Combat Philosophy
Bard Debate Union team gains national recognition
By J.p. Lawrence
When the Bard Debate Union Team walks into a room, people notice. Every other debate team dresses in suits and dresses. Polo shirts and khakis, at least. But the Bard team’s duds are jeans, ripped shirts and goofy hats.
Anna Daniszewski is a Bard debater. She’s pretty good, for a rookie. She and Max Taylor-Milner, her debate partner, form one of the top-20 novice policy debate teams in the entire country.
Daniszewski, a first-year, recently won 11th place at the Novice National Championships. Taylor-Milner, also a first-year, won 6th. They and the rest of Bard’s Debate Union team have won 14 total awards over the last semester, including multiple top-10 speaker awards.
They’re not your average debate team. No. They are combat philosophers. Critical warriors. Fast-talking, chain-smoking, Heidegger-reading hipsters. Over the last year, they’ve walked into rooms filled with future colonels, politicians and lawyers, and they’ve won.
“We’re probably the coolest kids at these tournaments,” says Mike Luxemburg, one of the team’s coaches, “or at least, the least nerdy.”
Luxemburg is the team sensei. A junior at Bard, he was once a big-deal debater himself. He says Ruth Zisman, the new debate coach, asked him and junior Sam Jaffe-Goldstein to come out of retirement to coach. The job: teach these two novices.
“We literally had no idea what we were going into,” Daniszewski says. They had joined the team on a whim. They showed up to their first tournament with no practice debates under their belt. They massacred the first team they met.
They got better as the year progressed. With Zisman, Luxemburg and Jaffe-Goldstein as their guides, Daniszewski and Taylor-Milner say they learned how to make complicated arguments and how to grind through all-day debates: five grueling rounds, one after another, like five final exams in one day.
They learned in time to talk like locomotives. Debaters read cards from bins filled with evidence and counter-evidence. The more cards read, the more evidence.
“You want to talk as fast as you can, while still being understandable to listeners,” says Luxemburg. He says good debaters reach speeches of six words a second.
The effect is staggering. When Daniszewski stands and reads Foucault’s first speech, her words whoosh. Big Latinized words, full of syllables and prefixes, rush from her lungs like water from a fire hose. Bio-politics, capitalism, hegemony, normative, discourse.
Her arms flap in circles, and she rocks back and forth. She gulps to breathe every 30 words. She reads the speech through in 43 seconds.
When Taylor-Milner transforms into speech mode, on the other hand, he stands ramrod straight. His quick-fire babbling is soft, composed, authoritative. Unlike Daniszewski, who normally speaks in measured, rolling phrases, Taylor-Milner can be brash, even appear cocky.
Debate, after all, is a performance. A judge looks for confidence, assertiveness and acting like you know what you’re talking about. In policy debate, students research and debate one resolution the entire year.
Students prepare several cases: one defense of a specific aspect of the resolution, and multiple attacks on possible opponent defenses. It’s like chess, Luxemburg says, knowing how to attack and then defend against counter-attacks.
As a critical team, Daniszewski and Taylor-Milner win through rhetorical jujitsu. Instead of arguing whether the United States should or shouldn’t give more aid to Yemen, for example, they’ll cite Foucault and Heidegger and argue that geopolitics as a concept is a dead end.
It’s not their opponent’s response to the question that’s wrong, they say, but the question itself.
“Teams are usually just like what? You just questioned everything that makes up the material,” Taylor-Milner says. “What the hell man?”
The point is to take debate from an intellectual, cold experience and turn it in something lively and relevant, says John Jeworski, a first-year on Bard’s varsity debate team. Jeworski says he has danced and taken off his shirt in debates.
“We’re known this sort of radical approach,” says Jeworski. “A lot of teams take similar roots, but Bard is renowned for pushing the envelope.”
Other teams are less enthused about this strategy. Most opponents have positive views of the team, but others are wary. The whispers, Daniszewski and Taylor-Milner say, cling to old stereotypes: “Crazy bard kids…They’re just like those fucking hippie stoner whatevers – we’ll get them…Those Bard kids, they’re going to pull some fucking shit.”
“Some teams get mad,” Luxemburg says. “A lot of schools think it’s cheating, or that it’s not what debate is. The way I think about it, anything’s okay in debate, as long as you can justify it.”
The team will have one more tournament this year. The whole team flies to Oklahoma March 22 to compete in the 2012 Cross Examination Debate Association National Debate Tournament.
Next year, however, the two will make a long-overdue move up to varsity. There, they’ll join Jeworski, who got them into debate in the first place.
Because of him and their coaches, Daniszewski and Taylor-Milner are the debaters they are today, the two say. The team this year spent long hours together, especially on the van rides home from tournaments.
There they talk about, in order: their last rounds, the debate in general, future debates, classes, everyone’s personal lives, and cigarettes. They don’t talk as fast as they do in debates, but their minds still race. “We’re a motley crew of hipsters,” Daniszewski says.
It’s a lesson their opponents learn fast.