Tournament Report: Hobart and William Smith Fall Classic

A Short Report 

on the Hobart and William Smith Fall Classic

by Peter Kipp, Professor, Department of English Literature, Ewha Womans University

Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS), located in Geneva, New York, holds a pre-season BP tournament each year.  Basically, it’s like the type of intervarsity (IV) tournament that the KIDA council is encouraging our schools to host.  I attended this year, on Sept. 15 – 16, as an independent adjudicator.  I really should have taken photos—but am totally out of the habit of doing that.  Still, I hope the following observations will be of interest to KIDA members.

Outline of the Tournament:

Date: Sept 15-16

Style: British Parliament

Team cap: No team cap, 32 teams participated

# of Prelim Rounds: 5

Convener: Anna Dorman (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

CA: Eric Barnes (Coach, Hobart and William Smith Colleges)

This year’s event featured 32 teams (including two swing teams from the host school) from eight colleges: HWS, Cornell, Colgate, the University of Rochester, and Patrick Henry College—all from the USA, and Wilfred Laurier College, Queens University, and Hart House from Canada.  There was a mix of rookie teams and experienced teams (including winners of national-level tournaments last year).  Regular BP tournaments in North America are held in separate circuits for the U.S. and Canada, and those in the U.S. run in conjunction with policy debate tournaments, but this was only BP.

I’m not sure what sort of system there is (if any) for keeping track of points or declaring someone a champion in BP, but I do know that the points for policy debate add up during the whole season and make a difference in who gets to go to national championships and who doesn’t.  From talking to debaters, though, it seemed like most of them were treating this as a chance to warm up “off the record,” and, in some cases, for policy debaters to try out a different genre.

Motions and Results:

R1:  THS the use of torture by democratic regimes.

R2: THS efforts to increase human cognitive abilities using genetic manipulation.

R3: THB the US should make ownership of functional handguns illegal.

R4: Given the choice [i.e.: only these two choices], THB that a nuclear-armed Iran is preferable to a US invasion of Iran.

R5: THW allow individuals to opt out of social security.

Semifinal and Rookie Final: THW allow gladiatorial mortal combat as a professional sport.

Grand Final: THB that fashion magazines do more harm to women than pornographic magazines.

Results:

There was no team cap, and nearly half of the teams in the whole tournament were from Cornell, which seems to have a pretty strong debate club.  In the rookie final, all four teams were Cornell teams.

Main Break:

Two teams from Hart House, three from Queens, and three from Cornell

1^st seed, Hart House (Vince and Murphy), 15 points

2^nd seed, Cornell, 13 points

The rest of breaking teams had 11 or 10 points

Semi-Finalists:

Two teams from Hart House, two from Queens

Grand Champion:

Queens(Kaya Ellis and Will Gibson)

Second Place:

Queens (Amelia McLeod and Katherine Fu)

Best Debate:

The best one I saw was the semifinal featuring the 2^nd, 3^rd, 6^th, and 7^th ranked teams.  I attribute this to the fact that it was a semifinal (rather than a final, where the teams tend to be more tired and more nervous at the same time), plus the topic (topics that seem crazy at first often make the best debates).

Anyone who has debated for a while will probably be able to guess at some of the clashes; the main ones were freedom of choice vs. government responsibility to guarantee safety, plus the question of how extensively and in what way violent sports (especially viewership of them) impacts society.  All four teams did an excellent job, with the only easy decision on the part of the judges (I was one of them) being that the Opening Government should not advance—though they had a clear case setup and gave really humorous speeches, they didn’t add a lot of depth to their arguments.

The eventual decision was that both closing half teams would advance.  Though Opening Opposition did a good job of discussing impacts on young people, lower socioeconomic classes, and minority groups—and thus also calling the idea of informed consent into question—their arguments also didn’t have enough depth to fully counter government bench questions about where they saw a justification for denying free choice when other dangerous activities (such as joining the military or participating in other violent contact sports) also were seen as legitimate despite having greater impacts on the same groups.  That work of rebuttal was partly done by Opening Government, but fully fleshed out and explained in the closing half.  Closing Government and Closing Opposition, in contrast, both offered somewhat greater depth of reasoning than Opening Opp., and Closing Opp. (the eventual tournament champions, from Queens) also offered some arguments about the extent of governments and laws in setting moral precedents and the impacts on society of commodifying death for entertainment that seemed very insightful and strong.

