The history of the International Public Debate Association begins with an idea. The idea was to create a debate format which would provide a genuine oratorical education. I wanted to get as close to the rhetorical ideal and as far away from the stylistic excesses of NDT (and later CEDA) as possible. So this goal was driven by a personal vision of what an ideal public speaking style might look and sound like.
As a child, I was fascinated by public speaking and developed models of excellence which were learned in the classroom and from television. Marc Anthony's funeral oration over Caesar's Body, Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Speech, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, John Kennedy's Inaugural Address, Roosevelt, Churchill, Webster, Demosthenes . . . Over the years, my level of sophistication would increase, but the basic vision wouldn't really change. It would merely elaborate.
Then when I was in high school, the debate team was going to attend a Student Congress and wanted to bring some extra warm bodies. One prominent team member knew me as a loud-mouthed and opinionated campus character, so I was perfect for them. I went and loved it. A few months later I got shanghaied into debate and then individual events. But this was the late 1960's and high school. The stylistic abuses which characterize modern NDT/CEDA at the university level were very minor on the high school circuit at the time. At least I didn't notice them. I wasn't troubled by any discrepancies between the rhetorical model in my head and the actual activity I was engaged in. I'm sure I attributed the difference between my rhetorical vision and what I was seeing and hearing to the fact that we were still learning to debate. I'm sure I did not attribute the differences to any fundamental flaws in the debate activity itself.
When I made the transition to college level forensics, I started at a Junior College. And like the proverbial frog who gets put into cold water and then has the temperature raised until he gets boiled, I simply didn't notice anything amiss. This was essentially the same activity I had been learning in high school only played at a somewhat higher level. And I was learning to play without doing much thinking about the basic nature or value of the game.
In 1972 my partner and I won the Phi Rho Phi National Debate Championship in Los Angeles. We were definitely very lucky dark-horse winners. This was the same year that Jack Howe formed the Cross Examination Debate Association. I finished my undergraduate work at UCLA. But UCLA wasn't a part of CEDA. And since my new coach had no respect for JC transfers, I ended up doing individual events and Lincoln-Douglas debate only during my Junior and Senior years. I was living right there in Southern California and didn't even know that CEDA existed until I was in Graduate School five years later.
Parallel to Forensics, back in my freshman year, I had been introduced to Toastmasters International by Robert L. Rivera, one of the coaches at my Junior College. Bob stressed the rhetorical elements of public speaking in debate and the Toastmasters experience reinforced this beautifully. Speed simply didn't work with real-world audiences. And audience analysis became more than pure logic and "dead bodies on the flow sheet." It was a real eye-opener. By the time I'd graduated from UCLA, Toastmasters (plus the fact I was NOT competing in team NDT) had brought be back around to a much more oratorical speaking style.
After graduation I worked for a couple of years as a salesman and sales manager. Here again, I found my speaking skills were being honed by real-world, real-people contacts. During this period I amused myself by writing a really bad basic textbook on debate. And in rereading that text years later I was struck by my emphasis on rhetorical elements. Then one day, I visited my old Junior College and one of the coaches asked me why I didn't go back to graduate school to get a Masters Degree. He told me an old friend of mine, Raymond "Bud" Zeuscher (who incidently was one of the co-founders of CEDA), was now head coach at California State University, Northridge. Why not go there and assistant coach for him. Someday I too could become a full-time debate coach. So I did, and was introduced to CEDA.
This was the fall of 1976. CEDA was starting its fifth year. My first, knee-jerk, response to the CEDA format was to criticize everything about it which was different from the NDT which I had known and had learned to love. Bud simply smiled and convinced me that I should give the new format a fair chance. This I did. And two years later I had become a major CEDA enthusiast. One of the characteristics of a truly valuable innovation is that it makes converts out of the skeptical without the need for excessive persuasion. The innovation sells itself.
In the fall of 1978 I was entering graduate school at the University of Iowa. I taught public speaking and freshman composition in the Rhetoric Program and volunteered time to help coach the debate team. Bob Kemp, the UI coach, assigned me a couple of freshman debaters to work with and I traveled to a few tournaments a semester. This was NDT territory. And by now, I had grown to really dislike the format in contrast to CEDA. It was too fast, too artificial, and too abusive. But the freshman were fun to work with and I had the naive belief that with CEDA's help, I could reform NDT. In retrospect it was like a flea on the tip of a dog's tail thinking he could somehow bring about a major change in the dog's direction. But at Iowa I got to study classical rhetoric and public address with Don Ochs who introduced me to Protagoras and Isocrates. Also, in the spring of 1981, Bob rewarded me for all of my volunteer work by sending me to the APDA tournament at the University of Chicago. Graduate Students could enter. So I took one of my freshmen debaters. We went to play and ended up going 2-4. But both my freshman partner and I had a great time. I found Parliamentary Debate to be much more to my liking than either NDT or CEDA.
