The New York Sophist

As I discussed on In the Bin, National Parliamentary Debate Association nationals had about 20 teams at their championship tournament.

Cross Examination Debate Association, by contrast, just had their national tournament and hosted 86 teams.

Globally, the World University Debate Championships held in Panama hosted 232 teams the last two weeks of December at their championship, which an American team won from Dartmouth.

Why the disparity? If debate is dying, how do you explain these numbers?

Debate is not dying; debate is inconsistent based on context. I agree these numbers are not what they were 20 years ago, but what was the same as it was 20 years ago? Nothing!

What are some explanations as to the relative health of some debate formats and not others?

The best explanation of the distinction between NPDA and CEDA is CEDA has a long history of being rooted in the curriculum of speech communication departments. There are still a large number of Boomer and tons of Generation X professors who came up in a system where a CEDA/NDT program was just an unquestioned part of the department whether they participated in it or not. There could still be some tensions in such departments between those who don’t understand or aren’t a part of the debate program and those who are. This is mostly because of a failure of the debate program to communicate to the larger department what they do.

I remember being profiled as “not a debate person” when I visited the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. there. Since it was CEDA nationals weekend, the students I met were not from the debate tradition, and were quite critical of debate and the people involved – mostly because there was not much communication about what goes on in the debate program, and these graduate students had to put it together based on what they saw from time to time. This is not their fault but the fault of the program to communicate its curricular connection (or even better, necessity!).

Having an assumed curricular connection is not working for debate in CEDA or NDT as the discourse is much more akin to sport today. Social media and University coverage of debate accomplishments is in the rhetoric of a NCAA team. This doesn’t help debate’s numbers because it doesn’t display fiscal need to the university. For example, the necessity of a lab to teach science or the necessity of a language center to help the foreign languages department is much clearer to a Dean than “We won a tournament!” appears. In that case, it sounds like athletics, which funds itself through donations and ticket sales (somewhat). This is directly connected to the large amount of “please donate to our debate team” crowdfunding posts I see on social media these days. Curricular connection is vital to the health of a debate program, but also requires the debate director to do a lot more than go to 13 weekend tournaments in one format as their entire program.

NPDA’s issue I think is related to this “assumed curriculum” connection where there is no basis for understanding it among the faculty. Most who did CEDA might not understand or see the connection to communication or rhetorical theory at all. Most debate directors have a lot of anxiety about having faculty come watch practice – either the practice will not be valuable (edited to look like some imagined 19^th century debate to deceive the faculty member) or it will be a real practice, risking alienating the faculty member and making them really question the value of the program. The best way through this is of course to integrate the debate program into the campus life very much how writing programs have done it.  NPDA should try to connect it's more open style (although it has really raced toward the CEDA model as a way to survive) from the earlier days to things on campus such as democratic deliberation centers, the writing center, dialogue initiatives, and the like. The contrast would be very powerful: NPDA format could be another addition of things that can be done to investigate a controversy, share perspectives on it, or help people find their way through disagreement.

What about the international numbers? This is explained through a few factors. First, debate is a club activity in most countries with no curricular connection whatsoever. There are some student club funds for that. But most importantly, non-American students do not have to pay huge tuition bills to attend university. This allows for the annual expense of travel and participation in an event that might be fun, interesting, and a chance to meet a large amount of international peers. Also the international attitude toward education is a lot less carceral than the American – not a lot of attention to attendance or completing a daily task to pass the course. There’s also not a lot of pressure to have a part time job to pay for school.  There’s more time for practice and engagement in debate as something enjoyable rather than another addition to an already stressful, surveilled college experience.

The biggest thing to increasing the numbers of participants in any debate format is more connection to a diverse, broad sense of audience. Although WUDC has its issues with how it theorizes audience, it offers an experience to debate the widest distinction between people with the widest cultural and geographic diversity of participants to judge. NPDA offers the most narrow in this experience. Diversity is great for rhetorical training as the rhetorical theory of argument isn’t about getting it right as much as it is getting it across. Practicing the same types of audiences before different types of people is educational. This is rhetorical education, something that a lot of people in debate don’t want – they want something more philosophical: The correct argument, with the correct information, said the correct way – and if you vote against it you are clearly stupid, wrong, an idiot, or worse, a conservative!

Shifting what debate’s goals are is the way to get the numbers up. Look at Worlds – the only distinction here is the diversity. It’s a tougher travel and a tougher amount of time to be away (although it is a holiday which makes the travel easier for those obsessed with class performance). This kind of integration might not be possible for NPDA or CEDA but imagination can come into play, as well as following the model of the writing center from composition studies.

Friends!

