Things rot, especially when they are not cultivated. If you build a house, it will immediately start to decay. It might take 40 years for a well-built structure to show signs of damage, but it will happen, eventually.
High profile structures typically get more protection from decay. But if the structure was built structurally unsound and you found it 40 years later in shambles, the state of the structure is not necessarily an indication of the structures around it.
At first, I was going to write about how CEDA is an indication that Academia was structurally unsound. But it turns out that CEDA is not an indicator because CEDA has always been stupid.
What is CEDA? It's "debate club" if you use a lose interpretation for "debate." Check it out:
Oklahoma vs Harvard - Debate Highlights; Published by CEDA on Mar 26, 2013
Watching this cold, I get the impression that the point of these debate championships is to combine cattle auctions with debate club. But is this a new development, or was CEDA always this stupid?
National Collegiate Debate Championship; Published by CBS on Published on Oct 31, 2006
Here's the oldest CEDA video I could find (it's 2 hours long, just click around the timeline a bit, like time index 1:17:43):
CEDA National Championship Debate 2004; Published by Alfred Snider on Jun 4, 2012
To me, these debate championships haven't gotten any worse recently. All that's happened lately is they've added hiphop to the cattle auctions. From what I can tell, these championships have always been stupid.
