“And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate”

Timothy M. O’Donnell1

Director of DebateUniversity of Mary Washington

Competitive academic debate is in a state of intellectual crisis. There is next to no consensus among participants about the normative assumptions that ought to govern debate practice and pedagogy. More specifically, there is little agreement about the question that a debate seeks to resolve. It wasn’t always like this. A few decades ago there was considerable coalescence around the belief that the question of the debate was whether or not the resolution was “true.” Overtime, with several starts, stops, and spin-offs along the way, that question gave way to another that asked if the policy advocated by the affirmative team was desirable. And though some still adhere to the policy analytic perspective, which was quite popular in the closing decades of the last century, it has now been supplanted to a considerable degree, by what may best be described as a postmodern paradigm. Many involved in academic debate now think that anything goes and that the question itself is open for debate. A short list of the many and varied questions which are vying for contention include:

Is the plan desirable relative to the status quo or a competitive policy alternative? Is the rhetoric/language used in the presentation of the affirmative case desirable? Are the representations contained in the affirmative’s speech desirable? Is the performance of the affirmative team desirable? Are the political consequences of the affirmative plan desirable? Is the activism of the affirmative team desirable? Is the methodology of the affirmative desirable? Are the philosophical/disciplinary moorings/assumptions of the affirmative

desirable?

Given that advocates on all sides have dug in their heels, it does not take much to imagine that if the current situation continues to persist, the debate “community” will eventually splinter along ideological lines with break out groups forming their own organizations designed to safeguard their own sacrosanct approaches to debate. It has happened before. Yet, while debate has witnessed such crises in the past, the present era of discontent seemingly threatens the very existence of the activity as both a coherent, competitive enterprise and a rewarding, educational co-curricular activity. The origins of the present crisis have many contributing causes, including the advent of mutual preference judging, the postmodern, performative, and activist turns in scholarly circles, the dawn of the information revolution and its attendant technologies, as well as a growing resource disparity between large and small debate programs. There appears to be no mutually agreeable solution. Simply put, there is little consensus about what ought to be the focus of debate, or even what constitutes good debate. Moreover, there appears to be no agreement about what question the judge ought to be answering at the end of the debate. In the present milieu, these questions and many more are literally up for grabs.

The product of this disagreement has been a veritable boon for the negative. We need to look no further than the caselist from the 2004 National Debate Tournament (NDT)2 to witness the wide variety of strategic tools that the negative now has in its arsenal. In one or more debates at this tournament, the negative team attempted to alter the ground for evaluating the debate by criticizing: the use of problem-solution thinking (or the lack thereof), the will to control present in the affirmative’s opening speech act, the reliance on and use of the state, the illusory belief in fiat, the affirmative’s relationship to the “other,” the embracing or eschewing of policymaking, the ethics of the affirmative, the rhetoric of the affirmative, the representations of the affirmative, the debate community as a whole, the debate community’s practices, the affirmative’s style of debate, the type of evidence the affirmative used (including an over or under reliance on experts), the affirmative’s failure to focus on the body, the revolutionary or anti-revolutionary nature of the affirmative, the piecemeal (or lack there of) nature of change advocated by the affirmative, the desires emanating from the affirmative debaters and/or their opening speech act, the identify formation instantiated by the affirmative, the metaphors inspired by the affirmative, and the very act of voting affirmative. And this is only a partial list.

To make the point another way, it is quite likely that an affirmative team on the 2003-2004 college topic who advocated that the United States should cede political control over reconstruction in Iraq to the United Nations – certainly one of the most pressing issues of the day – could have made it through whole tournaments, indeed large portions of the whole season, without ever discussing the merits of U.S. policy in Iraq after the opening affirmative speech. Such a situation seems problematic at best. That the negative’s strategic arsenal has grown so large that negative teams are tempted to eschew consideration of the important issues of the day (in the case of Iraq, an issue with geopolitical repercussions that will echo for the rest of our lives) for competitive reasons seems more than problematic. In fact, it is downright tragic.

