By Lincoln Garrett in Debate Musings — Oct 15, 2025

Radical Reform Ideas for College Debate

19 ideas for shaking up the landscape of college debate.

College debate's modus operandi is to do nothing and say we are all out of ideas. No more! I am critical but not a pessimist. I believe college debate can expand, become more interesting and become more fun. Here are some of my ideas, some certainly more speculative than others. Some of these ideas, I am a huge fan of — others, not so much. I also acknowledge that some of these ideas are incompatible with others on the list. With that said —

1. Build the schedule around 4 Grand Slam Tournaments

Right now, we have "majors". We need to borrow from tennis and golf and rebrand 4 key tournaments as Grand Slams. My idea is, let's get people to endow these tournaments for naming rights. The tournament name can stay the same, but the host school can change (if people care about that). That is what happens in golf (the US open is the US open, but it happens at different courses).

This would allow people to win the single season Grand Slam or win a career Grand Slam (winning the four tournaments at some point during their debate career).

These tournaments would need to be spaced out appropriately and be marquee events. 8 prelim rounds. Some sort of outreach and/or networking the Friday before. Good media and content follow up after the tournament is over. Is it not weird that we have had two "major" tournament winners to date, but no one has asked the winning teams how they did it?

If you google "debate team Northwestern tournament" (maybe not the best search, but whatever) you see Oklahoma and Liberty instagram posts, you see Michigan results page and you see MSU, Western Kentucky, North Texas and Kansas press releases among the first two pages of results.

College debate needs to do some work on garnering algorithmic attention. Grand Slam tournaments could help!

You could spice this idea up even more by having each of the four tournaments have slightly different rules or structure. This is what tennis does by playing on three different surfaces. This is what golf does by changing venues or updating courses. More on this kind of idea below.

2. Require a minimum number of debates on the topic for NDT qualification

Is rigor a worthwhile value to prioritize in college debate? How important is sample size? How many rounds teams have going into the NDT would be an interesting trend to study. I would assume the number is going down. One would assume if there was a round requirement to qualify to the NDT, that would influence travel schedules. The number of rounds necessary should be set so as to necessitate at least one or two regional tournaments. I don't have an intuitively great number, but this kind of idea pairs with other ideas like...

3. Get rid of districts

I qualified to the NDT out of districts three times. My sophomore year was the "ideal" case for districts.

NDT qualification should be based on a season of results. Some districts have already phased out a tournament in favor of rankings. This has the benefit of freeing up calendar time for better tournament ideas or better things to do on campus.

Districts will be unnecessary if...

4. Adopt a tennis style ranking system

In tennis, the next tier of tournaments is called "Masters." The top 30 players HAVE to go to these Masters tournaments. What if this style of ranking system determined NDT qualification? I would still just let voters pick the Copeland rankings, but for all other slots use a ranking system like tennis.

5. Alternate use time always

I will be transparent and say that, for me, cross examination is the most overrated part of switch side debate activities. Certainly, some debaters lose the debate because CX is so ethos destroying. Also certainly, you can think of a handful of moments where there was a good back and forth between both teams. I would claim those are exceptions to the rule. I think my opinion is in the minority. I thought my feelings would change since being back. Nope.

If you are in the group that thinks CX is awesome then all tournaments should be alternate use time. For those that do not know — alternate use time is where each team gets a bank of time. When a speech is not occurring one team's alternate use time is running. It can be used for prep or cross examination. Typically, it is 16 minutes (10 minutes of prep + 6 minutes of CX). So you could cross examine the 1AC for 4 minutes if you would like. You could cross examine for 2 minutes total in the debate and prep for 14. Whatever.

If you think cross examination is not so great can I interest you in...

6. Alternative use time but it is 13 instead of 16 minutes

Eh?? Debates would be shorter and thus days would be shorter. This is the least likely to be noticed way to cut a debate down. Think about it!

