NC/1NR — AT: Doesn’t Solve Corporate Control

2NC/1NR — AT: Doesn’t Solve Corporate Control

UDLs represent a vibrant politics of hope – in the face of injustice and suffering, we should refuse to passively accept the status quo and should instead affirm the possibility of a better tomorrow.

Debate is uniquely key to connect students to the democratic process and to enable them to become fully engaged in civil society

Competitive debate has a much longer history than the effort to implement CAC. For as long as it is possible to trace the history of democratic societies, testimonial accounts have espoused the benefits of forensic activities for developing an educated and aware citizenry. Although contemporary competitive policy debate achieves its specialized form only in this century, the forensic arts have existed formally at least since ancient Greek civilization. Successive experiments with limited democracy have provided their own examples of forensic importance, ranging from Socrates' advocacy of directed questioning to the traveling debates of Lincoln and Douglas to the arrival of the televised age as evidenced by the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Debate is so fundamentally connected to democratic practice that, for much of our civilization's history, its benefits have been thought nearly self-evident.

As modern scholars began to turn their attention to studying our own society in the middle of this century, however, these assumptions began to be tested by social scientists. Their research has not only confirmed that debate is beneficial for members of democratic societies—it has actually helped explain more effectively how participation in forensic activities improves our lives. Students who participate in competitive debate enjoy a number of positive benefits. The first and most obvious of these is improved communication skills. Where many undergraduates may have, at best, a single classroom experience involving public speaking, debaters spend many hours assembling and practicing hundreds of public speeches on topics of national importance. The questioning skills developed in cross-examination make debaters more capable of eliciting important information from their peers, thereby sharpening their analytical skills. Semlak and Shields (1997), for example, determined that debaters are "significantly better at employing the three communication skills (analysis, delivery, and organization)" than students who have not had debate experience (194). Such superior communication skills do not go unnoticed. Pollock's (1982) study of legislators concludes that "persons with oral communication skills honed by varied forensic events were also regarded highly by their colleagues in group discussion activity" (17). This sort of study supports Colbert & Biggers' (1985) contention that debate training improves interpersonal communication skills as well as public speaking competence.

While it seems intuitive that an activity involving competitive speaking would improve communication skills, debate also facilitates education in other, more subtle ways. Debate experience induces student involvement in important social issues. Every year, debaters study one prominent social issue, researching policy options from multiple perspectives. The knowledge thus gained often far surpasses the typical educational experience of non-debaters. Robinson (1956) describes debate experience as "an introduction to the social sciences" (62). The sheer breadth of topics a debater is likely to encounter, along with the competitive incentive to understand how the political world operates, virtually ensures that students who debate will be well versed in current events and public decision-making dynamics.

Barfield (1989) found that participation in competitive debate among high school students positively correlates with significant gains in cumulative GPA. The most comprehensive study to date of the effects of participation in debate was conducted by the Open Society Institute in 1999. Melinda Fine, the Institute's independent evaluator, investigated the impact of participation in the Urban Debate League on hundreds of high school students in New York City. She concludes that debate "appears to strengthen students' ability to persevere, remain focused, and work toward challenging goals .... Coaches and students agree that debaters have a heightened capacity to hang in and struggle—often in the face of disappointment and defeat" (62).

Academic debate does more than simply inform students—it teaches them how to evaluate the information they receive on a daily basis. Dauber (1989) asserts the unique emancipatory potential of forensics:

To me, academic debate is primarily valuable in that it is a mechanism for empowerment .... Whatever else academic debate teaches (and I would argue that it teaches a great deal), it empowers our students and ourselves, in that it proves to them they ought not be intimidated by the rhetoric of expertise surrounding questions of policy. They know that they are capable of making and defending informed choices about complex issues outside of their own area of interest because they do so on a daily basis (206).

Indeed, Fine came to much the same conclusion when studying students in New York. She argues that debaters are more likely to speak out because they "feel they have something useful to say, and because they feel more articulate in saying it" (61). These finding closely resemble Corson's conclusion that encouraging students to speak forces them to "confront learners with viewpoints different from their own" and therefore to achieve "an openness to the world and others" (25). Fine also discovered that participating in debate gives student better social skills and causes them to place more value on their social relationships. Debate is thus not only a way to connect students with academic subjects in meaningful ways; it is also a way to re-connect students to public life if they have been overcome by feelings of alienation.

Recognition that we are all responsible for our collective futures makes possible the realization of a better world – vote affirmative to leverage the idealism and potential of our generation against the cynicism and despair of the status quo.

