Every fall, it seems like a plague strikes Whitman. No, not swine flu or biblical locusts, but a swarm of teenagers in over-sized suits and pencil skirts. White dress shirts, no facial hair and bundles of boxes, papers, timers, laptops and whatever cheap imitations of what real lawyers use. Worst of all, they can talk really really fast. Almost incomprehensibly fast. And that’s why they’re an easy target.
Yes, these high school debaters are a nuisance aren’t they? It’s as if they steal our campus from us, taking our tables in Reid, our classrooms in Olin and our monopoly on Whitman.
But why is there an atmosphere of prejudice against them? Yes, “prejudice,” because the general sentiment is founded on ignorance. Debaters are monolithically described, from the young freshman to the experienced high school senior.
As a mass of unfamiliar faces, they disrupt the everyday look and feel of Ankeny for one weekend each fall and we don’t like it so it’s really easy to make them a topic of derisive conversation.
For me, I don’t mind the high school debate tournament so much. Been there, done that and done with that. But the pervasive annoyance at their presence is striking.
Have you been personally assaulted by a debater spewing bullets of critical theory, postmodernism and outrage at whatever political issue is in the air? Have they personally kept you waiting in line for a Taste of Sicily? Have they personally blocked access to your mailbox or prevented you from playing Frolf? Have they taken a classroom you hold dear to your heart?
Mostly, no. It’s rather the sight and sound of them that perturbs.
Thing is, we’re only a few years removed. Some of us graduated high school only six months ago and hopefully we haven’t gotten too old and jaded to remember. That sense of anticipation for college where we would get to do, in the open, all the cool things on “Frat row” was once ours. That sense of wanting to be free of seven periods of rote class and organized education.
Well, maybe we’ve forgotten the rigid existence of high school. But have we forgotten what it’s like to completely devote our after school hours and weekends into an activity we enjoy? Basketball, studio art, you name it.
That’s what debate is like for these kids. They got on a bus at some awful hour in the morning to drive all the way out to Walla Walla, of all places. They have hundreds of sheets of paper and hundreds of thousands of printed words to memorize, read and understand. All for what? To win argument after argument and maybe to learn a little bit about politics, philosophy and public speaking along the way.
Often times, it’s a world totally and utterly alien to our own. That alienation makes it easy to stigmatize and to misunderstand what went on this past weekend. Yes, they’re too young to pull off a business professional look, and they stand in stark contrast to our casual ready-to-hike-at-all-times attire. But if you love to hike, can you understand what it means to love to debate? It’s an activity requiring sacrifice, hard work and dedication, like any other worthwhile endeavor.
Instead of making the effort to understand, Whitties reduce the debaters to conversation fodder and common annoyance. It’s easy to ignore that the debate tournament functions to introduce potential college applicants to Whitman and generates revenue for Bon Appétit.
For a campus culture that prides itself on tolerance, diversity and being laid back, high school debaters seem to bring out an uncharacteristic vitriol. Uncharacteristic because its victims are so benign. Yet, characteristic because this prejudice is a symptom of a explicit willingness not to understand.
The bizarre thing for me is that if the basis for tolerance is not in a willingness to understand and then tolerate, but instead tolerance is rooted in a resistance to understanding, then we reduce tolerance to ignorance.
We tolerate what we refuse or are incapable of understanding and we don’t tolerate what we caricature. Otherwise, we’re not really tolerant but passively ignorant.
