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Chessville
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Update: Scholastics and the Soul of Chess by Tom Braunlich The Scholastic Article has been posted all along, but for some reason many people can't get to it by direct link. The way to do it is to go to www.okchess.org and then click on "Scholastic Chess Discussion Page". There you will find the article. I did do a small follow-up article last fall, but it was short and I didn't consider it worth posting. Mainly it was to correct the errors I had in the report on Pittsburgh case. I had several facts wrong there, but was told when I looked into it further that I had the "gist" of it right -- that well-meaning scholastic people had essentially banded together to vote themselves into control of the club. I had only spent one paragraph on the Pittsburgh case, and it was cited simply as one example of how easily scholastic factions, with their greater numbers, can suddenly grab control of an adult organization, so I hope the factual errors I made there did not hurt the article overall. The article has generated a lot of discussion on the topic all over the internet -- and this was its purpose. This issue is important and was being completely ignored by the USCF. Overall the feedback on the article has been strongly supportive -- many "horror stories" from parents about scholastic chess organizations have been sent to me. Many people have also written to say that scholastics are not so bad in their own area. I should have done a better job in the article to make it clear that there are wide variations in how scholastics are functioning in different states and cities. Quite often there are some programs that are not only good for education, but which also respect and support tournament chess as well. But as I point out, too frequently these different goals are in considerable conflict, and increasingly so on a national level. My follow-up article also mentioned the new case of a scholastic organizer with CalChess (the adult organization in Northern California) taking $26,000 from the CalChess treasury last August without authorization. He claimed to be doing it for the children -- in response to scholastic members not receiving all the 6 issues of the state newsletter promised them per year and some other perceived injustices. He did not follow "due process" or go to the D.A. with a charge of fraud. He simply took the money. Listen to the fervor with which he defended himself at the time, and his "scholastic reasoning":
I haven't followed what happened in that case since last September, and I've learned from the Pittsburgh case not to attempt to get to detailed about it here. But one thing is clear -- it is another example of the friction between scholastics and adult chess, and how scholastic supporters frequently seem to get overzealous and can justify highly dubious actions in their minds. One big piece of scholastic chess news was that the proposal to merge the USCF with the AF4C scholastic organization was tabled at the August USCF meetings. But it may come up again... An even bigger scholastic news story of course is Maurice Ashley's success in getting a scholastic organization to sponsor a huge record-breaking adult chess tournament in Minneapolis this May. This seems to contradict one of the hypotheses of the article, which was that scholastic organizations don't care about the effect upon adult tournament chess their actions have. The HB Global tournament is obviously a huge counter-example. It is great to see. And yet it is also troubling, as another example of adult chess becoming "dependant" on big-money scholastic organizations for funding. One of the other issues I raised in the article was how the "big money" in scholastics is drawing the attention of USCF officers more and more toward supporting scholastic chess with USCF time, money, and services, (often with no accounting of it) with the unproven assumption that this will eventually benefit adult chess in the long run. This tournament could be viewed as more evidence of the growing power of scholastics on the national level, something that concerns me. Still, I will be there to support the event, because (as I told Maurice), if it succeeds it will be easier for us chess organizers to find big-money sponsors by using HB Global as a model. My annual Millennium Chess Festival in Virginia Beach (Feb 25-27) for example, has a new corporate sponsor (Booz Allen Hamilton) who might become even more enthused and supportive if the HB Global event succeeds. Finally, it is worth noting that this year we will see some more huge scholastic events. There is a big Internet Scholastic Championship this Spring with $10,000 in prizes and the top eight finishers in each age category being flown to Las Vegas for playoff matches. Rather strange, don't you think?-- a Las Vegas casino as the site of a scholastic event? (I wonder how much will the common problem of chess cheating on the internet enter into this event?) Then of course there is a "SuperNationals" scholastic championships event (April 8-10, in Nashville.) Undoubtedly it will break more attendance records and make huge profits. So my question is -- this time, will we humble USCF members get to see an accounting of it? How much USCF time and money was spent on this event, and how much profit was made by the USCF and how much profit was made by the individual organizers? Inquiring minds want to know. :-) I hope people will continue discussing these issues. The competing goals of scholastic and adult chess are causing problems across the country as the issue is ignored by those in charge. As I said in the article, I personally think the two organizations need to separate and cooperate loosely with each other. But in any case, it is something that needs to be talked about and addressed somehow in a positive way. TOM BRAUNLICH
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