Concerns about the Surveillance Topic
We’ll bite.
Top level, the VBI post is deeply frustrating for us to read.
Most significantly, we strongly oppose this post’s notion that “camps”, which we read as “PFBC,” were attempting to “coerce,” “collude,” or “force” a grouping around Option 1. In fact, the day topics dropped, we reached out to several camp directors individually to ask for their thoughts. This included leadership at VBI. On Monday, June 24, we reached out to members of VBI’s staff to gauge their topic thoughts and initiate a discussion. We disclosed that we were strongly in favor of Option 1, and wanted to give our thoughts on the subject. One individual that we reached out to and Bryce had a couple of back and forth text messages that did not amount to them agreeing nor disagreeing with us on the topic to select. The next day, on June 25, we emailed that same individual and another VBI staffer listed as an author of VBI’s post with our more complete thoughts on the subject, which became PFBC’s Reddit post, as an attempt to gather community feedback. Later that afternoon, after still not hearing anything on the subject of camp topic discussion from VBI and after hearing other camps were planning to use Option 1, we decided to announce Option 1 as our camp topic. Some may think this was too hasty, which may be a valid critique. However, our camp model requires our staff to rapidly produce an evidence packet and topic lectures, and we wanted to get started on that work as quickly as possible. At that point, we were (and still are) fully convinced that Option 1 was the superior topic. And, at no point, including up to now, did VBI attempt to engage with our Reddit post, my post on the NDCA Facebook page, or any other public communication that PFBC engaged in to discuss the topic options.
Instead, VBI has made a post obviously referencing PFBC’s prior posts and, in my opinion, engaged in bad-faith argumentation done ex-post-facto to attempt to denigrate PFBC’s topic selection process and community engagement, while making no attempt to privately address these concerns with anyone at PFBC, which we take issue with.
In other words, we did attempt to engage in collaboration surrounding the topic selection with meaningful discussion. VBI is engaging in this discussion for the first time after many camps have not only already selected their topics, but have completed camp. That, to me, sounds more like a camp that has realized that it is in the minority of public opinion and wants their camp to “determine the topic” than PFBC’s process.
With that out of the way, we also want to engage the post substantively.
A2: “Camps Don’t Determine the Topic & They Shouldn’t Try”
We also don’t think camps alone should determine the topic. We think that when selecting a topic, camps should determine what the best of the two September/October topic options are, and select that topic because choosing the better topic will lead to better research and better debates. We welcomed and engaged with others that had different viewpoints and opinions. VBI’s post makes it sound like PFBC, without justification or discussion, picked Option 1 at will because “that’s what the national circuit wanted.”
This is ridiculous.
We selected Option 1 after several hours of topic research, a Zoom call amongst staff to discuss that research, and engaging as many people as we could as widely as we could, and while we were the first to publicly announce, we only did so after we were confident that the majority of other educators that we had discussed agreed with us and were leaning the same way.
That said, the viewpoint that camps should have little to no bearing on the September/October topic selection process is naive at best. Camps are run by adults that are leaders of the community wherever they teach during the year. These adults are generally the most involved with research, the topic selection process, and in engaging student research efforts over the 4 month period the topic is debated. Of course camps will have a say over what topic is selected. That’s why the topic that most camps select almost always wins the vote. The guiding principle should be: which topic is better?
Moreover, as others have already mentioned elsewhere, this post authored by one of the largest and most well-established camps in the country simultaneously argues that camps should not have significant sway over the topic, and gives arguments for which topic is preferable. Camps should engage in topic selection for September/October, and November/December, and January, and February, and the whole season, because we think the people that take time out of their summer to work at camps are the ones that make the activity function better.
This, however, is all secondary to the question that should guide September/October topic selection. Which topic is better? That is all PFBC cared about when making the selection, and it is all that we will continue to care about when we select topics going forward. We will continue to select topics within a couple of days of their announcement so that we can compile a staff evidence packet and recorded topic lecture before camp to students, and so that students can begin research as soon as possible to jumpstart their season.
A2: “Surveillance/Option 1 is bad.”
TL:DR; it’s not.
PFBC did 11 practice debates, 7 tournament prelim rounds, and 4 tournament elim rounds on Option 1 from July 8 through 16th. This was a total of 476 debates. Of these debates, 238 were won by the affirmative and 238 were won by the negative, for a perfect 50/50 split.
If VBI’s arguments about debaters being forced to engage with the topic in a racist way were true, one would think that at a camp that leans politically to the left with debaters that lean politically to the left in an activity that leans politically to the left that the topic would have been skewed terribly negative. This did not happen in nearly 500 rounds of practice borne out on the topic. To borrow from debate terminology, the impact of their claims that Option 1 will result in “too many rounds containing racist and xenophobic arguments” is that the negative will easily win debates. This did not happen at PFBC.
The next set of arguments that are made is that newer debaters or judges will make racist arguments. This has not happened on any topic that would lend itself to such arguments in the past: Medicare for All, NSA intelligence gathering, legalizing all drugs, etc., were all topics that had a wealth of atrocious literature that debaters could pull from to make bad, racist arguments, and they did not pull from that literature despite it often being on the front page of Google.
