Does this debase debate?

IMAGINE a presidential debate in which John McCain answers Hillary Clinton’s arguments by stripping down to his underwear or breaking into a rap song.

Strange as it might sound, such tactics are gaining cachet -- and victories -- in a top breeding ground for future politicians: America’s college debate circuit.

In recent years, renegade rhetoricians from Cal State Fullerton and other underdog schools have clobbered debate kingpins from Harvard and UC Berkeley with a hodgepodge of unorthodox methods known as “performance debating.”

Instead of relying on scholarly research to foil opponents, the teams employ guerrilla tactics such as reading from Dr. Seuss, impersonating pirates or ballroom dancing with a chair.

“People call us the terrorists of debate,” says Fullerton student Brenda Montes.

The goal of performance debate is threefold: Knock rivals off stride, impress judges with creative forms of argument and open the heavily white-male field to new voices.

The methods have sparked an uproar. Purists say the gimmicks are wrecking a noble tradition. But supporters insist the techniques are returning the art of persuasion to its roots.

“Debate is the greatest educational experience you’ve never heard about,” said Jon Bruschke, who coaches Cal State Fullerton’s team. “We’re trying to make it available to everyone.”

From Plato to Lincoln-Douglas to Reagan-Mondale, debaters have always searched for ways to outwit their adversaries.

In college tournaments, the longtime weapon of choice is speed-talking. The idea is to cram so many arguments into a speech that rival teams run out of time to rebut everything. To untrained ears, the rapid-fire verbiage sounds like an auctioneer on amphetamines.

But the research-saturated spiels stack the deck against small debate squads, said Bill Neesen, who coaches a performance team at Long Beach State.

Whereas a big-budget school like Northwestern or USC can steamroll into a tournament with a dozen people who do nothing but scout opponents and plot counterarguments, Long Beach has no backup.

“The big schools outstrip us on research,” Neesen said.

So Long Beach borrows from a playbook devised by a former mortician, a Grateful Dead fanatic and a guy with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts and sandals with socks. The rebels’ bag of tricks hinges on a simple rule: Everything in debate is debatable, including the rules of debate.

The pioneer in exploiting that loophole was Bill Shanahan, a Deadhead who ran the squad at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1990s.

In a debate on foreign aid to underdeveloped nations, Shanahan’s team turned the proceedings upside down, arguing that the concept of “helping” poor countries falsely implied that the Third World was inferior to the West. His students challenged the framework of the debate topic itself, saying it “imposed a racist, monetarist” view.

As Texas racked up victories, “smaller programs realized they could use this technique to compete against big-budget programs,” Shanahan said.

A few years later, former funeral director Ede Warner and Bruschke, a shaggy-haired Hawaiian shirt aficionado, expanded the concept. The two men had first crossed paths in the shadow of a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., where they were teammates on Augustana College’s debate squad.

After graduation, Warner returned to the family funeral business in violence-prone Gary, Ind. Saddened by the number of young blacks he saw in caskets, the African American undertaker decided he was “on the wrong end of the equation.”

Maybe debate could “empower black students,” Warner figured. He landed a job coaching the University of Louisville debate squad but had trouble recruiting minority students to an activity dominated by Ivy Leaguers quoting obscure postmodernist philosophers.

Then Warner had an epiphany. “We’re going to debate issues of race no matter what the topic is,” he declared. That led to replacing scholarly evidence with quotes from “organic intellectuals” such as rap singers.

The shift enabled him to attract students with no debate experience. And Louisville catapulted to national prominence.

A similar Cinderella story unfolded at Fullerton, where Bruschke, Warner’s former classmate, had assumed the helm. Bruschke stumbled onto performance debating in 1997, when his team faced top-ranked Emory University at a tournament. Arguing the topic of how to deal with unexploded mines in Vietnam, a Fullerton debater unexpectedly transformed a discourse on Jean-Paul Sartre and personal responsibility into a story about how she was molested as a child.

“I had no idea what she was doing,” Bruschke said, but somehow she tied it all back to mines.

The audience was stunned. Fullerton advanced to the final four, and Bruschke realized the power of personal narratives.

“Traditional debaters say the only evidence that matters is library research,” he said. “We say personal experience is equally important.” Bruschke points out that Aristotle ranked emotion equal to logic as a tool in seeking truth.

