In New Jersey: The Best and the Glibbest

David Kidd is dressed in a shirt that David Kidd is dressed in a shirt that may once have been tucked in. His grimy university necktie ends a palm's width above his beltless pants. The trousers are a baggy rumple. This is a collegiate champion, a star?

Kidd is, in fact, the man to beat at this year's Princeton off-topic debate tournament; a month before, he won the sport's most prestigious championship in Toronto. For his fourth-round match, Kidd must disprove the proposition: "If you have to ask, you'll never know."

He stands, grinning lopsidedly, the whiff of mischief strong. Straightaway, he needles his too earnest competitor from Rhode Island College (who had, after all, just called Kidd an "obnoxious fool"). "Yes, I saw last night," Kidd says, "the hideous goings-on between my honorable opponent and the lady he mentioned in his opening arguments. Is it any wonder that he would have us accept an argument that leads only to suicidal hopelessness?" The R.I.C. man, still jaunty, hums a bar of Feelings. The judge shouts, "You're losing it, Kidd!" Catcalls are tossed out promiscuously ("Lies! Lies!"), and as Kidd's peroration snaps to a finish in the snug Princeton classroom, hands bang approvingly on desks. Standard procedure in an important college debate tournament? A gathering of the best and the glibbest from 20 colleges?

This is off-topic debate. Conventional scholastic debating in the U S. has been on-topic, an achingly serious match that is less an extracurricular pastime than a kind of secular self-mortification. On-topic debaters all over the country argue a single consequential issue for a year. Off-topic debaters, who suddenly outnumber the on-topic traditionalists on most Northeast campuses, flit from one ephemeral subject to another every hour or so, allowing themselves only ten minutes to muster each case. Success at on-topic demands fetishistic research, note cards by the hundred gross and the rhetorical felicity of an armored truck. Off-topic debate, by contrast, is meant to be a cross between Groucho Marx and Daniel Webster. It rewards insult, parry and bluster. The judges' instructions for the Princeton tournament, for instance, emphasize that "witty (and only witty) heckling is encouraged."

The term off-topic may have been coined by a condescending purist, but now the apostate sect, like up-and-coming Fauvists, revels in the name. Bill Smith, a natty, placid Harvard freshman and Kidd's teammate, suggests a continuing enmity between the offs and the ons. "Off-topic debaters," he explains, "tend to despise on-topic, because most of us were on-topic in high school. I was, for a year and a half. It's very, very intense." Burned out at 18, they seek refuge in the unruly rumble of off-topic. "Sometimes," says Sanford Cohen, an off-topic Columbia junior, "it's pure theater."