And at this APDA tournament I had a critical lesson driven home. For five of the six preliminary rounds, we had a variety of topics which led me to debate in a very laid back, oratorical style. The sixth round was a topic which lent itself exactly to my winning 1972 debate case. So I teed off on it and presented a stripped down version of the case complete with structure, evidence, and NDT-style. I walked out of the round thinking I had literally blown our opponents off their feet. Later I found that not only was this one of our four losses, but that I had been rated the worst speaker in the round (well below my freshman partner) and assigned absolutely miserable speaker points. Since I ended up only three points behind the first speaker at the tournament, this is the round which had torpedoed me. And I'd done it to myself. I'm pleased to say that even at the time, I blamed myself for my strategic rhetorical blunder and NOT the judge. I thought about that round a lot on the car ride home where the lesson was really burned into my consciousness. The habits I'd learned doing NDT debate simply did not play well before a real-world audience.
After graduating I took the Director of Forensics position at the University of Richmond. This was a recently developed program and I was told I was free to take it in any direction I preferred. Since the department was predominantly theatre, and no one seemed to know anything about Forensics, I took it in the direction of CEDA.3 This was 1981 and CEDA was just starting to come into its own on the east coast. We also participated in APDA although Richmond, Virginia was at the extreme far south of APDA territory.
For three years I directed the University of Richmond program. During this time, there were some important influences on my thinking about rhetorical debate. First there was the experience of coaching CEDA and APDA when simultaneously attending many tournaments where I was assigned to judge Junior and Senior NDT. This made the contrast between styles frightfully clear. I would sometimes try to coerce NDT debaters into a more oratorical style by promising high speaker points if they would slow down and talk to me and threatening low speaker points if they didn't. I often found the NDT debaters incapable of changing their high-speed, abusive style. Paradoxically, I sometimes encountered Junior level debaters who were both more willing and able to make the adjustment. Hmmmm. This suggested something about the critical importance of practice and learned habits in speaking style. And it also suggesting something about the futility of trying to change the practices of NDT by jawboning.
Another important influence on my thinking from the UR period was a campus forum program which I inherited. This was a wonderful innovation which other schools would do well to adopt. Twice a semester the forensics team sponsored a public debate with audience participation, a "Campus Forum" it was called. The topic would be announced and well publicized in advance. All freshmen public speaking class students were expected to attend and participate at one or the other of these forums. They lasted 90 minutes and were kicked off by pro and con speakers. The lead speakers would generally be forensics team members. Sometimes they were representatives of other campus organizations or notable community experts. Very occasionally we had visiting parliamentary debate teams kick off a forum by competing against a UR team. Then the floor would be opened to audience participation. As in a parliamentary style student congress, the chair of the meeting would alternate pro and con speeches from the audience. These Campus Forums were great fun and highly educational. And the speaking styles were usually a tremendous improvement over the NDT and even the CEDA styles on the debate circuit. In fact, some of the least impressive Campus Forum speeches were delivered by some of the most experienced members of my team. They were much too "debate-like" and reminded me of my own terrible performance in the Chicago APDA tournament. This again led me to question the fundamental value of NDT & CEDA as a training ground for effective orators.
One final important influence on my thinking during the UR period was an attempt to add an experimental rhetorical debate event to our annual debate tournament. It was my first primitive attempt to solve the problem of rhetorical style in debate by tinkering with rules and format. This first experiment was a team event, patterned on the APDA model. The only important innovation which remains from this early experiment is the use of five alternative topics for the debaters to select among.
After three years at the University of Richmond I had worn out my welcome and had to move on. Thinking back, I was completely naive concerning the politics of running a forensics program. I had made a great many mistakes which I had no intention of repeating in the future. But the learning experience proved extremely valuable when I became Executive Secretary of IPDA.
