This thread is part of the "The Big Vision" series. Click here to go back to index/introduction.Re-focusing on the Correct Opponentsa.k.a. Asking the unspeakable -- Is it time to move past fighting Chip?A huge amount of the efforts of good quizbowl partisans over the past three decades has been spent directly opposing Questions Unlimited and its National Academic Championship. Those efforts have, more or less, directly resulted in the strong circuits we have now.
But we may be at a point now where it’s no longer the best use of our effort to try and reduce the number of attendees from 100 to 0. Chip Beall’s position is basically as weak as it’s going to get: basically every remotely-serious team has completely disaffiliated with Chip, the ranks of the diehards who go every year have seriously dwindled, and the field is largely composed of a constantly changing set of random schools across the country who get his mailer each year (he seems to physically mail every school in the country, or close to it). The “game show” antics have shriveled away. Every team with any amount of interest in academic tournaments of any sort has heard, or can be easily directed to, all the reasons why Questions Unlimited gets its reputation as an unacceptable question provider and company. And basically every contending team which could be peeled off from the Beall field has been peeled. What’s more, it’s clear, given Chip’s temperament and personality, that he will keep doing NAC as long as he lives, no matter how few teams attend or how bottom-of-the-barrel his service is.
This shouldn’t be seen as waving a white flag -- it’s an admission that we’ve done all we can realistically do, and have more pressing issues to turn to now that we’ve largely succeeded at this one. In most real-world conflicts, armies don’t persevere until every person on the losing side has been completely eradicated -- there comes a point where victory can be declared. The “cold war” between good quizbowl and Chip Beall is over, and we won. We may never see the formal surrender, but there’s little reason to sit around holding out for one when we could be building new infrastructure in new territory instead.
Now the point of saying this is
not to encourage would-be organizers to rest on their laurels and assume there’s nothing left to do. Far from it. The reason I bring this up is
because of all the alternative uses of our time -- ways to expand serious quizbowl -- which get freed up when we are no longer focusing our mental energy on this particular organization. Which is a better use of three hours’ time: composing the millionth anti-Beall post when 999,999 such posts already exist, or composing an invite to an upcoming tournament and mailing it to 700 teams? Or using one’s efforts to dislodge or convert bad tournaments and structures in one’s immediate area? If you (the reader) are in an area near a specific team which defiantly continues to attend NAC, you might have the power, if you get to know their coach and players, to peel them off and get them serious about serious quizbowl. But for the rest of us, the burden is to ensure that our own tournaments are high-quality and high-attendance.
It’s disproportionate for us to keep puffing up this man into sort of Emmanuel Goldstein-like Archenemy of All Things Good. In reality, Questions Unlimited is more powerless than ever, and likely to stay that way. It’s time to start focusing our efforts on the MANY local forms of bad quizbowl which do a lot more real damage to the circuits they’re near. Events such as the Pennsylvania state series, the KSHSAA state series, and It’s Academic involve dozens of teams who do almost no good quizbowl and are never reached out to in a productive way. Time to focus on showing the people who play those events what we have to offer, and dislodging bad quizbowl practices and bad-intentioned people in favor of trusted replacements.
Matt J.
ex-Georgetown Day HS, ex-Yale
member emeritus, ACF
Sailing away on my copper boat