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"left", Chico & "goo"

The "Left", Chico & "Goo"

Pat,

Sorry for the delay in this post...Am doing well...Hope that you will be
after this note---an interesting story for you and Matt.

Happened upon a round at a recent tournament and heard this judging
philosophy/preliminary commentary:

 Debater: Is there anything we should know before we begin?
 Judge: I don't like narrative.

It was a standard introduction to a contemporary debate---a vague, divine
pronouncement from the judge; silence from the participants. As an interested
observer, I decided to ask a question:

 JKM: What do you mean when you say, "I don't like narrative." Any  narrative
discourse? Narrative policy analysis? Personal expression?

This was his reply:

 Judge: I don't like the Chico State goo. (Chuckling from some of the
 debaters). I haven't heard their case, but that kind of narrative.

This comment concluded the preliminaries to the debate.

This episode typifies much of what is wrong with contemporary debate: the
request by the debaters for objective information; arbitrary preliminary
rulings by adjudicators; students suborning the behavior of the judge (e.g.,
laughter, failure to clarify obscure judge comments); the chilling of new
ideas.

I thought about those issues as I left the classroom to watch a different
debate, arriving in time to hear the judge say, "I don't like critiques..."

A final note:

Thought about this episode again when I read Dave Genco's comment on 2-22-95
in 'paternalism from the left':
>The only place that paternalism from the left takes place is in our voicing
of our >opinion outside of the round.
I am fairly confident that the judges of these debates would be associated
with this amorphous 'left.' I am also reasonably confident that the
difference in the location of this kind of utterance is not significant with
respect to the ability of the comment to chill creative speech.

Best, 

John

John Meany
The Claremont Colleges
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Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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