Indiana University Northwest in Gary was my next port of call. They did not have a forensics program and no desire to develop one. Thus I became a full time teacher and researcher. At the time, I had no particular interest in ever going back to forensics. I merely watched the CEDA experiment unfolding (steadily in the wrong direction, so far as I could tell) and did a good deal of research on the question of why this was so. I was particularly interested in trying to identify the structural factors which caused a debate association and format to drift into abusive rhetorical practices. Was this accidental or inevitable?
I came to the conclusion that it was inevitable and wrote a number of papers on the subject.4 I also did a content analysis study of actual debate ballots to help demonstrate how some of these inevitable forces worked in practice.5 The results of this three-year period was to leave me with a strong set of beliefs concerning the basic forces which governed style in academic debate. In a nutshell, here were my basic conclusions:
1. There is a 4-year "generation" in college level academic debate which creates a positive feedback learning loop. Freshman debaters enter the activity and spend four years being shaped by the expectations of the judging pool (which is made up primarily of senior debaters, graduate students and coaches). They go on to become judges themselves who, having learned the lessons of their four years of rigorous training, impose somewhat stricter expectations in their judging on the next generation of freshmen debaters.
2. The primary emphasis in judging feedback has been logos or the logical elements of persuasion almost to the exclusion of any concern with ethos (style) and pathos (emotion). You can easily see this in the design of almost every debate ballot and can clearly see it in the content analysis of the feedback which judges provide on these ballots. Hence it is not at all surprising that debaters have developed a rhetorical style which focuses almost exclusively on logic.
3. The founders of CEDA believed that excessive speed was caused by having too much ground to cover. They thought that having to debate policy resolutions required both case and plan be covered. To solve this they believed that debating propositions of value, would require less material be included and hence, debaters would slow down. I came to the conclusion that this belief was in error. Regardless of how large or small the topic; regardless of how simple or complex the issues; the game of debate as traditionally played demanded a maximum generation of issues. This seemed clear from the nature of debate theory as well as from the experience of actual practice.
4. Traditional debate theory, as taught in textbooks, as learned by debaters, and as applied by judges tended to reinforce speed and the massive reading of sound-bites of evidence. Theory states that the Affirmative has the burden of proof and that the Negative wins ties. Hence, if things get out of hand and confused, the negative will win. Thus it becomes a common, if not fundamental, winning strategy for negative teams to batter each and every affirmative case with a "spread" attack. They present as many issues, with evidence, as possible and attempt to overload the first Affirmative rebuttalist. The negative can then claim victory on any issues which the 1AR drops and can also claim victory based on the general confusion which results. Judges very frequently vote in favor of these tactics and thus, Affirmative teams develop motor-mouthing defensive strategies in response. They learn to cover absolutely everything, no matter how trivial or stupid with some kind of response to 'keep the issue in play.'
5. Highly trained, expert judges are thus a large part of the rules structure which keeps these stylistic abuses in place. In APDA and CUSID and much of the Parliamentary debate around the world, the associations are student run and there is a heavy dependence on non-expert or lay judges. While this is primarily an economic necessity, rather than a pedagogical choice, it has had the effect of keeping the rhetoric of these associations much more audience oriented.
6. Hence, solutions to the problem of stylistic excesses in academic debate must come from rules and format changes and will not come strictly from training debaters and judges. I.e., if you simply ask debaters to debate more oratorically, and ask judges to judge on more oratorical criteria, you will quickly find that first, they are unwilling to do so; second, they don't know how to do so; and third, that even if you find a willing group of debaters and judges (the CEDA experiment) and get them all started off in the right direction, the natural generational drift of academic debate and the basic debate theories, rules, and formats, will all tend to conspire to recreate the NDT style. I considered this to be a structural problem which could only be solved by incorporating structural changes into the debate activity.
The metaphor I used to characterize this at the time was 'speed bumps.' Much later I described this as follows:
If your neighbors are driving too fast through your communal parking lot, you can ask them to slow down. You could post signs. You can hold community educational or political action events. None of which is likely to have the desired long-term effect you're after. Then again, you could simply pour some speed bumps and your neighbors will, perforce, slow down.6
I left Indiana feeling that academic debate needed some speed bumps, but unsure of exactly what these speed bumps should look like and how they should work.
