Policy debate topic change controversies in the U.S. and Japan

ABSTRACT

In academic policy debate, annual resolutions focus research, facilitate argument development, and enable extensive preparation by participants. Little wonder, then, that calls to change resolutions mid-season tend to spark controversy and reflection. For example, citing strategic Cold War considerations, several branches of the U.S. military pressed the Speech Association of America to change the National Debate Tournament (NDT) NDT topic on recognition of communist China in 1954. Many called for the 2001–2002 NDT resolution dealing with U.S. policy toward Native Americans to be changed in the wake of the September 11, 2001 airline attacks. In Japan, debate officials withdrew the previously announced high school policy debate topic on nuclear power in arguing that it would be “educationally inappropriate” to debate such issues in the midst of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011. Where do calls for mid-season topic change originate? What motivates them? What explains whether they result in mid-season adjustments? Original archival research exploring such questions promises to contribute relevant content to the historical record, as well as shed light on perennial questions regarding policy debate's status and role as a community of practice in the wider world.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy debate
• topic selection
• Japan
• education
• Fukushima

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In some respects, this frequent topic churning mirrors contemporary practice in parliamentary interscholastic debating, where tournament organizers develop a slate of motions to unveil at competitions, sometimes just minutes before contest rounds are scheduled to begin (see, e.g. Eckstein and Llano 2016).

2. The cover page of past tournament booklets (both district qualifiers and nationals) lists official supporter companies and organizations including the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC) and individual electric power companies in their districts and localities.

3. National Association of Debate in Education, “Invitation to 2004 Debate Koshien and District Qualifiers.” Retrieved from http://nade.jp/koshien/2004/20040420.html. Accessed 17 April 2011.

4. Incidentally, “Resolved: That Japan should abolish nuclear power plants” was the national intercollegiate debate topic for the latter half of the 2011 debate season. To the best of our knowledge, no tournament host was criticized for making participants debate this seemingly insensitive topic and, unlike high school competition, no college competition (at least during this season) was supported or sponsored by the power companies or the FEPC.

5. Kaminoseki's planning of a new nuclear power plant construction has long been a subject of national media attention and debate.

6. David Marshall's (2010) account of rhetorical sublimation explains how discursive transformations can take place in ways that mimic an alchemical change from solid to gas (and vice versa). For Marshall, this concept provides a tool for understanding how Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico reconfigured his treatment of rhetoric in later works, dropping the term from the surface of his text, yet re-integrating rhetoric's key tenets in a new theoretical substructure. In a similar fashion, the themes and energy from national topic change controversies have become sublimated in local contest rounds, where debaters increasingly call for review of the structures, attitudes, and traditions that undergird the community of practice. Kathryn Olson and Thomas Goodnight's (1994) work on controversy supports this approach to rhetorical sublimation, showing how moments of intellectual contestation can sometimes grow beyond their original parameters, drawing the entire system of communication and social practice into question.

7. The “outward activist turn” in U.S. policy debate took shape as a collective initiative in the spring of 2003, when nearly 200 members of the intercollegiate policy debate community signed a petition to presidential advisor (and former high school debater) Karl Rove decrying the Bush administration's debating tactics in justifying war on Iraq. That petition was delivered to Capitol Hill on July 9, 2003, with Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), introducing it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and publishing the full text of the petition, along with the names and affiliations of signatories, two days later (see Kucinich, 2003). In a similar vein, the University of Texas's activist project on the Flood Action Plan sought to link contest round advocacy with collective mobilization beyond the tournament grid (see Goodman, 1993).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gordon R. Mitchell

Gordon R. Mitchell is an associate professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh.

Taylor Hahn

Taylor Hahn is director of the MA program in the School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Satoru Aonuma

Satoru Aonuma is associate professor Of English Language, Culture & Literature, Tsuda University.