7. Novice topic

High school LD does a novice topic that repeats every year. For what seemed like a long time, that topic was about civil disobedience, but apparently, they switched it to national service?? Switching around a novice topic too much defeats the point, which is: let's get a repeatable topic where the arguments do not have to be sewn from whole cloth, making it easier to get new novices up to speed. It would also have the benefit of removing novice debate as a consideration from topic deliberations, which otherwise have to serve two completely different constituencies.

Some of the ideas in this article are good but extreme changes. Some are bad ideas. Some are just good ideas that are easy to do. This is one of them!

8. High school times for JV and Novice

This one is also very intuitive to me. Novice debate is about learning and getting people hooked on debate for the long term. Extra speech time is generally wasted because they do not know what they are doing (no fault of their own, just the nature of things). You should be able to just slam through a lot of novice debates. 30 mins of prep pre-round. Judges who can educate but don't need a lot of decision time. And 8-3-5-8 (the last 8 is prep time). That's 80 mins of time. College debates currently are 92 mins. And they get more prep time and decision time. You should be able to do 5 novice debates in the time it takes to do 4 open debates.

If Junior Varsity should exist as a division (a point I can make without being elitist, I debated four tournaments my freshman year of college in JV), it would not hurt to create an incentive to "level up" to varsity as fast as possible. Your reward is more speech time. Teams should spend as little time in JV as possible, if any at all. If the only alternative you can picture to JV debating is debating in open at a major (which some people would argue is a perfectly acceptable outcome) we need to radically expand the offerings and imagination around how we get people hooked on debate.

9. Gimmicks that maybe sound fun to try for one tournament but could devolve quickly

A. Elims done by challenge. Emporia did this back in the day. I never got an accounting of how big a spectacle it was. For me, that is the entire case for it. Everyone must gather. You have to publicly challenge your opponent then you go walk off to your room. You must do this public gathering for every elim debate. I would also like to add that each team needs to carry some kind of trinket or something to serve as a bounty. You win the debate and you collect the loser's bounty. Adds a nice layer of personality to all the proceedings.

B. Everyone has to submit an argument list before the tournament. Your opponent gets your argument list. You get theirs. You each get to strike one thing from the list. They are not allowed to bring that up in the debate.

C. No one gets to read topicality.

D. Everyone reads a plan.

E. No prefs at all at the tournament.

F. Maximum prefs—the top 50 judges each have to judge 8 prelims or whatever. You use the least amount of judges with the highest preference possible.

G. You say there are three topics prior to the tournament. Each round you spin a wheel to determine the topic for the debate.

H. Each round has a different meta rule:

No CP's
Partners have to switch speaker positions
The only thing you can use your computer for is reading tags and the text of evidence
Bricker's positional competition is the law of the land.

10. Get rid of the topic rotation

We should talk about the topic process more broadly another time, but the topic rotation, particularly the legal requirement, does not add value to the process. Picking topics is hard — we don't need to add extra constraints. For some topics, you need to strike when the iron is hot (2009-2010 nukes, election year topics, I would say 2017-18 healthcare, our timing on executive power was prescient and quaint). Topic rotation does not really have a positive case that it promotes fun. It can hurt fun by saying "wait a year on debating that." The case in favor of the rotation is mainly educational, pertaining to breadth of topics. Voting solves that without an ex-ante rule. Voting lets teams express whether they want to debate the same issues or not. It's unclear if domestic/international/legal is the relevant axis for topic area diversity compared to more specific categories like military, diplomatic, economic, and so on. Also, the breadth of topics is less relevant when a majority of teams argue every topic the same way (maybe we should worry about that instead of topic rotations).

11. You cannot break new affirmatives

Everyone just has to send the 1AC that is going to be read at the start of preround preparation. Is it a game, or is it about learning and clash?? Answer the question!!