And this was my state of thinking when I took the Director of Forensics position at St. Mary's University in the Fall of 1988. I had thought I was finished with Coaching Forensics. But as it happened my new bride was finished with the cold Indiana winters. So we went looking for someplace warm to live. The St. Mary's position was one of many I applied for, and the one I eventually got. As a matter of luck or fate, I was again a Director of Forensics. And I brought with me a couple of important items of baggage. First, I had my University of Richmond experience to draw upon which made me very conservative and cautious. I didn't want to step on any toes. And second, I brought some firmly held and rather radical, if fuzzy, notions concerning oratorical debate and what such an animal would require to be brought into existence. So here I was trying to blend in and not make waves while at the same time personally committed to a basic concept which challenged much if not most of the existing debate community. Hence, I moved slowly.
I had inherited a very small, disorganized, and poorly-funded program. Morale was extremely low. Within the first year, all but one of the returning debaters had graduated, dropped-out, or moved on. The good news was that this allowed me to do some recruiting and start from scratch to build an oratorically oriented forensics program.
This of course was a pipe dream. I kept running into the obvious problem that whatever else I did or taught, my students would go out and compete on a debate circuit filled with opponents and judges who were immersed in the traditional styles and expectations of what had become NDT/CEDA debate. The most successful team I had during this period was a very talented couple who made it a point to ignore almost everything I tried to teach. Instead they emulated the style and tactics of their opponents who were doing well on the circuit. I knew I was doing a completely ineffectual job of 'fighting city hall.' I was tempted to simply give up. And insofar as trying to change the debating style of my own students on the circuit, I more or less did so.
However, we had also started hosting a tournament of our own in the fall of 1991 - The Diamondback Classic. We included an experimental debate event which was called "Parliamentary" (after my APDA experiences). It wasn't Parliamentary Debate of course, at least not in the World's Competition format which was common at the time. But it was parliamentary enough in comparison to anything which was remotely near Texas. We offered this event for several years, and each time I would observe the results and the feedback it generated from the participants and judges. Then I would tinker with next season's rules. I'd like to be able to say that I knew exactly what I was doing and carefully plotted and calculated every step, but this was simply not the case. We just kept trying different combinations of format and rules and slowly the event started to improve. The progress wasn't quite linear, and there was a great deal of trial and error to it.
I had opened this event for all comers including graduate students and coaches. In this sense I used a modified Toastmasters International model. I wanted to get the coaches out of the back of the room as judges and I wanted their feedback as participants. Some of the notable coaches who participated during this period were Mike Fain of Rice University (and later the University of Houston), John English of Vanderbilt University, and Jack Rogers who had just moved from Southern University in Baton Rogue and taken a position at the University of Texas in Tyler.
At our first Diamondback Classic Tournament, one of the surprise entries was the U.S. Air force Academy and their coach, Maj. Gwendolyn Fayne. She was soon to become one of the founding members and the first Executive Secretary of the National Parliamentary Debate Association. I was later told, strictly by rumor, that judging our Parliamentary Debate division at the Diamondback Classic was one of the important experiences which moved her in this direction. If I ever cross paths with Major Fayne again, I'll have to ask her if there is any truth to this rumor.
In any case, in 1992 NPDA was founded as a hybrid form of debate somewhere between the APDA/CUSID and NDT/CEDA formats. NPDA followed most of the format conventions of APDA/CUSID but followed the judging conventions and associational structure of NDT/CEDA. It was, in highly-oversimplified terms, a traditionally organized (as opposed to student-run) association which promoted Parliamentary debate. Within a couple of years, NPDA had reached Texas and was being strongly promoted by Mike Fain. Mike called me in the summer of 1994 and asked if I would add NPDA to our Diamondback Classic Tournament. We did so and watched over the next few years and NPDA quickly outpaced CEDA as the primary debate format at our tournament. And of course, we continued to offer our experimental 'Parliamentary' L-D event with its continually evolving rules and format.
All of which lead to an important decision point in the fall of 1996. There were three factors which led to this critical crossroad.
First, the growth and NPDA and the shrinkage of CEDA were leading to a fundamental shift of emphasis in the Texas debate community. CEDA's decision to select a joint annual debate topic with NDT had effectively lead to a reintegration of the two associations and provoked a great deal of disquiet among coaches who prized the nominal CEDA philosophy. These coaches were radically rethinking how much time, effort, recruitment, and training to place on CEDA as opposed to NPDA. They were starting to seriously shift their tournament priorities. This was seen in the changing size of the NPDA and CEDA divisions at various tournaments.