What is so tragic about all of this is that a debater could go through an entire debate career with very little effort to go beyond meta-argument or arguments about argument (i.e. debate theory). The sad fact is that, more often than not, the outcome of any given debate today hinges less on the substantive issues introduced by the affirmative’s first speech, than it does on the resolution of these meta-arguments. These so-called “framework” debates about what the question of the debate ought to be, while somewhat interesting, have little practical application to the circumstances of our times and in my judgment, at least, are less intellectually rewarding than their counterparts. In fact, in a situation where the merits of the public policy issues staked out by the year’s resolution along with the critical issues that those policies raise are no longer the focus of the debate – because the negative can shift the question – why have a resolution at all? The disastrous implications of this trend in academic debate are appearing at the very moment that the academy is being urged to take seriously the goal of educating citizens.3

In a world where proponents for any one of the varied questions are equally strident in staking out their views about what the debate ought to be about, agreement seems to be impossible. To be sure, there is value in each of these views. Public policy is important. The political consequences of policies are important. The language used in constructing

policies is important. The presentational aspects of policy are important. The epistemological, ontological, and ethical underpinnings of policies are important. And so on. What are we to do then in situations where advocates on all sides make more or less equally compelling claims? As an educator, I am interested in having the students that I work with ask and answer all of these questions at one time or another. As a coach, I am interested in having them have a predictable set of arguments to prepare for. Thus, the question for me is, how can we have a game in which they have such an opportunity? The argument of this essay seeks to chart a partial answer to this question. It involves staking out a compromise position that recognizes that there is value in a wide variety of perspectives and that all deserve an equal opportunity to be represented in competitive debates.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a framework consists of “a set of standards, beliefs, or assumptions” that govern behavior. When we speak of frameworks in competitive academic debate we are talking about the set of standards, beliefs, or assumptions that generate the question that the judge ought to answer at the end of the debate. Given that there is no agreement among participants about which standards, beliefs, or assumptions ought to be universally accepted, it seems that we will never be able to arrive at an agreeable normative assumption about what the question ought to be. So the issue before us is how we preserve community while agreeing to disagree about the question in a way that recognizes that there is richness in answering many different questions that would not otherwise exist if we all adhered to a “rule” which stated that there is one and only one question to be answered. More importantly, how do we stop talking past each other so that we can have a genuine conversation about the substantive merits of any one question?

The answer, I believe, resides deep in the rhetorical tradition in the often overlooked notion of stasis.4 Although the concept can be traced to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it was later expanded by Hermagoras whose thinking has come down to us through the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintillian. Stasis is a Greek word meaning to “stand still.” It has generally been considered by argumentation scholars to be the point of clash where two opposing sides meet in argument. Stasis recognizes the fact that interlocutors engaged in a conversation, discussion, or debate need to have some level of expectation regarding what the focus of their encounter ought to be. To reach stasis, participants need to arrive at a decision about what the issue is prior to the start of their conversation. Put another way, they need to mutually acknowledge the point about which they disagree.

What happens when participants fail to reach agreement about what it is that they are arguing about? They talk past each other with little or no awareness of what the other is

1 The author would like to thank Carly Woods, Clint Woods, and J.P. Lacy for their helpful suggestions on this paper. 2 See www.ndtcaselist.com.3 See Colby, Anne, et al. (2003). Educating Citizens, Jossey-Bass.4 For further discussion of the theory of stasis, see: Lunsdorf, Andrea A. and John J. Ruszkiewicz. (2001). Everything’s an Argument, Bedford/St. Martins; Vancil, David L. (1993). Rhetoric and Argumentation, Allyn and Bacon; Hill, Bill and Richard W. Leeman. (1997). The Art and Practice of Argumentation and Debate, Mayfield Publishing.

saying. The oft used cliché of two ships passing in the night, where both are in the dark about what the other is doing and neither stands still long enough to call out to the other, is the image most commonly used to describe what happens when participants in an argument fail to achieve stasis. In such situations, genuine engagement is not possible because participants have not reached agreement about what is in dispute. For example, when one advocate says that the United States should increase international involvement in the reconstruction of Iraq and their opponent replies that the United States should abandon its policy of preemptive military engagement, they are talking past each other. When such a situation prevails, it is hard to see how a productive conversation can ensue.

