Philip II, king of Macedon, had the reputation of being a heavy drinker. Once when drunk he gave an unjust verdict in the case of a woman who was being tried before him. "I appeal!" cried the unfortunate litigant. "To whom?" asked the monarch, who was also the highest court in the land. "From Philip drunk to Philip sober," was the bold reply. The king, taken aback, agreed to reconsider his decision.
How often we have wished judges would reconsider unjust decisions. Most of the time, of course, what we consider "unjust" is defendable and appropriate. In N.F.L. extemporaneous speaking contest rounds those who deserve to win almost always do. But the exceptions deserve our attention and action, not our tolerant bemusement.
SELF-CREATED PROBLEMS
Most losses are due to three factors: lack of experience, lack of work, and/or lack of knowledgeable coaching. But students who are otherwise prepared to win still can grasp defeat from the jaws of victory by falling into several common traps.
First on our list of self-created mistakes is the reuse or recycling of an old speech. Experience does teach good students that analysis, organization, and sources almost always overlap when topics are drawn from the same topic area (e.g. most education topics overlap with each other). But failure to update and change key information and key analysis invites defeat. And often one speech is used when the topic question has shifted. At one N.F.L. District last year the topic was on "special educational needs of ghetto minority students" but the contestant just recycled his standard speech on America's weak educational system and the need for curriculum reform.
Number two on our list of shame is the speaker's refusal to answer the topic question. This grievous error takes a variety of forms. The most common and blatant is spending the majority of the speech describing the problem and its causes. Since research reveals problems much more quickly than good solutions or answers this is an easy trap to fall into.
But too often otherwise intelligent contestants will fall into a different trap. The young man or woman will spend equal time giving arguments for and against different courses of action and then literally invite the judge to decide which course is best. This "both sides" stance is often given a low rank because it consciously avoids answering the topic question.
And then there is the speaker who answers the topic query in the last minute of the speech. Such an approach does, in the most literal sense, answer the topic. But it does not allow the judge to follow a cogent early stated position followed but a well articulated advocacy of that position. At best it forces the judge to search back through his/her notes and memory to access if the conclusion was justified.
John Newborn's Law tells us that "People can be divided into three groups: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened." Almost all mistakes will be corrected by good students and coaches. Ballots and experience will teach champion extempers what they need to do to learn and win. But what about true claims of injustice?
JUDGE-CREATED PROBLEMS
Seven questionable practices checker the history of judges' justice in extemporaneous speaking. First is the toleration of erroneous speech content. To award a major victory, and in at least one case a National Championship, to a speech checkered with incorrect statistics and inaccurate source citations does a disservice to the event.
A more common and understandable mistake is to award the top rank to a contestant who has superior fluency and personality, at the expense of a student whose content shows superior depth and knowledge. To award the victory to form over substance is to teach the wrong lesson. Such an approach resurrects Athen's charges against the Sophists; it rewards Plato's shadows in the cave over the real figures that created the shadows; it teaches that what you say is not important. If the primary goal of the event is to teach fluency and delivery then we surrender the intellectual justification for extemp as a separate event.
Next is the inattention some judges give to source quantity and quality. Some respected and experienced coaches argue that the number of sources consulted is unimportant, that they are more concerned with original thought and analysis than with "turning extemp into a fluent article report". But surely solid analysis demands that a diversity of sources and opinions be consulted. Are we to believe that crucial statistics and unusual insights can be found solely or primarily in a student speaker's "general knowledge"? We should not teach our students that knowledge is best gained through intuition and plagiarized ideas from unacknowledged publications. Quality leadership and educational goals demand more. To give our top honors to those who cite few sources is to encourage shallow thought and research, weakby William H. Bennett be found solely or primarily in a speaker's "general knowledge"? We should not teach our students that knowledge is best gained through intuition and plagiarized ideas from unacknowledged publications. Quality leadership and educational goals demand more. To give our top honors to those who cite few sources is to encourage shallow thought and research, weaknesses which experts continuously remind us plague our educational and business communities already.
