Three proposals for CARD's library and topic process.

The status quo.

We are seven years into CARD. From one year to the next, the activity has seen major changes, reflecting the turbulence of our political and economic present in the United States. I speak with above average authority on CARD matters having been actively involved each year. However, I still offer a perspective, and perspectives are partial.

I think there are some major challenges CARD faces. I’ll bullet-point them briefly, but any could be expanded on further:

• High overhead costs for our topic and library model. Our established models require intensive inputs of time and focus from directors and coaches. Ad hoc, tournament-by-tournament decision-making, rooted in collaboration and problem-solving helped the activity in its earliest stages, but everyone has less time to give. When there are system shocks (like the elimination of a DoF) those systems are further upended.

• A lack of shared vision about the activity. This is a reflection of norms that are not deeply internalized rather than bitter disagreement about what our norms should be. However, there is also some disagreement about our norms.

• A lack of coordination between student research effort, the needs of the library, and the timeline for the topic.

• Library criteria that are either ineffectively disseminated and taught or too subjective to provide meaningful guidance.

• Disparate views of Topic and Library Committee (TLC) roles that are unsustainable.

• Diminished competitive incentives for students to engage in the research process.

• Diminished personal and professional resources for collectively steering the activity. The energy, passion, and curiosity that are important to drive an argument activity forward are waning as people’s bandwidth for such work continues to evaporate.

CARD Matters

I think there are overwhelming upsides to CARD, however. I think it has the best chance to offer people in the Western US a policy debate experience. I personally think the odds are much higher than seeing NDTCEDA program growth, but people can place their bets on Kalshi I guess. So it is worth asking: what would be the most strategic change to CARD that would be capable of some mix of the following?

• Increase incentives for students to engage in research independently, as well as utilize the library more.

• Enhance coordination of community-wide research (especially among students) while simplifying the tasks and effort required of the topic and library committee (TLC).

• Simplify and standardize community processes to make things like TLC participation more sustainable and resilient.

• Solidify CARD’s structural advantages that promote accessibility and engagement (predictable library, lack of back-file/generic topic derailment, controversy-centric debate pedagogy, publicly accessible debates).

Let me make three proposals for reform. Would any of these constitute a strategic move that consolidates CARD’s benefits, develops new ones, and sustains the activity?

Option 1: Fine-tuning the timing and size of research waves and revising the library criterion.

First, this approach would try to build a standard timeline for research waves. The weak version would be set each spring following the competition schedule. The strong version would spell out a timeline to be used year in, year out, regardless of competition timing. The weak is more adaptable, but more prone to personnel disruption and cyclic swings in committee attention and workload throughout the year. The strong sets a clear target and programs can budget their efforts around the work of that committee. Either proposal needs to be strategic about lining up student-led research waves with the academic calendar, avoiding the winter-break cliff.

Second, this approach would revise library criteria with two goals in mind. First, promote group consensus about what makes a good library, and build a library that reflects a shared vision of CARD’s argumentation theory. Second, remove ambiguity that exists in some criteria pertaining to credibility and germaneness.

The major limits of this approach are that it does not dramatically alter the existing incentives for competitors to engage (or not engage) in research, both within and outside the library, it does not do anything to coordinate library research (the TLC is still left reviewing what gets submitted, with many rejections for redundancy or incompleteness), and it doesn’t address the underlying issues of bandwidth/focus to engage in steering throughout the community.

Option 2: Build a clearer topic selection process that is intrinsically linked to the library building process.

There are two ways to do this. First, you could transform the topic ballot into a library ballot. Programs vote on what shelves should be installed in the library, and the TLC’s job is to make sure it’s a good book before putting it on the shelf. Second, you empower the TLC to define the shelves and tell the community what sort of articles to submit.

The first method is more democratic, but does require there to be more upfront activity from the topic committee (or community members participating in the process). It is possible this might require a summer topic convention much like CEDA uses to help create an informed ballot. It is doable work, however, especially if CARD holds onto its defining value of denying competition a monopoly on community values. The second method is less democratic, but does address the coordination issue head on. It also would simplify the routine business of the TLC, making it less subject to changes of vision that accompany changes in leadership. For either option to make progress towards the challenges of focus and steering, it would also require more precisely tuned timelines that are relatively durable.

Option 3: Redefine the library’s relationship to the activity in a more radical way. My first draft proposal: build an advocacy library while removing the prohibition on the library as the sole source of quoted material.

An advocacy library would be a collection of advocacy articles. In its most simple sense, articles that very clearly propose and defend a course of action. Shelves in the library would thus be populated by different policy proposals from solvency advocates, and articles that challenged the efficacy of those proposals (case negative) and offered their own (counterplans). It is also possible that this redefinition could extend to critique alternatives, recognizing that it would also require more careful reflection on how to interpret CARD’s foundational philosophical goals and assumptions about fiat. Advocacies would still be subject to independent considerations such as the topic, timeliness, and germaneness. Debaters would then be allowed to introduce their own evidence that they have researched to fill out cases and strategies. In the most blunt terms, this is a proposal where a) community members are highly constrained about what solvency advocates they can offer, but b) set loose to constructively explore and assemble different understandings of advantages, impacts, and disadvantages.

This proposal runs numerous risks. Would debates become just a race to terminal impacts? Considering we have a nuclear weapons topic with articles vividly describing omnicide and the horrors of nuclear winter and I still heard that there were “no impacts in the library”, this isn’t an idle concern. Would it create too much unpredictability to obtain the benefits of CARD’s accessibility? Maybe, but perhaps it could also be tempered with a stepped up library process (advocacies only in open as described above, but a more conventional CARD “starter” library for junior, or the first half of the year in junior?). Would it erode progress in other areas where CARD is succeeding, promoting the recycling of backfiles or the introduction of spuriously competitive CPs or contrived disadvantages? Maybe this would require that CARD move beyond the bounds of soft norms towards harder criteria for what can be introduced in a debate. “All non-library evidence must be from the past two years.” “Advocacies (plan texts, counterplans, alternatives) must have a comprehensive advocate that backs them. No Frankenstein-ing arguments together or partial advocacies, full stop.”

I’m still not sure how to fully insulate against a race to extremes. I can think of several tools, but all require some sense of shared faith to not race to the extremes, and I’m incredibly ineffective at getting everyone to think like me. It may require us to dial up our expectations for debaters to present fully coherent arguments in the first place (CEDA’s burden-of-rejoinder-philia discounts the significance of that, and CARD errs if it goes that route more than it already does), step up our expectations that debaters be publicly engaging and persuasive, and put faith in our structural constraints of shorter speeches (in the face of high expectations and little time, you could more easily win by running a short race rather than racing for extinction). Rehabilitating disclosure could also help. Alternatively, perhaps there could be link and link answer shelves in the library, leaving debaters more flexibility to explore uniqueness and impact arguments (but providing a backing or guarantee that debaters will always have some ground banked in the library to contest the disadvantage, and an incentive to go out and find more).

Risks aside, there may be some benefits to a bold shake-up like this. CARD needs a good dose of oxygen to its collective brain. In our first seven years, we were successful at showing that big risks can pay off. Personally, I would not trade the last six years (stressful as they were) for six years of what had come before (toxic community cultures that placed competition ahead of any other consideration and an environment of overwork and zealotry that drives people away from the most important educational experience I believe exists on a college campus). So, seven years in I am not afraid to take a chance. It doesn’t have to be any of these chances listed here, but we gotta get thinking, talking, doing.

-Travis Cram, Director of WWU, CARD Exec Secretary, Interim chair, Topic and Library Committee

cramt@wwu.edu