You might already be aware, but I'm back at it with the In the Bin Podcast. If you are tired of reading my ideas now you can find a new way to be tired of my ideas through the power of audio! The podcast keeps to its traditional roots of discussing intercollegiate and tournament debate but also uses debate as a way to offer critique and conversation of things going on in our broader rhetorical, argumentative, and debate world.

I've set up a page for the podcast as I don't want everything to get confused on this site, so if you want you can go subscribe to that blog here.

The podcast is available anywhere you already get your podcasts. Give it a listen, let me know your opinion, or if you have a subject you'd like me to cover, let me know and I'll make an episode about it.

What gives? I am reading Deliberative Democratic Theory for the first time – never really been much of one to have faith in democracy other than a rhetorical commonplace that really comes in handy – perhaps more than any other commonplace out there, even family (Sorry Vin Diesel). But this is some good stuff. It’s making me think that our Constitution in the United States won’t survive, since it – like deliberative democracy – is founded on the assumption that a particular kind and a particular intensity of literacy will be a given, a priori status. This is not the case. Perhaps this is the true security threat from social media, not the Chinese government.

Anyway for a bunch of people who bray and yap without pause about rights, freedom, liberty, and oppression, NCA rhetoricians who come from a debate background don’t really mention or even cite generally any deliberative democratic theory. I’m kind of surprised (but not really). Maybe it is because this stuff wasn’t really out and circulating when debate publishing was at it’s peak (I’m saying this is the early 1980s but you can disagree). It could also be the repeated pattern we see in NCA work where people don’t cite anything other than the popular and accepted sources. The NCA folks are nothing but trendy, all racing toward whatever the popular source is for their work. The funniest moment of this for me was a paper on Buddhist monastic debate pedagogy I wrote with a Buddhist Priest and submitted only to have it rejected because it didn’t include Heidegger. This is funny for so many reasons but tragic for the stand-out reason: People who volunteer to review are somewhere between cops and authoritarians, decrying people like Trump while enjoying enforcement of the “social norms” of NCA on submitted papers.

Deliberative democratic theory has the potential to rewrite debate pedagogy I’m thinking. It’s pretty incredible, and would solve a lot of the issues that contemporary NCA debate faces: Cost, tournament norms, high level of entry, lack of judges – the list goes on. What it seems to do (and I’m not going to say too much in particular as we are submitting this idea to Alta) is recenter the practice and pedagogy of debate on the idea of the second persona instead of some abstract, technical “rules” of debate arguments. Who cares if you link if the people believe it? Studying the reception not the accuracy of transmission is a turn in rhetoric that happened in the 1970s. We should stop ignoring it and start teaching it maybe.

I watch the TV show Catfish quite regularly, to the point where I now see a pattern in pretty much every episode. The Catfish gets the victim to love them, then takes advantage of them because the victim thinks they are in a relationship with someone who is only benefitting financially, personally, or in terms of their mental health. The victim sacrifices a lot of time and money because they are so happy to be "in love" with the idea, image, text, and so on that the Catfish provides.

This is the relationship between the National Communication Association and the publisher Taylor & Francis. I am not exactly sure how this works, but from my vantage point it seems that NCA takes a lot of pride in having such a reputable publisher behind almost all of their journals that "matter." This is some kind of credential, some kind of point of pride that the journals are published here. What does NCA get for this?

I know that the editors of the T&F journals are paid, but they don’t do that much. Most of the labor comes from faculty who are enamored with the idea of being a reviewer (the cops), people who have an ethical compulsion to review articles (the scholars), and others who just feel bad about the situation and understand that people’s livelihoods are at risk if articles aren’t reviewed expediently (the helpers). None of the money that goes to the Editor nor any of the money Taylor and Francis gets from subscriptions to these journals from libraries and other institutions, such as databases and indexes goes to any peer reviewer. The Catfish has convinced us this is an act of love of some kind – albeit a toxic relationship.

This system is crazy. I have heard of people waiting 10 to 12 months for an initial decision from an editor in the T&F journals, such as Quarterly Journal of Speech or Argumentation & Advocacy. I am often just sent a random email from T&F expecting me to review an essay without any context or explanation from the editor, or even a please. I’ve gotten rejections from editors that say things like “this doesn’t fit in the journal” and then under the next editor, I see something along the same lines that I wrote about. It seems that the people Editing do not care about the actual work in the journal, but the relationship and the status it brings them – they get some money, they get to say they are the editor of one of our ‘important’ journals.

Any professional work such as consulting or offering a professional opinion on something should be compensated if the people asking you to or requiring this consultation for someone else’s livelihood. That’s just the way it should work ethically and fairly in a system where one cannot provide for basic needs without working.