I do not mean to suggest that dialogic engagement always unfolds along an ideal plain where participants always can or even ought to agree on a mutual starting point. The reality is that many do not. In fact, refusing to acknowledge an adversary’s starting point is itself a powerful strategic move. However, it must be acknowledged that when such situations arise, and participants cannot agree on the issue about which they disagree, the chances that their exchange will result in a productive outcome are diminished significantly. In an enterprise like academic debate, where the goals of the encounter are cast along both educational and competitive lines, the need to reach accommodation on the starting point is urgent. This is especially the case when time is limited and there is no possibility of extending the clock. The sooner such agreement is achieved, the better. Stasis helps us understand that we stand to lose a great deal when we refuse a genuine starting point.5

How can stasis inform the issue before us regarding contemporary debate practice? Whether we recognize it or not, it already has. The idea that the affirmative begins the debate by using the resolution as a starting point for their opening speech act is nearly universally accepted by all members of the debate community. This is born out by the fact that affirmative teams that have ignored the resolution altogether have not gotten very far. Even teams that use the resolution as a metaphorical condensation or that “affirm the resolution as such” use the resolution as their starting point. The significance of this insight warrants repeating. Despite the numerous differences about what types of arguments ought to have a place in competitive debate we all seemingly agree on at least one point – the vital necessity of a starting point. This common starting point, or topic, is what separates debate from other forms of communication and gives the exchange a directed focus.6

I propose that we carry our recognition of the significance of stasis one step further. Not only should it extend to the “topic” under discussion in any given debate, but it also ought to extend to the framework that should operate in any given debate. In this view, the affirmative would not only begin the debate by laying out the topic to be discussed but also the question that the judge should answer at the end of the debate. Stated differently, just as the affirmative gets to choose the case, they also ought to be allowed

5 For further discussion of the importance of acknowledging a genuine starting point, see Eemeren, F. H. van, and Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.6 See for example: Snider, Alfred and Maxwell Schnurer. (2002). Many Sides: Debate Across the Curriculum, New York International Debate Education Association.

to choose the framework. The remainder of this essay is dedicated to detailing the advantages of affirmative framework choice (AFC) and answering the most likely objections.

The rationale for affirmative framework choice.There are several reasons why the affirmative should get to choose the framework for the debate. First, AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive speech. This speech is the starting point for the debate. It is a function of necessity. The debate must begin somewhere if it is to begin at all. Failure to grant AFC is a denial of the service rendered by the affirmative team’s labor when they crafted this speech. Further, if the affirmative does not get to pick the starting point, the opening speech act is essentially rendered meaningless while the rest of the debate becomes a debate about what we should be debating about. History is instructive here. The brief and undistinguished life of both counter warrants and plan-plan have amply demonstrated the chaos that results when the negative refuses to engage the affirmative on its chosen starting point.

In this light, AFC may even be viewed as a “right” similar to the affirmative’s right to define. Although there are several reasons why the affirmative ought to have the right to define, the most persuasive justification recognizes that with the responsibility of initiating the discussion on the resolutional question comes a concomitant right to offer an interpretation of what those words mean. Of course, it is not an exclusive right because the negative can always challenge the interpretations. Nevertheless, the affirmative’s interpretation carries a certain presumption that is accepted as “good for debate” unless proven otherwise. The rationale for AFC follows a similar line of thinking. The affirmative should be able to choose the question for the debate because they are required to speak first.