Second, A former graduate student at Southwest Texas State University, Lisa Coppoletta, had finished her master's program and taken a one year appointment as the debate coach at UNC-Charlotte. She had been impressed with the experimental format at St. Mary's and wanted to offer it at her own tournament. She called me that summer to get more information about the event which I was happy to provide. I also told her that if she really did add it to her tournament, I would fly out with some students to participate. I'd been offering the event for years and opening it up to coaches without ever being able to compete myself. This would be an opportunity to check out the experimental format from a competitor's perspective.
And third, the name "Parliamentary" had become problematic. APDA and NPDA and British Parliamentary-style debate around the world were using the term in a very similar way, and the St. Mary's experimental event was clearly a different animal. The name 'Parliamentary' simply didn't fit the new format.
So with all this in mind, the UNC-Charlotte tournament in the fall of 1996 was an important catalyst. The tournament did, in fact, take place. It was extremely small, with only UNCC and St. Mary's participating in the experimental parliamentary debate division. But we had a total field of about 14 entries and it was great fun. For the first time, I could see the attraction of this format from the perspective of a participant. During the final day of the competition, Lisa and I got a chance to sit and talk with a few debaters. The subject turned to the new event and Lisa strongly suggested we form a debate association to promote it. I thought that a debate association consisting of one school in Texas and a second school in North Carolina was not intensely practical. But Lisa was enthused. So I promised that I would take the question up with the coaches who attended the Diamondback Classic which would be held the following month. This turned out to be a fateful decision.
As a side note, during our conversation at UNC-Charlotte, Lisa suggested that 'Public Debate' might be a better name for the event. She told me that this was the name used by Glenda Treadaway for an event on her Appalachian State University campus. So to Lisa Coppoletta the IPDA owes the primary impetus for the creation of our association and to Glenda Treadaway we owe our name.
At the 1996 Diamondback Classic I talked to a number of individual coaches including Don Black from Kansas City Kansas Community College and Phil Fisher from San Jacinto College South, both long-time supporters of the St. Mary's experimental debate format. I also talked with Jack Rogers, one of the most respected and influential coaches on the Texas and Louisiana circuits, who as mentioned above was now at the University of Texas at Tyler and John English from Vanderbilt University, who had been flying out to attend the Diamondback Classic for several years. There were some other coaches who's opinions I solicited, but these were the most important players. The general feeling, shared by all, including me, was that we had plenty of different debate associations as it was. And, while there was a good deal of enthusiasm for 'Public Debate' (this was the tournament when I first unveiled the new name), there was little enthusiasm for a formal commitment to creating yet another new debate association. But we didn't close the door on the idea either. Jack's Patriot Games Tournament was going to be held the following month. The tournament included a panel where professional scholarship was presented and he suggested adding a second panel to discuss the future of Public Debate. So with some relief we all agreed to think it over and take it up again in Tyler.7
The UT-Tyler scholarly panel became the critical meeting where the decision was made to go ahead and form a Public Debate association. And perhaps the most important individual in this discussion was Trey Gibson, an assistant coach under Jorji Jarzabek at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport. Trey was the spark plug. Neither John English nor Lisa Coppoletta could make the tournament, but Jack Rogers, Phil Fisher, and I plus several other interested coaches and students were there.8 Many of us had more experience with the event, but it was Trey who seemed the most gung-ho about the potential of the format and of the idea of forming an association. He simply treated the decision as a done deal and continued to inject enthusiasm into the discussion. His comments centered around how it should be done and what the benefits would be rather than expressing doubts or concerns about the wisdom of such an undertaking. This attitude proved to be infectious and by the end of the meeting the decision had been made. We were going to form a new 'Public Debate Association' which would be launched in the Spring at a St. Mary's University tournament and our first full schedule would begin during the 1997-1998 season. Jack Rogers agreed to serve as the first President of this new association, I was going to be Executive Secretary (and do most of the actual work), and we were of the opinion that Lisa Coppoletta would be a third officer in one form or another. As I recall, we all walked out of the room with a certain air of euphoria.
By the next day the euphoria had worn off and Jack and I looked at each other like two men recovering from a three-day drunk. What had we gotten ourselves into? [Next]
Mission Statement & Introduction I - The Origins of IPDA II - The Organizational Period III - The First Season [1997-98] IV - The Second Season [1998-99] V - The Future of IPDA VI - Endnotes