoring elements of their arguments to the specific judge or judges that will be scoring their debates. And if a given judge has an ideology that is against a given student’s argument, that student is then stuck in the tricky situation of appealing to the judge without changing his or her argument.
A “paradigm” is a judge’s personal statement that explains what they will be looking for during a debate, and they are typically published on Tabroom, a database maintained by NSDA. Traditionally, paradigms have addressed how judges will perceive the technical elements of
students’ arguments, such as the speed at which they speak, how they follow a “flow,” etc.
Recently, however, political ideologies have infiltrated the ways judges will score a student’s debate – a fact that some judges are now openly admitting in their own public paradigms.
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“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Lenninist-Maoist,” the paradigm of judge Lila Lavender begins. “I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging…I will no longer evaluate and thus ever vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”
Further down in the lengthy paradigm, Lavender throws even more restrictions on students' arguments, such as “Non-Black debaters should not read afro-pess” and debaters need to “truly grasp what Marxism is” if they’re going to make arguments about it. The statement also goes on to say that Lavender is “a transgender woman who has a deeper voice” and urges debaters to account for this as it is “exhausting” for Lavender to deal with “judges and debaters who are unable to resolve this contradiction.”
Lavender's not alone. Judge Kriti Sharma notes that “referring to undocumented immigrants as ‘illegals,’” will automatically cause a debater to lose. Shubham Gupta notes the same thing in his paradigm, in which he describes himself as "queer" and “an immigrant and hardcore liberal” before saying he will “immediately stop the round” to give the person a loss and a "stern
lecture” on the proper terminology for illegals.
According to the NSDA’s rules, none of these restrictions should be allowed, as the organization expects its judges to “decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.” After the article by Free Press was published, NSDA released a statement on Twitter, saying that its training materials for judges “provide best practices for adjudicating speech and debate,” and that the judge paradigms housed on Tabroom represent the opinions and viewpoints of the individual paradigm authors.”
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