KFM

College Policy Debate finds itself at the convergence of many ripples in the pond of the American Academy over the last 40 years. Argumentative innovations, the growing complexity of academic scholarship, the and the advent of Urban Debate Leagues, are among the factors that brought us an era in which students can “hack” the rules of debate by reading an Affirmative advocacy indicting the activity of Policy Debate in the finals of a national championship and win (Kraft, 2014). The advocacies are known as the Kritik. Teams that have won national championships by using the Kritik, such as Towson, Georgetown, Rutgers, and Emporia owe their success to a long-legacy of scholars, coaches, and supporters who created cracks in the door of Policy Debate and set the stage for the modern era. Proponents of College Policy Debate (CPD) have traditionally vaunted what I call the PlanFocus Model of Debate (PFM). Within the PlanFocus Model, the Affirmative team proposes a Plan of action to solve an inherent problem in the status quo that is causing significant harm. The Plan is as an example of the larger Resolution, or topic, that debate organizations craft and vote on for a year of debate. Resolutions almost exclusively center on what the United States federal government should do about problems ranging from immigration, to democracy assistance, land use, and alternative energy. The PFM is argued to provide competitors with longterm research, decision-making, and critical thinking skills by debating both sides of the Resolution with well-reasoned arguments (Freeley & Steinberg 2013). Alternatively, proponents of the Kritik do not believe that the debate must center on a Plan of action by the government. Instead, Kritik debaters introduce arguments linked to philosophical questions raised by the Resolution, the debate community, and the norms and procedures of debate. These two competing camps are engaged in an ongoing culture war known as the Clash of Civilizations which segregates the community along pedagogical, and often racial, lines (Dillard-Knox, 2014, Pg 6). Those who sit in the traditionalist camp have been regularly accused of avoiding, rather than engaging, the arguments presented by teams that read the Kritik by objecting to the content of Kritikal arguments as a distraction from the Resolution (Odekirk & Reid Brinkley,2012). The culture war intensified in 2013 when Emporia SW “United the Crowns” of CPD by winning both the Cross-Examination Debate Association and National Debate Tournament championships in the same season with two different Kritik Affirmatives. While this affirmed efforts to diversify debate and to validate the Kritik, it also shattered the glass ceiling over Kritik arguments and minority success in debate at-large. Uniting the Crowns spilled over to other evidentiary debate like Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, and some forms of College Parliamentary Debate. Moreover, representatives of the debate community, including recent National Debate Tournament Champions from traditionalist and predominantly white institutions, publicly denigrate Kritik debate and scapegoated it for a decline in participation. Others have made this same claim even though the biblical end of the event has been prophesied since at least the early 1980’s – much earlier than any modern debaters or Kritiks were even thought of (Herbeck, n.d.; Parson, 1996; Louden,1997). The American University remains under fire and will face renewed financial and political pressure because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The CPD community is not exempt from these concerns and will face increased visibility due the upcoming season of online debate. Together, all these things serve as a reminder to justify the learning community we have created. A reasonable fear of we who are” diversity-enhancing” is that the traditionalists who disengage from us and our pedagogical goals now will not defend our programs tomorrow. Kritikal debate does not have a direct and singular academic defense of our model. Extant literature on the Kritik is focused on recording history, creating and documenting important theoretical and cultural justifications for Kritikal arguments, engaging in rhetorical criticism, responding to racial hostility , or discussing Kritik innovations (Mitchell, 1998;Haig, 2005a; Haig, 2005b; Reid-Brinkley, 2008; Polson, 2012; Reid-Brinkley, 2012; Smith, 2013; Vincent, 2013; Alston, et.al. 2014; Dillard-Knox, 2014; James, 2017; Kelsie, 2019) My research into this question shows that the CPD community, and proponents of the Kritik specifically, spend insufficient time describing pedagogical value to those outside of our community( Llano, 2014). A priority must be to mount an internal defense of the Kritik-Focus Model (KFM) of debate. A second priority must be translating that defense to external actors. This paper will serve both goals, in part, as an addition to the literature on the Kritik that explicates some of the pedagogical benefits of the KFM.