(First of all, apologies to Adriana. Last time I apparently let spell check let your name get modified to Amanda while I was training it to accept Neilesh's name. My eye got off of the ball there.)
I had heard about the upcoming documentary on It’s Academic a while back, and I had both made a note to reference it and to be wary when its presence was announced to hsquizbowl. I was actually mildly disappointed to see only one dismissive response to it, as I knew that many who have passed through that forumview that as a bête noire, spending tremendous amounts of pixels to vituperate over how they believed it to be an inferior product. But I came to the realization that, most of the people who have beefs with It's Academic have passed from this forum and got on with their life’s work. So I would like to place in front of youseries of hypotheses as to the importance of It’s Ac in the history of television quiz bowl, and circuit quiz bowl. As someone who has spent a great deal of time trying to duplicate, supplant, or expand It’s Ac’s efforts, I think they’re interesting points that might help explain why they’re important in the greater scheme of things.
Hypothesis: It's Academic standardized a canon for television quiz bowl.
There are many long lasting programs which have run in their local markets, but It’s Academic was one of the few to develop as a template that was carried on to other markets, and probably the most successful instance of that. As late as 2000, it was the largest format license to local stations, and providing questions to easily put a televised program together. It meant that dozens of stations used their questions over the years, even if they didn't use the It's Academic name. You have the acknowledged branches of their program (New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, Hawaii, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore, Central Virginia, Hampton Roads, and out to Australia and New Zealand) and you also have a large number that imported the format and ran with their own modifications over time (Pittsburgh, Lancaster,Indianapolis, Nashville, Arizona, more that I can't pull off the top of my head.) Think of it almost as a fast food franchise model, the questions were the recipes and ingredients supplied by their central source, and the local programs were able to put minor modifications on the menu to satisfy their customers (not necessarily the teams, but the sponsors). The local college could sponsor a question each week, or offer scholarships in addition to the main sponsor's prize money.
It's Academic's model also allowed it to act as a force multiplier, the questions once written were secure, there was little danger of local broadcasts leaking out to the next major city, and there was little risk of someone compiling a record of all the questions from this year and then migrating it out to another town. Their model allowed the questions to be used in multiple cities over the course of a year or multiple years. (All of you who looked at that and said "that's unacceptable recycling of questions!" I'm not disagreeing with you in the least. Standards and practices in the television industry would not disagree with you in the least now. I'm merely stating that without the ability to easily record episodes at home, communicate content of matches between competitors in different markets, or transmit episodes across the internet, this could stand up to a standard of security that we don't accept now. But please consider that if that had not been allowed to expand It's Academic's (or other programs') model to new cities, there would not have been sufficient population of people familiar enough to grow circuit quiz bowl out when internet communication made it possible? And would the circuit have been able to grow without adopting the same technique in mirroring tournaments, which is merely this with a safeguard of mutual trust?)
As the point of production for multiple cities, there were absolutely no evolutionary pressures on It's Academic for the majority of its development. So when there was a desire to change something about the show, there was a communication chain that never worked. If you were a top player who wanted something different from the most prevalent format in your local area, you had to either lump it, or graduate, find collegiate quiz bowl, create your own questions for competition, and apply the your evolutionary pressure there.
I admit that since the 1990s they've also been an inertial force restricting change within their own environment, but as we'll see in the next section, they're capable of change, and influencing other entities to change, albeit slowly. That slowness has also manifested itself to their franchisees as reliability. And reliability in this case was and is a killer app. It keeps the stations down the line happy in that what they got last year is absolutely similar to what they’ll get this year and next. It removes lots of questions you have to ask when supply is disrupted.
Structurally, It's Academic is designed to satisfy most students who pass through it, satisfy the sponsors and its television audience. For those who want it to be something else, there's now a parallel format of events which don't run on television which respond to changes those players want to see, or more precisely want to execute. And for the most part, those critical of the structure of It's Academic are aged out of it quickly. The only people in the ecosystem who spend a long enough time in the system, to be able to truly change it are the coaches, and they have an out as long as the circuit makes itself visible to them.
Now having heard that, do you wonder why I'm working on finishing this book?
The Civil War on a note card.
Here's my second more radical hypothesis, which ran across something I was doing in putting note cards together this week.
For most of that tree of stations, It's Academic exported local educational curriculums nationally. That is the question of what is in canonically and what is out of quiz bowl, quizzing, or even bar trivia has been influenced by this program. I'm going to admit that that influence has waned from that time period, but what was written for It’s Academic was seen by a couple generation of quiz bowl writers, and imitated by those same writers as they were forced to create their own questions for events.
In the early 90’s where the great expansion of collegiate circuit quiz bowl took place, the college teams were stacked with players from the DMV who had competed on the show, and there were numerous college programs in the vicinity who could explain quiz bowl in college through the lens of It’s Academic to potential recruits. In that area, it had the cachet and common knowledge of its existence to be the equivalent of Jeopardy! as a frame is nationally.