Second, AFC ensures competitive equity. Leaving the framework open to debate puts the affirmative at a significant competitive disadvantage. When the negative has the option of changing, or even initiating, the framework discussion, the first affirmative constructive speech is rendered meaningless. This hurts the affirmative for two reasons. First, it gives the negative a two-to-one advantage in constructive speech time for making framework arguments. Second, the first affirmative framework choice (or lack there of) locks the affirmative into defending their opening speech act against an entirely different framework from the one it was designed to address. Not only does AFC solve these problems, it also gives every debater an opportunity to have debates in the framework of their choosing. Allowing the first affirmative constructive speech to set the terms for the debate ensures that teams get to choose to debate in their framework half of the time. For example, if one team wanted to have a policy debate, AFC would allow them to do so when they are affirmative. Similarly, if another team wanted to have a performance debate, AFC would give them a similar opportunity when they are affirmative. This means that every team would have an equal opportunity to have fulfilling and engaging debates on the issues they choose to discuss half the time.

Third, AFC has substantial educational benefits. To begin with, it would force teams to debate in multiple frameworks. Too few teams at both the high school and college level

have true argument flexibility. It is an undeniable fact that the debate enterprise would be a more educational undertaking for all involved if teams had to prepare to debate a variety of different frameworks. AFC solves this problem because the framework, like the case, would be determined at the beginning of the debate. Unfortunately, in a world where the question of the debate is not resolved prior to the start of the debate, teams simply pick the framework that they want to defend and advocate it on both the affirmative and the negative. When the negative is permitted to shift the framework, affirmative teams are denied the opportunity to debate in the framework that they selected. Ceding framework selection to the affirmative creates a permanent space for the exploration of multiple frameworks. Indeed, it would allow them to flourish. The fact of the matter is that the creativity which stands behind the wide variety of argument strategies in contemporary debate ensures that a diverse set of frameworks would continue to be explored. AFC aims to break the idea that teams should debate only one way. Instead, it empowers alternate perspectives on debate and gives each an equal footing.

In addition, AFC would have the educational benefit of promoting argument development. If widely accepted, it would have the effect of bracketing framework discussions. Such a move would necessarily focus the debate on issues germane to the framework selected by the affirmative. This would provide more time to explore these issues in greater complexity. Recall for a moment many of the diverse negative strategies deployed at the 2004 NDT. Now ask, how much more intellectually rewarding would those debates have been if the framework discussions were removed from consideration? AFC creates a situation where this is possible.

Fourth, AFC creates a compromise that allows different perspectives on the question of the debate to coexist. The problem with leaving the framework open to debate is that it makes a schism in the community inevitable. Such a split, if it were to happen, would have serious long term consequences for the existence of competitive debate. Unfortunately, the history of intercollegiate debate is a history marked by fissures that have seen groups of like minded people peel away from the larger community because of their disagreements about what counts as excellence in debate.7 This process has happened before and it is likely to happen again. Indeed, I suspect that it is already underway as one or more pockets lament the seeming intransigence of their competitive counterparts in coming around to their perspective on what the activity of debate ought to be about. AFC is a compromise position that gives everyone an equal stake in the game.

Finally, AFC, if widely accepted, has the potential to change the nature of judging and would put debating back into the hands of the debaters. If one considers the wide variety

7 Such splintering has happened in each of the past three decades. It began when in the 1970s when the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) was formed as a break away group from the NDT. It continued in the 1980s with the creation of the American Debate Association (ADA), a rules based organization that kept the NDT topic, but crafted a series of content rules to govern the conduct of debates. And it occurred again in the 1990s with the formation of the National Educational Debate Association (NEDA) which was itself a reaction to the trend toward NDT style debating in CEDA. However, splits in the larger debate community, are not always permanent as the reunion of NDT and CEDA in the mid-1990s demonstrates.

of claims that judges today make in their judging philosophies about what they will and will not tolerate, it is clear that there are significant cleavages in the judging pool. The reason for this is that judges (my self included) have different dispositions toward the question of the debate and they are often willing to impose those views in the debate in a variety of ways. AFC envisions a situation in which judges could mutually agree to disarm.