I would not actually go that far, but I do like you have to send the plan out ahead of time. I have witnessed too many cosmetic changes to plans that are only met to obfuscate. Getting rid of that practice while preserving new affirmatives seems good to me.

12. Judge panel deliberations

Should judges on panels get to talk to each other? If they get to talk to each other, do they have to reach a unanimous decision? If they don't reach a unanimous decision, what should happen?

I like the idea of if you lose unanimously you are out, but if you lose on a split decision you get another go. This would mean we have to make the elims of tournaments double elimination, like it currently works in high school NSDA qualifiers. If you lose on two split decisions you are out.

The only time I ever want to deliberate with judges is in a semifinal or final round environment when I am deliriously tired. I judged the finals of Wake in 2014 between Michigan AP and Northwestern MV and the debate was about dedev.

Fun fact — tabroom has this debate as a 3-2 for the Affirmative from Northwestern. This made me think I was going crazy because I remember this as a 3-2 for the Neg from Northwestern where the 2NC is the cap K and the 1NR is dedev and then the 2NR is dedev. I looked up the docs in my email and I was right, tabroom is wrong. Phew.

Anyway, I might have really screwed Michigan AP in that debate because I was too tired. Really could have used some judge deliberation to double check what I missed.

13. Highest seed always debates the lowest seed every elimination round

This is called reseeding. The NFL is the only major sport that does this in their playoffs. The case for this is that it makes prelim debates more important. There is a real advantage to being the top seed. What this means in practice is that you keep your seed no matter what, you don't take over the higher seed if there is an upset. So if the #1 seed and the 31st seed both win a double octafinal round, they would debate each other in the octafinals. The #1 seed would not debate the 16th seed or whatever like a normal bracket.

14. Side equalization at every tournament

I am pandering with this one because I think coin flips are way more fun. Some sort of shenanigan is much more likely to occur with a coin toss. People will say "nobody has coins." Tournaments can provide coins! It's fine! Add it to the list.

However, there is really no good answer to the argument that coin flips create the possibility that someone wins a tournament on one side, which means that side equalization is a better demonstration of skill. Alas, that argument is pretty good.

I do wish the execution of side equalization was cleaner and that it was easier to understand what is going to happen in the next round.

15. Let teams pick their side, but there is a twist

You get a pairing. It tells you your opponent, but not the sides. That is because you can pick the side you want to be, but you have to bet a certain amount of your prep time. If your opponents bet more prep time than you then their choice of side goes through.

An example — you want to be affirmative. You bet 3 minutes of your prep time. Your opponents want to be negative. They bet 5 minutes. So the debate is you on the affirmative, your opponents are negative but they only get 5 minutes of prep time.

This is fun for a few reasons. First, you have to figure out if you and your opponents want the same thing or not. In the example the opponent got hosed because they could have been negative for free and the affirmative received 7 mins prep instead of 10.

Second fun thing is you can just bet 0 and not care what side you are. Cool flex.

If people bet the same amount or the system breaks or whatever the computer just assigns sides like normal.

16. Berserking a Preset

Berserking in chess is when you forfeit half your time to make moves, but if you win you get double tournament points. Could we make this a thing in debate? The things we must figure out:

Is the reduction in time 50% across all speeches or something else? The key is it has to be disadvantaging to the team beserking and correspond to the prize.

Is the appropriate prize two wins? What else could we do?

Should you only be allowed to berserk in preset rounds?

Do we need a better name than berserk for debate purposes?