As you well know, the futures we inherit are not of our own making, but the futures we create for generations of young people who follow us arise out of our ability to imagine a better world, recognize our responsibility to others, and define the success of a society to the degree that it can address the needs of coming generations to live in a world in which the obligations of a global democracy and individual responsibility mutually inform each other. Translating the future in such terms poses a serious and important challenge for your generation because the language of democracy and social justice has come under serious attack within the last few decades. Not only has a widespread pessimism about public life and politics developed in countries such as the United States as politics is devalued and public space is commercialized or privatized, but the very idea of justice is under attack as the language of the social contract and democracy are either devalued or ignored. Dreams of the future are now manufactured in the Pentagon, corporate board rooms, or in Hollywood. In a post 9/11 world, the space of shared responsibility has given way to the space of shared fears; the obligations of citizenship are reduced to the imperatives of consumerism; and the public sphere is emptied of all substantive content and becomes a playground for endlessly enacting and reinforcing the banal privatized fantasies of shopping malls and celebrity culture, which means putting up with the likes of Paris Hilton.

Hopefully, this will not be the model through which you will imagine the future after you leave here today. But dreaming and acting upon a more just and democratic future means you will have to build upon and continue your education, which should begin with the recognition that justice is the merging of hope, reason, imagination, and moral responsibility tempered by the recognition that the pursuit of happiness and the good life is a collective affair. Where does education fit into all of this? Education suggests developing a language and set of strategies for translating private troubles into public considerations and public issues into individual and collective rights. Rather than widen the gap between the public and private, you will need a vocabulary for understanding how private problems and public issues constitute the very lifeblood of politics. I stress this point because you are living in a world that is increasingly collapsing the public into the private, creating conditions in which public discourse and politics disappear only to be replaced by a litany of individual flaws to be born in isolation. You see the signs of this everywhere. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of individual character. Racism is said to be merely individual discrimination or prejudice. Homelessness is reduced to choice made by lazy people. Misfortune is viewed as a private disgrace or deserving of only a sneer. At the level of social policy, public officials make lyrical pronouncements suggesting that a crisis such as water pollution can be solved by buying bottled water. Politics takes many forms but central to it is the need for citizens to be able to translate individual problems into public concerns. And that is going to be your job. You leave here today with degrees in education, science, marine science, technology and so many others ... forgive me for not mentioning them all. Today, I ask you to think of yourselves as competent professionals who also have a special obligation as civic leaders. Leadership, as the great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, is the ability to question the basic assumptions central to a democracy, to learn how to govern and not simply be governed, to be capable of promoting a vision of the better society, and to raise important questions about what education should accomplish in a democracy.

I believe that one of the many great challenges facing your generation is how to resist the manufactured cynicism, moral despair, and social Darwinism (with its cult of competitiveness and war against all ethic) served up in all the spheres of public life and mirrored daily in reality TV shows such as Survivor, Temptation Island, The Biggest Loser, and The Bachelor. Democratic politics needs leaders, while manufactured cynicism needs celebrity idols. The other great challenge facing your generation is the need to develop a language of not only critique—one that refuses to equate democracy with market relations and consumerism—but also a language of hope.

Zygmunt Bauman elaborates further, arguing that any viable notion of democracy is dependent upon a culture of questioning, whose purpose, as he puts it, is to “keep the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unravelling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished.” To reclaim human potential in the service of planetary democracy is an act of daring that I hope your generation readily confronts and succeeds in establishing. You live in a world in which democracy, if it is to survive, needs to be sustained by new global public spaces and spheres. The lesson here is that democracy is very fragile, takes many forms, and it is never guaranteed. It is up to your generation to confront the dark forces afoot globally trying to eclipse the promise of democracy. Hints of such forces can be seen in alarming tendency towards barbarism reflected in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib ­ the prison in which those degrading photographs were taken, the widening economic inequalities between the rich and poor, the increasing religious fundamentalism around the globe, the ongoing militarization of public space and surveillance in public schools, the ravaging of the planet for profit, and the attack on critical dissent in the universities and elsewhere. The future is now in your hands and it is a future that needs your skills, critical judgment, sense of responsibility, compassion, imagination, and humility. Rather than trade in your dreams of a better world for a home security system or gated community, I urge you to “connect your utopian passions with a practical politics” in order to define what is still possible in a democracy. Everything is possible for you but it can only happen if you can imagine the unimaginable, think differently in order to act differently, and “give imaginative shape to humanity’s hope for a better and more inclusive future.”