Frankly, this argument demonstrates a lack of topic research. Border security is inevitable. The United States is not moving to de-securitize the border in the status quo. There is a substantial debate right now over how the United States should respond to an unacceptable situation at the border, especially as regards migrants, given the horrific calls to “build a wall” or Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star being legitimate policy proposals now. There are excellent affirmative arguments which contend that increasing surveillance infrastructure will necessarily trade off with physical infrastructure at the border which is worse for migrant health and wellbeing outcomes. There are arguments that surveillance infrastructure would increase federal oversight of the border and require ICE and CBP to minimize suffering inflicted on migrants or to decrease the power of state border patrol agencies and agents, especially the Texas National Guard. Our original contention that Option 1 allows students to engage in the topic in a nuanced way was borne out during our debates at camp, and is an additional justification for camps attempting to engage constructively in the topic selection process.
Not only did we not have a problem in any debate with the affirmative reading racist or xenophobic arguments, we found these arguments to be increasingly creative and grounded in good research. There is nothing racist about engaging in debates regarding cartels, human trafficking, drug smuggling, politics, satellites, international relations, among many other affirmative arguments we heard at camp. It is not only possible to debate the affirmative without being racist, but much easier and more strategic to do so. Through our research, we found that much of the affirmative literature did not frame the issue in xenophobic terms, and instead engaged in good faith argumentation about an important political issue. Never once did an affirmative stand up and read 4 minutes about how immigrants are bad for our country and should be deterred from entrance.
VBI’s view of topic selection links hard to the “cede the political” DA - meaning that, if high school debate chooses not to have debates about immigration out of concern for some of those debates engaging in racist rhetoric or elevating problematic literature, the debaters produced by high school debate will be ill-equipped to have conversations that require engaging in racist rhetoric or shutting down that problematic literature.
So, no, we do not think that what happens at PFBC will “inoculate debates nationwide from themes that are the main thrust of topic literature” in its entirety. The debates that we had, including with debaters that were learning how to debate at the first time, grew research, critical thinking, and argumentation skills that will shut down those debates that will inevitably happen - if not in high school debate, then in dining rooms, school cafeterias, on social media, during discussions about the 2024 election, and in myriad other places across the country and online. We think that PFBC prepared students for those debates. We have the data to back that up.
Next, let’s talk about elections. No question that elections ground is going to shift dramatically, and the viability of that argument is likely lower than when the topic was written or even selected a few weeks ago. But, the argument is not dead, nor do we think that having a discussion about immigration policy’s ramifications on the presidential race is anti-educational. We also do not think that elections is the only ground on the topic. The fact that predictions are, by nature, unpredictable, seems to be a reason that the topic will stay fresh through October, if anything. But, the debate without elections is rich enough to sustain the next 3 and a half months of debates.
Then, VBI makes the argument that some possible aff arguments, like my examples listed above, “stray far from the core of the existing literature.” This is not true. VBI is correct that the discourse on immigration in the United States is shifting to the right. That does not mean that the literature is as well – especially peer-reviewed, scholarly literature that most debaters must engage in to win high-level debates. My original argument about “creative defense on the topic” has been misinterpreted to suggest that affirmatives may only eat around the edges of the topic, and that just did not happen at camp. Again, if that had happened, we would have seen far more negative teams win debates than affirmative teams, which did not occur. Unlike VBI’s graph of “topicality vs. racism,” PFBC has data from nearly 500 practice debates which indicates that the affirmative is just as likely (if not more, in some cases) to win as on any other topic. So, unless VBI has intended to call the staff at PFBC racist (which, obviously, they did not), we don’t think their complaints about the topic have a substantial impact.
A2: “For Energy”
Unlike VBI’s post, we will not pretend that we have done as much research on the energy topic as the surveillance topic. We haven’t. But, we are more convinced that their concerns on the immigration topic are just not being borne out by research done and rounds that our students have engaged in. But, feel free to take our arguments with a grain of salt.
We’re very glad that there is an argument list that VBI is now publicizing. We would have encouraged VBI to engage in this discussion 3 weeks ago, when we initially attempted to have it. But, like we said in a comment on a previous post a few weeks ago: “Could negative teams win rounds with these arguments? Sure…Debaters can always get creative with less than ideal topics, but that doesn’t mean they are good topics.” We are also thrilled that VBI has posted an evidence packet for public consumption. This is a good step that we think more camps should do. PFBC will certainly continue to do so.
However, we also do not believe that any of the listed arguments on the negative of the energy topic deal directly with the uniqueness issue of state failings regarding energy policy in Mexico, including its production and distribution, nor do we think that the core arguments about “energy prices and carbon emissions” are particularly interesting with the present wording of the topic. We think that when evenly matched, negative teams would struggle to cite good evidence defending, for instance, the status quo of carbon emissions, or the status quo of energy access in Mexico. We will concede that this is based on a cursory reading of evidence, and mostly from VBI’s packet, and not 2 weeks of camp, but thus far, we still have yet to see a compelling link card that lays out a core topic disadvantage that was written in this decade, which has good uniqueness. We obviously hope that we are wrong, if the topic is in fact Option 2. That was my concern when this topic was discussed on the wording committee, and it remains so now. Looking at VBI’s uniqueness cards for instance: the World Bank card is from 2017, pre-AMLO. None of the rest of the cards get at an impact of energy poverty or greenhouse gas emissions. We still think the affirmative should be way ahead on uniqueness debates on the topic.