Now the thing that seemed to be commonplace in the packets from those schools with strong ties to the DC area was a small but persistent presence of questions about the Civil War. Because Cornell’s team traveled widely for competition, as far south as Tennessee, I always noticed a distinctive 1/0 slot in the history subdistribution as soon as we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, or if the team that wrote the question did. After a few years where players were a little more mobile in their college selection this diminished, but I recognize this also was a time where state requirements for history were deemphasizing the Civil War and deemphasizing local history in the curriculum, which would be a double whammy to curricula in that region of the country. So as we got into later time, this diminished. The last time I saw a significant concentration in a prominent position was the first few years (2000-) of watching Pittsburgh’s television program, which we knew was a clone of It’s Academic. But what we saw in those questions was an elimination of the long tail of possible answers we had seen in college and high school packets.
Since then there have been other writers for the Pittsburgh show, and they’ve limited the number of Civil War questions in the years since. While they never were going especially deep into Civil War battles, they also were playing tight with the answer space. They’ve limited themselves to the Firsts, Lasts, Onlies, and Outliers, and to those answers that have a readymade last clue (usually a notable death or alternate name for the battle.) I began to consider whether the entire Civil War’s military history could be contained on a single notecard. In doing so I think I got everything in for the show that might come up.
Note that I’m making the notes for either television or novice high school competition, and that I’m only taking the military battles portion, on the expectation that political history of the period is significantly more fraught and thus unlikely to be on the show beyond an answer of Lincoln or Emancipation Proclamation.
US Civil War - Military History
1861 - Fort Sumter (SC) Charleston Harbor
First Bull Run(VA)(1st Manassas) CSA victory
1862 - USS Monitor vs CSS Virginia (Merrimack) ironclads Battle of Hampton Roads(VA)
Shiloh(TN) (Pittsburg Landing) USA gains control of the western theater
2nd Bull Run(VA)(2nd Manassas) CSA victory
Antietam (MD) (Sharpsburg) Bloodiest day of war
1863 - Chancellorsville (VA) Stonewall Jackson shot and killed
Vicksburg(MS) USA victory gives union control of Mississippi R.
Gettysburg(PA) USA victory, Lee's (CSA) most northern attack.
1864 - Grant given command of US Army pushes toward Richmond
Sherman's March to the Sea, total war campaign through GA
1865 - Lee's Surrender at Appomattox Court HouseWhile that seems abrupt and not enough to satisfy the historian, it’s entirely enough notes that would fit on an index card and cover what would be asked on TV. The state information is there in case someone wrote the question to a state answer, and the alternate names are writers shorthand for last clues. It would probably be a green card in my system because you would choose some part of it to construct your question rather than use the whole thing, but it looks functional and able to deal with the subject to the degree necessary for the competition.
A note for the book: There’s a significant amount of military history which has seen a similar trim of the long tail from quiz bowl in general. I think that trimming the long tail tends to me what I’ve termed “Midas clues” more prevalent, and military history can get trapped in narrow opening clue selection. Questions about Benedict Arnold for instance, tend to go down the path of his wounding during the Battle of Saratoga, while questions about Mexican general Santa Ana often go into his defense of Veracruz in the amusingly-named Pastry War. I think any subject which is on the wane due to substitution of a different subcategory could suffer from this, but it’s a good thing to note when considering these fields of study.
A second little note that I’ll have to pursue before I will be able to complete the thought:
Monday, I took Catie on her first college visit, to the most local college to us (Washington & Jefferson.) It was a function of the admissions department of the school so my mind wandered over a plan I had attempted to execute in the early 2000s. The administrative body that was most tied to college quiz bowl were student unions and student activities/programming. This was due to the partnership between College Bowl and ACUI. While sitting in their student center listening to the dean of admissions, I thought about whether we might have had better integration of college and high school circuits if the relationship had started with admissions offices.
The hypothetical begins with this: currently high school competitions are frequently hosted on college campuses, mostly by quiz bowl organizations on campus, but not exclusively. A few honors colleges, service fraternities, campus and civic organizations use the events to recruit high school students to see the campus in the hopes that they will choose to enroll at that institution. Some even offer scholarships for the winners at their events. Those aims align perfectly with the efforts of admissions offices, which would be looking to show their campus to curiosity-driven self-starters from local schools that would be highly likely to graduate on time and be successful post-college. (Yeah, laying the buzzwords on thick, I know. Just feeding back the signal.) Could quiz bowl events be aided by efforts of the admissions department?
When I last asked this question here, the answer was “yes, but” and the but was that they’d need significant effort from someone familiar with the local teams to make an event happen that would satisfy all their needs. My last attempt at that around 2006 was a failure, but much of the failure came from the distance I had to travel to get things moving. I didn’t have a local person doing the lifting and coordination with the local high schools, so I had established circuit teams traveling to a place that didn’t engage with them, just gave me use of the hall. I don’t think I’m the right person to build that model, but I might be the right person to build the pieces that the right person in an admissions office could use to build that model.