To win, performance teams must first persuade the debate judge to base the decision more on style of presentation than purely on content. So they spend part of the debate arguing over which method most effectively addresses the topic. Under Bruschke, Fullerton debaters have ranked as high as No. 2 in national tournaments.

“He has done a marvelous job taking kids whose parents didn’t even go to high school ... and turning them into powerful speakers and advocates,” said Harvard coach Dallas Perkins.

Meanwhile, the godfather of performance debate, Shanahan, moved from Texas to Fort Hays State University in Kansas, where he began sprinkling debates with Lakota Indian chants and videos of static.

“Once the floodgates opened, there was an explosion of different techniques,” Shanahan said.

There was also a backlash, especially toward Louisville’s racially tinged presentations. “Some people got to the point of near-violence, they were so frustrated,” Shanahan recalled.

Performance teams “have pretty much started to ruin traditional debate and what it offers students educationally,” said Ken Sherwood, director of forensics at Los Angeles City College.

In the past, debaters had to research both sides of an issue. “It taught students there’s always another side and it forced them to understand the opposition,” Sherwood said. “If you do that, you’re better able to defend your own perspective.”

In contrast, performance squads focus on personal stories and theatrics that often have little to do with the topic, he said.

Defenders of alternative tactics say they’re simply trying to “level the playing field” against students who have been honing debate skills since high school, often at elite private campuses.

But Sherwood disputes the idea that underprivileged students need gimmickry to compete. “My program has brought more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into debate than Louisville, Fullerton and Long Beach combined,” he said.

Harvard’s Perkins said it’s true that performance debating can shortchange students on research skills, but he still admires the movement. “It has strengthened the game and made it more demanding,” Perkins said.

At a recent Malibu contest, Brett Beeler of Cal State Fullerton stopped mid-sentence in a debate and asked teammate Caitlin Gray for a document.

As she rummaged around, Beeler impatiently left the podium and whispered heatedly at her. The tiff escalated, and suddenly he slapped her.

The judge of the debate came unglued. “You need to leave right now!” he shouted at Beeler.

But the slap was an act -- a way to breathe life into the otherwise dry debate topic, a court case involving domestic violence.

“I really did believe it was an incident of domestic abuse,” said the judge, Orion Steele, a professor at the University of Redlands. “It took me a good half-hour to cool down.” Then he awarded the victory to Fullerton.

Each of Fullerton’s two-person debate squads uses a strategy tailored to individual members’ backgrounds.

Puja Chopra and Parija Patel, both of Indian descent, sit down and meditate in debates to symbolize that arguing over legislation is pointless because true change must come from within.

Another duo cranks up a stereo and delivers arguments with homespun rap lyrics. When opponents complained that rap wasn’t an acceptable way to debate, Fullerton countered with a swipe at speed-talking. “The way you talk is understood by fewer than 2,000 people in America,” debater Dale Morrison said. Rap has a better chance of influencing listeners, he said.

Some schools get so swept up challenging Fullerton’s tactics that they forget to rebut the team’s arguments, Bruschke said. He estimates 10% of college squads use performance tactics.

When performance teams face each other, things can get pretty weird. Long Beach State once faced two women from Concordia College in Minnesota who stripped down to G-strings and talked about reclaiming their bodies from objectification by men.

The all-male California team couldn’t get past the distraction. “Their brains left them,” said Neesen, their coach.

Another contest pitted a Fort Hays student dancing with a chair against a Northwestern team reading the script of “Dr. Strangelove.” The topic was federal control of Native American land.

“It was a wild debate,” Shanahan said. “Strangelove” prevailed.

Part of a performance squad’s success depends on the element of surprise. “It’s classic guerrilla warfare,” Bruschke said. “Your tactics have to constantly change or you lose your advantage to superior force.”

Shanahan once judged a match in which a team used nine minutes of silence to signify that African Americans had no voice on a policy matter.

“It was powerful,” Shanahan said. But when other schools began copying the ploy, it wore thin. “After you hear it 15 or 20 times, it becomes passe,” he said. “The bar gets raised.”

Ultimately, the endless quest for novelty could doom the new form.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to do something that really challenges the boundaries, because the boundaries have been all but eliminated,” Shanahan said. “It’s hard to say where things will go next.”

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roy.rivenburg@latimes.com