Additionally, many of these cards that are supposedly negative uniqueness are describing harms in the status quo, which is my primary concern with the topic. For example, Chambers 23 says “several foreign companies already have a footprint in the country,” and the Garcia and Martinez 6-27 card says that “public-private partnerships for lithium projects are allowed,” which seems to indicate that there is a problem with PPPs in the status quo, not with the affirmative, making many of these impacts non-unique. None of the renewables cards substantively acknowledge the fact that climate change is measurably getting worse or that Mexico comprises just 1.4% of global emissions. Same goes for the offshore drilling contention, which has a relatively tiny impact. The Hackbarth evidence from 2021 and the Hanieh evidence from 2023 in the indigenous communities section a) is written about issues with the status quo, and b) post-dates the negative World Bank evidence from 2017 describing improvements in access to indigenous communities, which leads back to my critique that much of the negative arguments just link to the status quo and not the affirmative advocacy. Similar issue with the Political Unrest contention’s top-level link evidence – it is from 2014 - and, none of the cards from June specifically cite energy policy as something that Sheinbaum needs to be careful about.
We could go on, but my core concern from the original post still exists: there is not good uniqueness evidence for the status quo of energy poverty, and none of this link evidence seems to link to more than the status quo. Would PF survive? No doubt. But we still think that the surveillance topic is better.
Briefly on novice retention: this argument is less of a concern to me. We think that most people will stay in debate regardless of what topic is chosen. But, we think that students who are more likely to tune out from debate if they don’t have something that interests them are more likely to tune out having a discussion about Mexican energy policy than domestic immigration. Again, just as we think that PF survived a topic about legalizing drugs, or a topic about Medicare for All, we also think PF would do just fine after an Option 2 being selected for September/October 2024. That does not mean it is not a worse topic.
One Last Issue I (Bryce) Have Personally With The Post
While this is outside of the scope of topic selection, I take strong personal issue with an additional part of this post here. VBI says that there are certain types of “tolerant and inquisitive students that we need in debate” who would be more interested in Mexican energy policy than a “securitizing, potentially xenophobic resolution.” As a former teenage hard-right-Republican-turned-Libertarian-turned-reliably-Democratic voter, I fully credit debate with transforming how I view the world, and making me more tolerant and inquisitive. If I had been debating Option 1 as a sophomore in high school, I may have been the type of student who initially was interested in making the vitriolic, racist, and deeply troubling arguments that VBI discusses in their post. Does that mean that I should not be forced to confront reality, engage in research, and defend my problematic viewpoints? Was 15-year-old me not “worth it” for debate to engage in? The topic is written for high school students to broaden their understanding of the world and engage in sensitive, timely, politicized issues that require thoughtful engagement and discussion. I fully believe that debate should train debaters for conversations in the real world.
The fact is that, without debate, I would likely currently be a Trump voter. In fact, the reparations topic of September/October of 2015 forced me as a high school senior to fully reckon with an American history that I had neither fully internalized from my high school’s curriculum nor been exposed to at all at home. More than one of my family members responded with crude, racist remarks when I told them about the topic that I was planning to debate, and I was, for the first time in my young life, prepared to respond to them that reparations was not, in fact, a “communist plot” to give more welfare to people that did not look like them and take away their political power, nor would reparations take the form of “watermelon and fried chicken.”
These are real things that my family said. No doubt that many homes like mine are even more vitriolic and racist in today’s political climate. But that begs a question: should we not have debated about reparations because of these kinds of viewpoints? Was this debate not worth having because some students at other high schools where I grew up in Wisconsin made arguments that “Black Americans will spend it all on gambling and drugs”? I think that the fact that I engaged in those arguments and won debates proving that those arguments were in fact racist and deeply problematic exemplifies the transformative power of debate. We should not limit ourselves to “noncontroversial topics” because we are scared of having those discussions that can, and have, transformed lives – mine included. Instead, these conversations ought to be embraced.
While I don’t think the intent of VBI’s post was to target me in any way, I cannot help but ask – are there some students that VBI is not interested in teaching because of their upbringing? And if so, are we not giving evidence of debate being a “liberal echo chamber” that is parroted by bad-faith far-right commentators trying to eliminate it? This portion of the post deeply troubles me.
Conclusion
PFBC will still be endorsing Option 1. We will post our staff evidence packet on the PFBC website soon, once we recover from the end of camp yesterday. We encourage everyone – not just camps – to participate in community discussion regarding September/October topic selection, but we will continue to responsibly use our platform to advocate for the topic we think produces better debates. We think that, in this instance, it’s Option 1. You should vote for the topic that you think produces better debates.
While we’re at it: PFBC has an online supplement to camp that will run July 29-August 3 and has resources available to view and download on our website. More information is available here. We will be using Option 1 at online PFBC.
— PFBC