Would affirmative framework choice hurt negative ground?There are, of course, a number of objections to this proposal. First, some will object that AFC would hurt negative ground. These objections can be easily answered. First, ground is not an all or nothing issue. The affirmative’s choice of framework provides plenty of negative ground. If the affirmative chooses a policy framework, then the negative gets policy ground. If they choose a performance framework, then the negative gets to critique their performance and offer a counter performance. Second, the problem of negative ground exists in the status quo. Given the wide variety of frameworks advocated in affirmative constructive speeches today, negative teams already have to be prepared to debate multiple frameworks. This proposal would not impose a larger burden on the negative than already exists. Third, framework debates themselves are not critical to negative ground. If the negative is only prepared to engage in framework debates, then they are obviously not well prepared to be negative. Fourth, it could be argued that the negative has too much ground in the status quo. Affirmative framework choice levels the playing field. Given the expansive range of generic negative strategies that the negative has at its disposal, it is not an exaggeration to say that negative teams today clearly have the upper hand. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ground loss under the present system is worse for the affirmative. In situations where the negative shifts the debate to its desired framework, the affirmative is at a much greater disadvantage because they have made time allocation and advocacy choices that are not easily rectified.

Would AFC foreclose framework debates which themselves have value? Perhaps. This criticism brings into focus the locus of the educational dilemma. The position staked out in this article is that framework debates have less educational value than their counterparts. Framework debates divert the focus away from debating the substantive issues contained in any framework. In the status quo, the team that wins the framework debate wins the debate. The problem is that so much precious speech time is spent on the framework debate that many debates never get to the intellectually and pedagogically valuable discussion of the issues themselves. More importantly, affirmative framework choice captures all of the benefits of framework debates with none of the downside. Different affirmative teams will advocate different frameworks which means all of the questions that currently get asked would inevitably get asked.

Would AFC mean the negative could never question affirmative assumptions? There are at least two answers to this objection. First, not necessarily. The negative would still have ground to critique the assumptions embedded in the framework advocated by the affirmative team. For example, if the affirmative advocated ceding political control in Iraq to the United Nations through a policy framework, the negative could still question all of the policy assumptions which speak to the plan’s desirability. AFC only constrains

the negative to the extent that they are limited to the starting point selected by the affirmative. This means that the negative would be forced to bracket questions regarding the desirability of the affirmative with respect to its language, its representations, its politics, its performance, its philosophy, etc. Similarly, if the affirmative advocated ceding political control in Iraq to the United Nations through a performance framework, the negative could question all of the assumptions behind their performance in addition to topically derived core negative arguments (although those arguments would have to be adapted to the framework advanced by the affirmative). In such situations, ground loss would be minimal because the ground that the negative loses would not be germane to either the resolutionally derived question or the affirmative framework. Thus the only thing that the negative loses under AFC is the ability to shift the question of the debate through critiques of the affirmative framework. Viewed this way, the negative’s complaint is that they don’t get to talk about everything but the affirmative. But why should they?

Second, the benefits gained by adoption of AFC outweigh what would be lost. Limiting negative ground focuses the discussion and generates richer debates within the framework chosen by the affirmative. There is no substantial benefit to allowing the negative to question every assumption since the emergence of critical affirmatives ensures a place at the table for these types of arguments.

Third, the negative does not have a right to question every assumption. Infinite preparation time for the affirmative is a myth. Affirmative teams, only have a fixed amount of time to prepare to debate. If they are forced to defend any and all assumptions that they are heir to by virtue of their existence at the end of thousands of years of human civilization there is no reasonable expectation that they could ever be prepared to debate. The number and range of questions that the debate could be about is certainly much greater than the amount of time the affirmative has to prepare. Such a situation is anathema to any cooperative learning enterprise. If learning is to be maximized, participants must have a reasonable expectation about what to prepare for. This is, after all, why everyone who participates in two-person “policy” debate thinks there ought to be a topic. Yet, while we seem to agree that there should be limits placed on the affirmative, the same thinking does not always seem to apply to the negative. AFC merely recognizes that both sides need to give something up to have a debate.