Reviews for the most part are not professional. Mostly you get someone with an ax to grind, for the compensation for reviewing essays is only to feel good about yourself. The pleasure most people get is from disciplining someone who doesn’t know ‘the field’ as well as they do, and the joy of beating them back into their box. The rarer reviewer is someone who wants to help the essay become better – I’ve only had that twice over a career of about 15 years trying to publish in these journals. There are no professional standards. The editors just announce, like an aristocrat, what they like and don't like, and those who are in the know get published while those who submit get a desk reject within a week.

Taylor & Francis will allow anyone to read my work published with them for a one time fee of 50 USD. They also will let me publish the article anywhere I like without fear of copyright violations for 5,000 USD. How generous! This money does not go to reviewers. Where does it go? Who am I paying to access my work? Surely I am just paying for the PDF formatting. Is this a fair price for that kind of work? Absolutely not.

Furthermore, Taylor & Francis sold all of our writing to Microsoft to train their Artificial Intelligence models last year. NCA had nothing to say about it, but it is possible I missed the press release. NCA, oddly, isn’t very good about communicating much to anyone who isn’t already a member of the organization. Even then, it’s spotty at best.

With all this money being generated by NCA members and only a trickle going to the Editors of the journals, why do most departments insist on publication in these Taylor & Francis journals as necessary for tenure and promotion? Why is such an unprofessional system being leaned on for such high-stakes professional results? Either there are some secret financial kickbacks NCA and it’s leaders get from this deal (nice dinners at convention or something) or there’s some necessary funding of the convention, which is quite expensive, that comes out of the Taylor & Francis money. One thing we do know is that there is no transparency as to what happens with that money. Most of it goes to making Taylor & Francis very profitable. And they should be rewarded for formatting some bad looking PDFs and messing up source citations in the copy edit over and over again.

NCA has alternatives here, and it blows my mind they don’t pursue them. The first would be obvious: Pull all the journals and make them Open Access. A deal for an organization this large with this much text being produced a month would make any OA site very happy for the traffic. Another solution would be to demand OA status on everything Taylor & Francis publishes. Another great idea would be to have Taylor & Francis pay the full transport, food, lodging, and other fees for any 3rd or 4th year Ph.D. student to come to the national convention. There also should be a room that has free food all day for graduate students. This might sound expensive, but remember: Taylor & Francis was paid 10 million US dollars for the first installment of stealing our writing and handing it to Microsoft for AI training. They did nothing to create that, or help create it, or anything – all they did was format it and put it in their journal when we said it was done. It’s really unbelievable that any NCA members tolerate this nonsense.

But then again, it’s always amazing to me how much the victims on Catfish tolerate. Maybe they have low self-esteem? Maybe they don’t think of themselves as really being able to offer much to a partner? The speculation goes on and on, but we never really find out. NCA can and should offer another alternative if they are going to host journals of some kind, and that should be a professional model where everyone is compensated fairly, the money is transparent, and scholars and others can trust that their work won’t go to nefarious purposes to make executives rich by doing nothing. Right now we have no transparency, no professionalism, and a sea of graduate students and junior faculty who are caught in a horrible system that they have to participate in. Hopefully NCA will remember that it is there to serve its members.

I love News of the Day, the concept the site, everything about it, but I do get that the paywall is frustrating for most people. Although you get about three months of my writing for free there just signing up, I'd rather my writing be easy to access. So I'm just putting everything over there on here. You can read it in either place!

If you like what's going on consider leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi site. As higher education starts to spiral here in the United States, support for this kind of writing becomes more important daily. I believe the way we have been doing things - debate tournaments instead of public debate events, high-cost low-quality academic journals that are inaccessible by journalists or even engaged public intellectuals, and courses that focus mostly on discipline and obedience than material that matters are all responsible for the climate we find ourselves in.

The politics of the moment must be slow, thoughtful, well written, and not dive into the anxiety and panic that traditional media benefits from. I have colleagues and friends who watch Fox News or MSNBC religiously because they want to figure out what's going on - this only whips ones emotions into a frenzy and creates a crippling anxiety about wanting to act and not being able to act. 

Acting is not politics as it is a reaction not a response. Reading and writing, thinking things through is the democratic way. Anything else plays into poor power dynamics. But we are addicted to the "clap back" of social media.

I'll try my best to pump the brakes on this site but there's a lot of black ice on the road. 

Anyway, love that you are here reading this. I'll keep trying to bring my best in a climate where the students just cynically want to know how to get an A, the administrators just want to appease the government, and the public wants to march around in circles holding signs. Not a lot to get excited about out there.