The New York Sophist

For the past three years, I have come to Houston at the end of July to teach and learn at the Houston Urban Debate League summer institute. I was invited to help introduce non-American derived debating to the students and teachers here, and I accepted. I rank that decision as one of the best I’ve made in my life. It’s a wonderful program with wonderful students and a great way to welcome the end of the summer and a return of the academic year. I took this photo on the University of Houston campus last summer. Next week the camp starts up again, and I’m getting very excited to see what the week has in store for us. 

The summer debate camp is a very American thing. Normally, at the high school level, the objective to having it is pretty clear – get a leg up on the competitive year by doing research, having some practice debates, and focusing on debate when there’s nothing else to really get in the way, such as all the obligations that appear during the regular school year. 

I feel that the summer debate institute is a waste of an opportunity if it does not also focus on the larger aspects of debate practice – that when you practice debating, you are practicing being a particular kind of subject, a particular kind of ethical being in the world, and that practice has implications that go well beyond winning a big tournament.

Debate summer institute is one of the few places where we can sit down and openly discuss what we get out of practicing it, and what we should get out of practicing it. Without the tournament pushing and squeezing the air out of the room, debate practitioners can explore the many ways that debate has influenced their agency, their being, their thoughts – everything. It’s also a great place to locate and explore connections to the larger world of discourse. Debate is a tiny part of this universe, but when doing the tournament shuffle, one can easily substitute debating as the set of “all valuable discourse” – which leads to disaster once you take a breath and speak to other intelligent people who do not participate in the practice of debating. 

This spring I was invited to teach at a college debate summer institute, and it was an exciting possibility – but I wondered what I could offer. I have little to no interest in teaching people tricks and tips for tournament victory. I have even less interest in trying to figure out how to approach a motion. My interests are in the relationship between the person and that same person, practicing debate. How much space is there? What does it consist of? When you are practicing debate, are you your identity, or are you some other? 

Are debate practitioners enlightened critical minds or people who just speak a different language from other critical thinkers? Is debate helpful or harmful to the traditional model of politics that we have adopted in the US? What is the nature and function of research in casual debates among peers? I feel like these questions should be the questions that a summer institute should include in its programs. Such questions, if thought about and worked on, or – in my favorite phrasing, if they are used as a point of departure for our normative claims – would radically alter tournament norms and practices. They would have to. Judges can only judge what debaters do in debates. That’s how all of our practices to this point came to be. Debaters’ careful reflection (or uncareful adoption of norms in order to win) are the thing that shapes what debate tournaments are, which shape our understanding of debating.

The point of the debate institute is not to make people better at winning tournaments, but to make people better at debate. This includes being better at understanding the scope and scale of debate as a system of practices designed to improve the self. Debate will not serve to improve the self if it is always focused on the tournament victory as the only endpoint of practice.

The HUDL debate institute does this in a very creative way, hosting programs for the students in the evening where people from community politics, the practice of law, and other realms come to host discussion panels, talks, or presentations about the city and communities they live in. These presentations keep the work done during the day on debating in a context of outside community and the city. This raises important questions about the distinctions between advocacy designed for a tournament and advocacy designed for a courtroom. 

Instead of a smooth process of “do these three things and you will win,” summer debate institutes should be the place where we step back from tournament competition and consider the gaps, the spaces, and the people that we become when we practice debate. A practice changes a person, and reflection on that practice and those changes are essential to the recognition and appreciation of what debate does for us. 

Just finishing up the amazing book, Organizing Enlightenment and it has surpassed my expectations which were pretty high. The book chronicles the history of the formation of the research university in Europe, and the reasons behind it. The short version is that the Ph.D. oriented research university that we all know and some of us love more than others was a reaction to perceived information overload.

The ethos of books and printed matter was eroding in the 18th century. The transformation of books from the source of knowledge to commodities created a crisis in confidence about information. The university was the technology that stepped in to move the ethos of information away from a collection of print to an ethic – a group of people committed to working on a particular ethic of knowing – and through that commitment, they can know which books are valuable and which are not. But collecting books and memorizing them no longer served as the site of knowledge. The university community was that site. 

Long after that came the American Land-Grant college project, which gave land and resources to create huge state colleges and universities on the principle that the university creates things that are not only valuable to those who don’t attend the university or work there – the members of society. Many land-grant colleges worked in tandem with farmers and engineers to test designs and do experiments that would benefit them, change methods, or test out ideas they always wanted to try themselves, but the stakes were too high.

After reading this book, I feel an essential tension exists at the university today – the tension between creating ethical subjects of knowledge and providing a social and societal benefit seem like they could be at odds anyway, but add to the mix that most universities are now focused on student careers, individual “branding” of students, and spending a lot of resources showing them how to get internships, write cover letters, and other menial tasks. University as job-placement center doesn’t clash with these two larger aspirations – it erases them. 

Faculty are also caught in the echoes of this rhetorical DNA of the university, often adrift to find a viable identity outside of publishing niche essays that are barely readable in journals that have no coherence from essay to essay, which are hardly read as a journal, but serve more as repositories for resources for future journal creation. It’s like the verbal version of the sci-fi clone organ farm come to life. 

