Harkins,+Caroline

I am currently an assistant debate coach at Dartmouth College. I debated four years at Dartmouth and throughout high school. I am not very familiar with the high school topic this year, but I taught at the Dartmouth Debate Institute and Workshop this summer and judged 20-30 debates on the topic then.

Here are some things that might be helpful:

-Debate what and the way you want. I will work as hard as I can to accommodate.

-Topicality—Fair warning, my threshold for voting on topicality is higher than most. Neg's need to prove that the Affirmative plan is unreasonable to debate. That being said, I will and have voted on T, and I prefer limits over grounds arguments.

-Theory—I tend to think conditionality is ok. PICS, AIKs, and condition CPs are also ok if they are specific. In general, the more likely an argument is to promote laziness or the less it is grounded in the literature, the more willing I will be to vote against the argument. The states counterplan is probably okay, but I can be persuaded otherwise more easily on this argument than others. If you want to argue this, I'm most persuaded by literature and laziness arguments.

-I like smart arguments. Preferably they’re carded, but they don’t have to be. Smart analytics beat bad cards and bad arguments. Offense-defense discussions tend to become excessive and come at the expense of substantive arguments.

-I don’t really have a K/policy preference. For both, the more specific the argument and evidence the better. You can make up for this with persuasive spin in some instances, but I tend to dislike generic Ks, disads, and counterplans that require little-to-no topic-specific research.