The Evolution of Public Forum Debate: Structural Changes
- Aahana Gupta
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
Public Forum debate was invented in 2002, named after Ted Turner (founder of CNN). In the two decades since its inception, nearly every aspect of it has changed, from the very foundations of the activity to the people who compete in it. In this five-part series, you will learn more about the evolution of Public Forum debate and how it’s become the activity it is today. This is Part 1: Structural Changes in Public Forum Debate.
#1 -- Three-Minute Summaries
The three-minute summary was piloted during the 2019-2020 season. According to the NSDA, “The purpose of extending summary speech time is to open up the debate for more substantive responses to issues that arise in rebuttals.” For the most part, the debate community seems to agree that the three minute summary did allow for better debates. Dylan Morgan, an assistant coach at Theodore Roosevelt, explains that the two minute summary “promoted spreading in summary which shouldn’t be forced, prevented depth, and it caused all this sticky defense stuff which made debate more confusing.” Increasing summary times also differentiated the speech from the final focus, making the round more interesting and less repetitive.
However, Sophia Gustafson, a coach at Iowa City West, cautions that “It encourages students to be less mindful and less aware of their word economy…at the lower levels of debate you see more rambling and not collapsing.” However, she still believes that at the higher levels of debate, especially on the national circuit, longer summaries have granted teams the opportunity to flesh out arguments and have more clash, overall leading to a more educational debating experience.
#2 -- Debate Topics
One of the most foundational aspects of Public Forum are the topics of debate. According to the NSDA, the goal of PF is to “debate varying resolutions…which exposes students to a variety of topics.” However, early resolutions rarely deviated from talking about domestic issues. While early PF topics sometimes had an international focus, it almost always related back to the United States as the actor or the entity being affected. The first topic that was exclusively international came in February of 2006. The next fully international topic didn’t come until January of 2014. Over time, resolutions have shifted their focus from domestic issues to also be inclusive of more international points of contention. Lydia Magalhaes, a coach and experienced judge at Des Moines Christian, experienced this shift first hand. She recounts how when she was debating, “You couldn’t get through four years of high school debate without talking about the electoral college. Now, we’ve had two or three topics about Taiwan within the past three years alone.” Parker Klyn (head coach at Theodore Roosevelt) agrees, stating that “PF topics are generally just kind of policy topics now, but there used to be more value-based ones as well.” Some examples include the January 2008 topic, which was “Resolved: In a democracy, civil disobedience is an appropriate weapon in the fight for justice.” Another example would be the November 2015 topic “Resolved: In response to the current crisis, a government should prioritize the humanitarian needs of refugees over its national interests” which is arguably one of the last (if not the last) morality-based topics. PF resolutions also became much more expansive, both in the scope of potential arguments and in the scope of their impacts. Overall, this shift has led to changes in the debates that occur, affecting the types of arguments that teams are reading and the type of literature and evidence that they use to support their contentions.
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