17. Loot for accomplishing quests

Should debate tournaments give out more prizes? I think it depends on two factors. What is the prize for and what is the prize? I hosted and organized just an ungodly amount of tournaments in my decade in debate. I tried to innovate on the trophy front on multiple occasions. It is pretty hard, but it is doable. Here are some ideas:

One-of-a-kind tournament branded items. Over the years the scarcity and uniqueness of the item goes up.
Memorabilia acquired by the tournament that relates to the topic.
Somewhat related, but prizes related to "debate celebrities." Like autographed books or some other novelty. One year I ended up with a Bradley Whitford signed script from the West Wing because his son was in my lab. That's not a great example because that's a real celebrity, but you get my point. A better example is the Liberty tournament giving out...Geiger counters (I think that's right?) as speaker awards. Although I am blanking on the topic tie in.
Working with local craftspeople or artists or food people or something. If you went to the Binghamton tournament in certain years you could walk away with a quilt, I think. Winning blankets at debate tournaments is a good one. People hold on to blankets and are very fond of them if they are good.

The second part of this is — are there impressive accomplishments that happen at debate tournaments?

My bounty idea above
Win streaks come to mind, but how long of one is impressive?
Not dropping ballots in elims
What else do people got?

18. One tournament is the experimental one

There might be too much variation between tournaments now. If you think all the tournaments should be the same to produce a big sample size and better know who did the better debating, that's reasonable. However, you do need a mechanism to try new stuff. Professional sports leagues use minor leagues to test out changes in the rules. Obviously, you could not use JV or Novice for experimenting with new constructs BUT you could say the Grand Slam tournaments have to be the same, with the experimenting happening at the regional level.

Alternatively, there could be one tournament that does the experimenting. It could be its own marquee event on the calendar. Maybe it does not factor into first round voting BUT only the top team from a school can enter. You know it is going to be different than any tournament you have debated at before. Maybe the experimental rules come later on in the process, like a big surprise.

You get to the tournament. You gather. It is right before the Round 1 pairings. The tournament director informs you that "Surprise! We are footnoting everything Truf has said about intrinsicness into every debate."

The horror.

19. Consolidate and create a college NSDA

I am not the first person to raise the points I am about to raise. Everything that will be said has already been said, time is a flat circle, and so on. If you want to familiarize yourself with some debate history as written by debate coaches, refer to the articles at the bottom of this page. I will say my imagination is bigger than what any of those articles or conferences gets around to proposing. At the moment, I am not going to lay out this discussion in a comprehensive manner. I find that history relevant and interesting (because I am a nerd), but a topic for another day. For today I am interested in flagging that I am on the side of bold action sooner rather than later. Hopefully writing this can stimulate some real talking and real action down the line.

Right now, there are three organizations that influence how college debate operates — CEDA, ADA and the NDT (some would certainly say the AFA also has to be on this list and it could be a potential solution. Sure, whatever. We can nitty gritty this topic later. I am laying out a vision, not settling a long term debate). These three organizations all use the same topic. For the younger and newer around these parts, that is not always how it worked. Prior to 1996 CEDA and the NDT were two different circuits with different topics. Schools did one or the other (maybe both? I am not sure about that).

From one of the articles below written in 2013:

"A major concern expressed in both conferences was the threat posed by the increasing fragmentation of the forensics community. Correspondingly, a special issue of Speaker and Gavel conjectured on what debate and forensics would be like in the 1980s. The articles in the 1980 Speaker and Gavel repeatedly warned that fragmentation in forensics was threatening the viability of our activity. The arguments held that many forensics groups all speaking as the voice of excellence threatened to leave little more than impotent fiefdoms."

Fiefdoms indeed.

At the moment it is less that there are three different organizations when there does not need to be, and more that there is not any organization that can do enough for college debate. Streamlining would certainly help, but it would not be sufficient to achieve what I seek.

What I would seek is an organization whose mission is to expand competitive and public debate on college campuses. College debate could use its own version of an organization such as NSDA. NSDA's mission and vision are:

"The National Speech & Debate Association connects, supports, and inspires a diverse community committed to empowering students through speech and debate."

And

"We envision a world in which every school provides speech and debate programs to foster each student's communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative skills."

