here - College of Arts & Sciences - Bethel University

Bubb, Nick
University of Wisconsin-Madison
My background is largely in high school debate and forensics competitions. I am
diamond coach in the National Forensics League. I coached at James Madison Memorial
High School for six years and during that time I sent Wisconsin’s first representative to
the National Tournament of Champions in Lincoln-Douglas Debate in ten years. I
coached Sheboygan North High School for two years, winning a state championship in
Lincoln Douglas Debate, and redeveloping their policy debate team. Last summer at
Marquette University Debate Institute, I lead their top policy debate lab with Bill
Batterman, Cheryl Stanga, and Brandon Sheats. My academic studies are in public
policy. I am a master’s candidate at La Follette School of Public Affairs.
My experiences with policy debate and LD have led me to clear judging philosophies in
each event. However, I have judged only one parliamentary debate tournament and so my
philosophy is still a bit developing. Quickly, my framework for evaluating policy debates
is from a policymaker’s perspective and my framework for evaluating Lincoln Douglas
debates is from a standard’s perspective. My philosophy for parliamentary debate is
pretty much tabula rasa. But this means you must:
1) Define how I should evaluate the round. Is it on terms of providing a policy
Or is it on what a definition of morality is This can be accomplished in one
sentence but it must be done.
2) The end of the round must refer to this framework and weigh the competitive
arguments in the round.
Often times, I think the easiest argument is the best. Debate sometime gets silly when
debaters choose not to make the most intuitive arguments and instead introduce
something extraneous to the debate. But if you want to win debate extraneous
information, you can do so and win in front of me, so long as you set a clear framework
and make arguments that operate within that framework. I guess that means I have
preference for debaters to debate the resolution, rather than something else. But if you
want to debate something else, that’s fine. I’m not going to vote you down just because.
Debate should be what the debaters make of it.
I am not a fan of performance debating. While I’m familiar with some of the arguments
performance debaters make, I have only judged those debates a couple of times. A
concern I have with performance debating is that those debaters attempt to remove logic
from an activity that should place logic at its forefront.
I consider myself a flow judge. Because of the spontaneous nature of parliamentary
debate, I tend to be a bit forgiving on the flow compared to LD and policy debate. For
example, so long as topicality violation is relatively clear to me, I won’t make it a major
issue that violation is somewhat unclear at times (e.g. is it within or just in you’re
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