Hopkin,Wes

I am a Junior at Harvard College and have been involved with debate for the past 8 years. I have judged at the Harvard LD tournament for the past three years. In 2008 I adjudicated the Varsity LD Final and in 2009 I chaired the JV LD Final.

I have a strong preference for individuals to actively clash with their opponent's case. Don't just posit a competing value premise or criterion without actually giving me compelling reasons to prefer yours. Moreover it is important in my mind that arguments in the round should link back to the original premises and criterions posited by both sides. I am perfectly amenable to sort of giving you the benefit of the doubt and skipping a few steps to get the link but the best debaters in my opinion don't force the judges to make those leaps in the argument. I'm not particularly impressed by those who can speak at a mile a minute, or by those who choose to use overly technical language in their speeches. I am also not impressed by Kritiks which in my opinion are just non-responsive at best or completely incomprehensible at worst. I prefer when debaters do not rely on excessive cards as warrants, if you present a compelling, logical case you really shouldn't need any outside warrant and if you are making strange assertions or assumptions that would require proof it's often hard for me to evaluate their validity. Honestly just because some apparent authority said it doesn't make a bad argument any more compelling. Furthermore I very much dislike simply name-dropping a particular thinker without actually explaining what argument that person advances or why it is important. In my experience the people who do that tend to over-generalize the argument of those thinkers and often present something that Kant or Foucault would actually disagree with. As a style note I quite prefer when people come off as relaxed and easy-going. It is just a debate tournament after all and while we do want to win, debate is also about having fun and engaging in an intellectual activity.

In a nutshell, to quote a friend of mine, I like good arguments and dislike bad arguments.