As best I can tell from the website CEDA is about the following:

"One of CEDA's most important functions is to serve as a professional association for scholars and teachers in the field of applied argumentation and debate. In addition to sponsoring scholarly programs on issues of interest to association members at the annual convention of the National Communication Association, CEDA has organized two indigenous scholarly assessment conferences: The 1991 St. Paul 20th Anniversary Assessment Conference, and the 2001 Tahoe Conference on Academic Debate. CEDA also publishes Contemporary Argumentation and Debate: The Journal of the Cross Examination Debate Association, a refereed scholarly journal that serves as the primary outlet for monographs and essays addressing issues related to the theory and practice of academic debate."

You kind of see the difference?

How this situation came about is no surprise. If you read about debate's history from debate coaches you will read the same things I am about to say. Stuff is expensive and getting more so. Being a debate coach or a director is a hard job that is mostly under-resourced. There is a time, money and energy crunch. College debate has fragmentation issues. That was true in the 80's, that was glossed over in the 90's with CEDA and the NDT merging and has been the case for this millennium. Tournaments now have more teams representing fewer schools. This trend is not unique to the moment. Many articles flag this sort of thing in different eras.

At its core, college debate needs an organization that is truly in its corner. The two big deficits in college debate are advocacy and fundraising. These jobs are both fraught and difficult.

College debate needs an organization that makes the case for debate. Why is competitive debate good? Why is having more debaters on your campus good? Why is open debate important for a college campus? Why should debate be used in the classroom? Why do we need debate in an AI world? How can it be that educational institutions claim increasing critical thinking as a goal, but organized debate is in decline?

Debate needs to advocate for itself. You see leaders of sports organizations do this. You see labor leaders do this. To my knowledge college debate has never had a real mechanism to shape the perception of the activity. You need a position that relentlessly promotes debate and shamelessly defends it from slander, in public. Whose job is it to respond and comment on articles that do damage to debate? If debaters are targeted with harassment who is going to defend them?

Debate needs to expand its sphere of influence. What do we do with all the research done on a topic when it is over? It is not that debate produces its own research, but highlighting what debate does best — evaluate arguments and assess arguments from multiple sides. Debate is also unique in the way it synthesizes arguments, no other activity brings authors and articles into conversation with one another like debate. This wealth of knowledge about arguments across a wide breadth of topics could be a resource for the general public. Why shouldn't debaters and coaches be considered thought leaders?

College debate needs an organized network of supporters. Proactive programs are working on this angle individually to secure their future. Debate as an activity needs a similar focus. Current debaters, potential debaters, alumni, academics, civilian supporters, professionals from sectors where debaters concentrate. You need a network of people to demonstrate clout to universities. You need a strong network to achieve financial and growth goals.

College debate needs a strategy for the attention economy. This is tough work as well. However, there are so many avenues that could be pursued as well. Publicizing and expanding the footprint of tournament is the most obvious one. Forming a symbiotic relationship with academics to highlight their work. You can have and highlight substantive debates. You can comment on how other people debate. You can have meta-discussions about argument, communication, persuasion and debate. Having something to talk about is not the issue, it is about having an engaging form (which again, is a challenge, but the only way to solve it is by trying stuff).

Here is an example. In the state of Florida, they are talking about getting rid of property taxes. Florida Republicans are saying stuff like this:

https://x.com/ThomasSowell/status/1976755869753766390

How could debate demonstrate its worth with something like this? You could talk about property taxes, you could talk about models of government finance, you could talk about choices and tradeoffs. Lots of public policy issues to discuss. But you could also talk about the substance and persuasiveness of specific arguments. Does DeSantis's analogy about sales tax and TVs make any sense in this context? Every time you see something circulate and your reaction is "this shit must hit so hard if you're stupid" then you have discovered something where debate can demonstrate the value of critical thinking.

It is easy to point out barriers to things. Even if we were all not debaters, it would still be easy. Instead of doing that and garnering the predictable results college debate has been living with for decades I propose we change the balance of forces to help create a radically reimagined activity that is more vibrant than it has ever been.