Diab,+Kenan

Kenan Diab Hawken School

I debated for four years (2004-2007), one for University School and three for Hawken. As a debater, I traveled on the national circuit sporadically, mostly attending large quarter/octafinal bid tournaments (e.g. Glenbrooks, Minneapple, Emory, Greenhill, ...). I have judged only one tournament this year. With this in mind, here is my paradigm. Maximize your utility accordingly:

1) Speed: As a debater, I was usually pretty fast and could handle my own medicine, but now I am somewhat out of practice. Thus, I generally prefer slower rounds, but I won't mind speed so long as you are crystal clear. If you are being unclear, I will yell "clear" once or twice, but after that, it will begin to affect your speaks. I will not pay attention to any argument I did not understand during your speech. I will not read evidence or argumentation that you did not articulate clearly after the round.

2) Argumentation: I prefer substantive debates that are clearly about the resolution. I don't think positions that can always operate independently of your opponent's argumentation are valid in LD. I am not receptive to silly positions that ask me to change the rules of the game (e.g. 30 point overviews, kritiks of time limits). Besides that, I will listen to practically anything. However, I am not on top of the critical literature by any stretch of the imagination; I am now a particle physicist, not a philosophy major. If you are making a nuanced, subtle philosophical point, you have to make all pieces of the argument very clear.

3) Theory: I don't like theory debates very much. I understand that there are situations that require it, and in those circumstances, I will be understanding about it. Usually, however, I don't usually feel comfortable or competent at judging when the round comes down to that. At least in my day, it seemed as though theory arguments were rampantly abused as time sucks. Given my personal distaste for this kind of argumentation, I am highly willing to pull the trigger on an RVI under the right circumstances.

4) Decision calculi and weighing: You have to tell me how to adjudicate the round. If you're going to deviate from "traditional debate", you need to set up and justify whatever framework you'd like me to use explicitly and completely. If you're not, you need to tell me the most important properties or tests I should be considering/using to decide which advocacy is more desirable, and then you need to explicitly weigh competing claims against those yardsticks. In any case, both debaters must provide and justify a clear hierarchy for evaluating arguments in the round. The debate should not require me to guess which of twelve areas of the flow is the most important. Absent this, I will a) mark down your speaker points and b) default to a "traditional" paradigm where I subjectively evaluate the desirability of the affirmative and negative advocacies relative to whatever semblance of framework was established in the round. Failing even that, I will literally flip a coin.

5) Formalities: I don't care at all. Stand up or sit down in CX. Use flex prep if your opponent agrees to it. Whatever. If you are mean or rude in your round, however, your speaks will suffer (see #6), and if you egregiously bad about this, I will intervene with my ballot.

6) Speaker points: My mean speaker point assignment is high (probably around 28), but the standard deviation is large (probably about 2.5). I richly reward good debaters, but severely punish bad ones.

If you have any further questions, ask me in round.