Notre Dame [correction: University of North Dakota] lawprof Eric Johnson notes that many law professors seem to be former high school debaters and suggests that this may be a common phenomenon. For what it's worth, I'm a former high school debater myself (1 year of policy, 3 years of L-D). My anecdotal impression is that there is a high representation of ex-debaters not only among law professors but also among other social science and humanities scholars.
Why do so many former debaters end up in academia? For the most part, it's probably correlation rather than cause. Both debate and academia tend to attract highly intellectual people with an interest in politics, law and related subjects. But there may be a causal connection as well. Debate played an important role in making me comfortable with public speaking - which turned out to be very valuable in later years. And for reasons I discussed here, it also led me to work much harder in school, thereby rescuing my floundering academic record and enabling me to get into an elite college (without which I might never have made it to Yale Law School later). These experiences may be atypical. But I suspect they parallel those of at least some other debaters-turned-academics.
On the other hand, I have to say that at my school, unlike Johnson's, debaters didn't usually hang out with "the cheerleaders and football players." Whether that helped my later career as a lawprof or not is hard to say. On balance, I continue to believe that the real enemies of debaters and other highs school "nerds" were the popular crowd, not the much-maligned jocks.
I didn't do high school debate, I did do college debate, and my experience is lots of debaters go to law school (because we like argument), and some of us probably ended up as law professors.
Also, debaters have a leg up in the legal field because of the emphasis on research tools like Lexis-Nexis, familiarity with law review articles and...it also helps that many of the current mentors of debate have ties to the legal field.
Is it the case that people who go on from law school to other careers tend not to have been debaters? That would be strange. This is quite reasonable.
Let's face it: there's probably a DNA mutation that causes lawyers, whether practicing or academics, to love a good argument. No wonder so many flocked to debate when they were younger.
Tho I detested the "spread" style which came in just before my time (I can just picture a voter keeping a spreadsheet on the presidential debates, and going for a candidate since he made 48 points and his opponent only answered 45) even it came in handy on occasion -- when paring arguments to stay within word count, and once during oral argument. (Death penalty case, when I sat down for the appellant the two minute card was up. I planned for about two minutes. When I stood up for the reply, a one minute card greeted me -- I must have just about used up the second minute. I switched on the fly and got in three solid hits and a fancy conclusion. Won it, too.)
My high school used to push people into debate if they thought they might like to be lawyers or study law in college.
High school students who want to become lawyers are disproportionately likely to, in fact, become lawyers. Furthermore, high school students who want to become lawyers are disproportionately likely to go out for debate, because it lets them do what they imagine lawyers do. So a disproportionate number of lawyers were high school debaters.
I'll also say that while at my school the debaters weren't popular, per se, we weren't unpopular either, and it wasn't a bar to popularity if you did other cool things. We had crossovers with the chess club, sure, but also with the frisbee team (those guys were best friends, actually).
Of course, my school was all about academic rigor and overachievement (we are The Overachievers of book fame, though I think that the book is overstated), so that might change things a bit.
I'm thinking more likely candidates would be the opposing debate team or the possibility of being made to look like Palin on Couric...
Or, for the best debaters, the administration of the school.
Jocks were never a problem. They were good at what they did. So was I. The popular people were good at being popular. I think that was the problem. You can't be popular in High School with other people being unpopular.
It seemed perfectly reasonable that the academic elite in wet sciences went on to medicine, those in math and physics went on to computers, and those on the championship speech&debate team went on to law.
It took a classmate of mine who was both a mathie and a member of speech&debate a couple of years as an engineer to realize he should have gone to law school, which he did, now combining that with his native quantitative skills.
I had the disadvantage of strong family pressure to be a pre-med so that by the time an advisor in college asked me for the first time "Do you want to go to medical school?" it was too late to figure out what I wanted to do, so I fell back on math and CS; by the time I got around to applying for law school it was time to start a family and I decided not to give up what seemed to be a promising engineering career.
Take a look at this video, starting at around the 4:30 point. Or this one, at various points throughout.
This is debating? Seems more like a poetry slam or some kind of performance art. Weird.
"This is debating? Seems more like a poetry slam or some kind of performance art. Weird."
Or Glossolalia. Palin has already infected the minds of even our most lawyerly youth! Is no one safe?
Still it never made for popularity. Luckily, I went to a huge high school with about 5000 students, so social divisions had a minimal impact. There was always a comforting degree of anonymity and plenty of "B" and "C" groups to hang out with. Unless one followed the doings of the glitterati, who seemed to be jocks and the girls with the right clothes and from the right part of town, they could be ignored.
I was never a law professor, but I did teach brief-writing and oral argument for a while. And, I think it is in this area that debate experience is most helpful. The practice of structuring and supporting an argument that is inadequately taught in English Comp courses (for legal purposes) is drilled into you by debate. For most law students, the use of the outline form and the explicit labeling of arguments in headings is something new, as is the instinct to never "drop" an argument.
As for the nature of debate today, I would like to see some moderation or counter-movement to "the spread." While I used and abused the spread as a high school debater, not every debate then was a spread contest. It seems that the tactic was not developed to the point it is today. It now appears to be universal and the sine qua non of competitive debate. This is somewhat surprising to me, as I was taught numerous ways to "beat the spread," without a counter-spread, even though it might require speaking at a somewhat accelerated pace. (E.g. pull out key winning arguments in overview, group opposing arguments, argue an underlying fallacy, heavy sandbagging, etc.) When I debated, the spread was a tactic rather than a method. I wonder if the pendulum will swing back, somewhat.
We were there at the same time. Remember the sandwich guy?
Cherubs, represent!
You bet I remember the sandwich guy. Wish he came around here everyday. That was a great summer.
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