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My Topic Voting

I decided to wait until the official announcements to reveal my topic
choices and to provide a few comments:

my rankings were:

1. domestic terrorism -- quite a few of the committee members ranked this
first
2. seasia
3. civil rights
4. campaign finance reform
5. space

I voted for these two to be kicked out
6. russia
7. treaties

some of my reasoning

1.  domestic terrorism is a current controversy which potentially can
offer both narrow and broader topic wordings and yet could be an equalizer
between the have and have nots of debate;  it has not been debated in
recent years and i believe is increasingly relevant and interesting to
students; this would be a great topic area to attract novices
2.  seasia -- i think this was well explained and defended in the very
best topic paper submitted;  the authors took the job of research and
investigation of a topic area seriously; they did not attempt to use their
ideologies and arrogance as a defense of why this topic must be debated;
they demonstrated scholarly and objective attitudes; they deliberated
before they argued; they had a tremendous bibliography; for those who want
to do a foreign policy topic this seems to be superior to russia, given
that it is a less argued area than russia; i am unsure how novices will do
with this topic which is my only major concern
3.  civil rights -- an important and highly relevant area to students and
probably a very good topic for novices; i was not pleased with the topic
paper and i think a topic paper more to my liking might have caused me to
rank this higher; before anyone reacts to this, let me say that i prefer a
more traditional scholarly approach, but i do not know that this is
superior to more creative approaches; i think we need to debate
affirmative action and other civil rights issues;  i also think it will be
very difficult to step out of our ideologies and to deliberate before we
argue;  i think, if selected, this could be one of the most enlightening
and important topics we have debated in recent years
4.  campaign finance reform--an current controvery that everyone should be
interested in (including me) but they aren't (including me); i think that
this topic area deals with one of the main problems of contemporary
democratic society that many people have given up on -- including
debaters; there seems to be little interest on the l in this topic; this
is a topic that might be very difficult for novices and might not interest
them -- given the hurdles to learning about debate -- i am not sure this
would be a good topic for beginners
5.  space -- my final frontier but the topic paper was excellent; i am not
interested; i hear space cases debated almost every topic; i am just not
interested in hearing them for entire year; this is not a topic for
schools with limited libraries; this topic area has some surface appeal to
novices but it seems very difficult for them -- based on my experience; i
do not see much interest in this topic on the l; i do not believe this is
a topic for the entire community

the topics i kicked

6.  russia -- tired; not much interest; been there, done that; very
important area but we have had these debates 
7.  treaties -- came in after the deadline for consideration; i also think
this topic would not be good for new programs, novices and schools with
limited libraries; i dislike this kind of fill in the blank topic and the
kinds of debates it produces, but in any case we should not have
considered it because it was after the deadline.....

a lot of people will not like my choices, but i did not like a lot of
yours -- however, i do pay attention to the community who talks on the l
and the community who does not --the committee provides a great mix of
ideas and i hope i add to that mix


Russ Church
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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