Would AFC tip the balance too much in the affirmative’s favor? This is potentially the most serious objection to the proposal advanced here. After all, why wouldn’t an affirmative advocate a framework that made it impossible for the negative to win? The short answer is that some affirmatives might try. However, this charge is not unique to the proposal contained herein. The affirmative already has free reign to introduce a framework for evaluating the debate, and many of them do. Furthermore, while the risk of creating a competitive imbalance in favor of the affirmative might seem likely, this criticism is more hypothetical than real. The same communal notions that have generally served to limit affirmative case selection with respect to topicality could also function with AFC. Of course, negative teams would have to be prepared to argue that the framework presented by the affirmative is untenable for competitive and/or educational

reasons. But, this is no different than what they already prepare to do with topicality. There is a reason why the vast majority of teams do not run the best affirmatives from past topics year after year. Negative teams are more often than not, able to easily defeat those affirmatives with topicality arguments. Why? Because virtually every participant in the game has an intuitive sense that we must reach stasis to even have a debate. AFC merely carries that notion one step further by recognizing that to have a debate we must agree on both the topic and the question that the judge seeks to resolve with respect to that topic.

The appropriate inventional resource for creating arguments about the legitimacy of the affirmative framework is topicality theory. In preparing to craft arguments against illegitimate affirmative frameworks, there are several standards which the negative could use. First, the framework should be predictable. The negative needs to be able to have some basis for preparing to debate the range of possible affirmative frameworks. Since the resolution is the only stable indicator of what the negative needs to prepare to debate, it seems that a reasonable expectation is that the affirmative’s framework should be germane to the resolution. That is to say, the resolution should function as a generative tool not only for a list of affirmative cases, but also a list of affirmative frameworks. Second, the framework should be educational. The framework chosen by the affirmative ought to be educationally beneficial. At a minimum this implies that the possibility for critical thought resides in the framework. Third, the framework should be debatable. This is another way of saying that the framework should be competitively balanced or equitable. There has to be a reasonable possibility that the negative can win. To this extent, the burden of explaining what the negative needs to do to win rests with the affirmative. They ought to be able to offer a clear rationale or set of conditions in which the judge would vote negative. Finally, the framework should be fixed. Once the affirmative introduces its framework into the debate, they should not be permitted to alter or change it in any way. The appropriate theoretical analogs here are the reasons why affirmative conditionality is illegitimate.

What will it take?AFC implementation will require action by both debaters and judges. From debaters it will require both willingness to compromise and recognition that learning to debate in different frameworks has value. I envision a world where prior to the start of the debate, the affirmative would disclose to the negative team what it is that they wish to talk about (the case/plan) as well as the question that the judge ought to answer at the end of the debate. In addition, they should be prepared to begin their first affirmative constructive speech with a rationale for the question which lets the negative know what it is that they need to do to win the debate. AFC will also require a similar move on the part of judges. Not only will we need to lay our framework predispositions at the doorstep, we will also need to explain to debaters that we endorse the idea of AFC.

ConclusionCompromise is never an easy thing. Some compromises are unsatisfying, to one or more parties to a controversy. Others are down right objectionable. Yet, sometimes compromise is necessary if a group is to remain together. In my view, academic debate

has reached a crossroads where failure to compromise will mean the end to community. Stasis tells us that we cannot continue on the present course much longer. On the other hand, if enough participants are willing to leave something at the curb, we might be stronger because of it. Arriving at mutual agreement concerning the advantages of AFC is one such compromise that will allow the twain to meet in a way that debate can flourish well into the 21st century.