And what of source quality? Extemp preparation rooms, even at the National Championships, overflow with Time, U.S. News, Newsweek and similar shallow, exploitative secondary sources (See, for example, the biting, documented criticisms of these magazines in the book EVIDENCE by Robert and Dale Newman.) Many judges seem to frank citations from these "sources" as being on a par with the New York Times (ranked number one in accuracy and quality for eight of ten years in repeated polls of American news editors and writers) and scholarly journals, books, and international publications.
Then there is the repeated problem of judges who vote on the basis of reputation. It is a very human action. We all, after all, want to avoid criticism. And what is more defendable than to give the winning rank to the person whom everyone expects to win? When one of the contestants is a former national qualifier (or, at nationals, a person who was in finals the previous year) all but the most secure judges will tend to ballot for the person with the established record. Often this person will deserve the decision but too often s/he receives an undeserved first because the judge lacks the fortitude or insight necessary to give the proper ranking.
And there are the blatant cases of judge bias. Year after year there are first-hand accounts of judges judging students with whom they are strongly affiliated. Most often these seem to be examples of parents or alumni from school A judging students from school A, or coaches from a summer camp judging students from that camp. These incidents have occurred at regional tournaments, large numbers of N.F.L. qualifiers, and Nationals itself. It is hard to defend any ethical basis to this action, especially on the part of the judge since s/he is the one who most assuredly knows the inherent image of moral turpetitude.
Finally, we have the question of inconsistent rule application. Occasionally it is a question of rules being ignored entirely. Some preparation room supervisors check for predone outlines, some do not. The rules on highlighting in different colors to create an outline are sometimes ignored. And, at the other extreme, are prep rooms that create their own rules. In one southwestern district preparation room supervisors went in before extemp was scheduled to start (while the first debate round was going on)and without permission of the owners opened and "inspected" some students files. Then, upon finding some outlines that had not yet been removed, harangued the students when they returned from their debate round and then punished them by occasionally refusing to answer their questions about schedules and rules while the extemp section of the tournament was in progress. At the National Tournament some procedures shift yearly, depending upon the people in charge, the assertiveness of students and their coaches, and the mood of the leadership.
Late in his life J.A. Froude commented that "Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes." We have made our share of mistakes so what have we been taught? How can we do better?
The major step is to share the results of our collective experience. We make ourselves better coaches and judges by rectifying the mistakes described in the earlier section of this article. We coach our students not to reuse old speeches, to always answer the topic question, to answer the topic question early and clearly. As judges we must be sure to learn enough about current events to catch erroneous content and to reward content above fluency and personality. We learn to assign student rankings based on source quality and quantity, to avoid voting on reputation and to refuse to judge those we hold a bias for or against.
But how are these principles passed on to new judges, to new coaches? Three methods deserve consideration. First, ballots must be modified to reflect these problems and solutions. Second, experienced coaches must render timely assistance to new coaches. Oregon's Mentor program is an excellent model to follow. At the fall Speech Association meeting each new coach is assigned an experienced coach, a mentor, to help improve his or her comfort and skills. Learning how to be a good judge can certainly be a crucial part of every such program.
Thirdly, judging assignments must be made in a more objective and information based manner. All judges should be required to fill out simple cards listing current and prior school affiliations and those of their children (plus any camp affiliations) as a preliminary check on their objectivity. Whenever possible judges meetings of about 1-2 hours length should be held the night before, or at the start of the tournament to review the most important guidelines for judging each event well.
Prep room problems require solutions drawn from increased professionalism and consistency of rule application. There is no substitute for maturity and objectivity in running the preparation area; it is not a place to assign the young, or inexperienced, or those with any agenda other than to be fair andconsistent. For N.F.L. Districts this means that each committe must select people to run the room who know the rules and will administer them in an impartial, consistent manner that follows the letter of our rule book.
Offering such solutions is easy. but, like many affirmative plans and extemp speech solutions the real test is application. If we don't work harder to improve the quality of extemp judging we risk turning it into another biased, sophistic exercise that demeans the intent of our association.
(William Bennett has coached numerous national champions in extemp. He chairs C.D.E. National Institute.)