What we need is a faculty-led move to make the university an agent of intervention again. Organizing Enlightenment shows how a few thinkers managed to be convincing that the orientation of the university should move away from books to people as the locus of knowledge. The land-grant project still haunts us – are our graduates the only social benefit we produce? This essential tension – between serving students who we are to make the ethical loci of knowledge vs. the obligation to also benefit society through our work and research – should be the focus of faculty intervention. And it can be a great source, historically rooted, with which to fight administrations who are dug into the perspective that the university should be engaged in job-placement services across the board. 

There are many ways to do this, more than there are faculty I bet. But the important thing is not to find the solution, but to think about that essential tension in everything we teach and write. The faculty need to adopt an ethic of knowing first, and there’s no better way to do that than through practicing it in little ways, every day.

Just finishing up the amazing book, Organizing Enlightenment and it has surpassed my expectations which were pretty high. The book chronicles the history of the formation of the research university in Europe, and the reasons behind it. The short version is that the Ph.D. oriented research university that we all know and some of us love more than others was a reaction to perceived information overload.

The ethos of books and printed matter was eroding in the 18th century. The transformation of books from the source of knowledge to commodities created a crisis in confidence about information. The university was the technology that stepped in to move the ethos of information away from a collection of print to an ethic – a group of people committed to working on a particular ethic of knowing – and through that commitment, they can know which books are valuable and which are not. But collecting books and memorizing them no longer served as the site of knowledge. The university community was that site. 

Long after that came the American Land-Grant college project, which gave land and resources to create huge state colleges and universities on the principle that the university creates things that are not only valuable to those who don’t attend the university or work there – the members of society. Many land-grant colleges worked in tandem with farmers and engineers to test designs and do experiments that would benefit them, change methods, or test out ideas they always wanted to try themselves, but the stakes were too high.

After reading this book, I feel an essential tension exists at the university today – the tension between creating ethical subjects of knowledge and providing a social and societal benefit seem like they could be at odds anyway, but add to the mix that most universities are now focused on student careers, individual “branding” of students, and spending a lot of resources showing them how to get internships, write cover letters, and other menial tasks. University as job-placement center doesn’t clash with these two larger aspirations – it erases them. 

Faculty are also caught in the echoes of this rhetorical DNA of the university, often adrift to find a viable identity outside of publishing niche essays that are barely readable in journals that have no coherence from essay to essay, which are hardly read as a journal, but serve more as repositories for resources for future journal creation. It’s like the verbal version of the sci-fi clone organ farm come to life. 

What we need is a faculty-led move to make the university an agent of intervention again. Organizing Enlightenment shows how a few thinkers managed to be convincing that the orientation of the university should move away from books to people as the locus of knowledge. The land-grant project still haunts us – are our graduates the only social benefit we produce? This essential tension – between serving students who we are to make the ethical loci of knowledge vs. the obligation to also benefit society through our work and research – should be the focus of faculty intervention. And it can be a great source, historically rooted, with which to fight administrations who are dug into the perspective that the university should be engaged in job-placement services across the board. 

There are many ways to do this, more than there are faculty I bet. But the important thing is not to find the solution, but to think about that essential tension in everything we teach and write. The faculty need to adopt an ethic of knowing first, and there’s no better way to do that than through practicing it in little ways, every day.

From Irvin Peckham’s excellent blog, Personal Writing in the Classroom, Here are the rules for good writing assignments:

Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn’t a very good assignment.

It is also the case that if these are not present, the public speaking assignment will suffer as well.

Presentations as evaluation should follow the same guidelines. Why assign speeches or speech topics that are not enjoyable?

What happened to the pleasure of speech in our courses? We’ve twisted it for the most part into a festival of failure – where student speeches on pot legalization or gun control become the cynical evidence that our students are helpless and sad in the world. We chuckle about it and do nothing to fix it.

Instead, let’s stop working so hard to make public speaking a sad and vapid experience. Let’s work to make it pleasurable and enjoyable. Who cares about the politics. Who cares about the knowledge displayed. What we need is a return to the sheer joy of hearing the orality of an other engaged in what should be enjoyable – the art of speech.

From Irvin Peckham’s excellent blog, Personal Writing in the Classroom, Here are the rules for good writing assignments:

Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn’t a very good assignment.

It is also the case that if these are not present, the public speaking assignment will suffer as well.

Presentations as evaluation should follow the same guidelines. Why assign speeches or speech topics that are not enjoyable?

What happened to the pleasure of speech in our courses? We’ve twisted it for the most part into a festival of failure – where student speeches on pot legalization or gun control become the cynical evidence that our students are helpless and sad in the world. We chuckle about it and do nothing to fix it.

Instead, let’s stop working so hard to make public speaking a sad and vapid experience. Let’s work to make it pleasurable and enjoyable. Who cares about the politics. Who cares about the knowledge displayed. What we need is a return to the sheer joy of hearing the orality of an other engaged in what should be enjoyable – the art of speech.