It’s hard to describe the real excellence of this debate, even in a paragraph as long and full of big words as that last one, because the summary labels I gave to arguments don’t really capture their quality or the depth of analysis and example that were used to support them.  This was a debate equal in quality to anything I’ve seen anywhere—Worlds included.

By comparison, the grand final was only about as good as the best debates at KNC—still good, to be sure, but not world class.  One nice touch in the final, though, was the OG’s reference to the semifinal motion in opening the debate: “In the semifinals of this tournament, Canada met the USA in mortal combat, and emerged victorious.”  The final also saw the tournament’s other best one-liner in response to a POI:

POI from CO (in the context of a clash over whether women are more empowered to talk about pornography’s influence on their lives or fashion’s influence on their lives): “Women can talk about fashion magazines with anybody, any time, but they can never talk about sex.”

Answer from MG: “I don’t who you have sex with—but when I have sex, I certainly talk about it with my partner.”

Tournament Atmosphere:

• I was very much an outsider at this tournament—knowing exactly nobody (I saw the announcement on the Internet and just wrote to the convener to see if I could go as an independent judge)—so I can’t comment in depth, but people seemed to be having a good time.  Teams generally sat together in the briefing room, without too much running back and forth to talk to people from other schools, but that may be partly because at least half the teams were rookies, and they probably didn’t even know all of their own teammates yet.

• Food was just so-so, and there were no social events, per se.  One nice aspect of the tournament was the plentiful donuts, bananas, bagels, and coffee provided each morning.  There was enough coffee to last through the afternoon, and that got me through the day on Saturday, since I had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to drive to the tournament, and hadn’t slept well the night before.  Saturday lunch was cold pizza.  Saturday dinner was scheduled to be provided, but, when the tournament ran late, dinner was cancelled along with R5, and everyone just let out early.  Sunday lunch was subway sandwiches.  All this was for a $50.00 registration fee—and I think people in Korea might have complained if they had their Saturday dinner cancelled after paying that much.  But, nobody at the HWS tournament seemed to mind.  Rob Snowe from Patrick Henry was even raving the next morning about the great Indian restaurant he went to with his team the night before.  I think the operating assumption in the U.S. is that everyone hosts one tournament a year, and it’s OK if they charge a bit extra on the registration fee and use it as a team fundraiser.  Maybe that’s something we can consider at KIDA?

• Though the food seemed a bit sparse, I have to say the trophies were very nice.  Best speakers (top 3 rookies & top 10 open division) got big art pieces of blown stained glass (Murano style) mounted on solid wooden bases with the tournament and award name on a brass plate.  Semifinalists got carved wooden boxes with brass plates.  Finalists and above got big enameled dishes with brass plates.  Unlike other BP tournaments I’ve been to, there were also awards for a second place team in both the novice (rookie) and main divisions.

• I met one Korean guy from Cornell, Daniel Yoon, who said that he had judged at a YTN tournament during vacation and was hoping to be back in Korea in the future to do more debate work.  He is regularly a policy debater, but went to this tournament to practice BP and learn more about Parli style.  There seemed to be a few other Koreans on the Cornell team as well, because, at one point, everyone was watching Psy’s “Oppa Kangnam Style” video, and all the non-Koreans were asking a lot of questions.  Score one for Korean pride!

• North American teams travel a long way to tournaments (Patrick Henry College is in Virginia—a seven or eight hour drive away), so it wasn’t surprising to see several schools leave after the break announcement (remember that only three colleges had teams break).  The U. of R. stayed to watch the semifinals, but only the Canadians were left by the finals (plus me, and a few of the HWS debaters).  So, it’s not just in Korea that debaters leave a tournament early.  That said, since it’s pretty easy for most of us to get home from tournaments (if they’re in Seoul, anyway—I know this is changing), I think it would be nice if more people stayed to watch semifinals and finals in our country.

* Thank you Professor Kipp for your contributing article to KIDA Talks. :)