The New York Sophist

One of the greatest advantages one has as a teacher of debating is that you get to work with students at strange times in strange places and under weird conditions. You are also free of those overpowered structures of degree credits, grades, assignments, and classroom authority (which professors are way too obsessed with these days I think – why not let the students run the class once in a while? or often? they are overpaying for what’s being offered anyway).

Professors where I teach spend a lot of time talking about the students. The style they most generally employ I have named Cynical Pedagogy – it’s identifiable in its sarcastic tone when suggesting an interesting assignment or a normative demand on what to offer to the students, then it’s followed by laughter and a description of the nightmare that would appear if such an assignment was offered. The key to the discourse, I think, is that it is always about the students. This is the center of the discourse, it is what structures it and drives it forward, giving it life all its own. And it’s hard to resist – most metrics at the university point out that students are the fuel for the departmental budget. Students are what keep things moving. Students are what we both serve and make at the university. We depend on them to give back later as well, once they are set in their careers.

But debate teaching is not like this. When a topic comes out, a student might know more about it than the teacher. Likewise, and much more frequently, is that nobody knows much about it at all. We come together over ideas. Nobody is in charge, just the demand for good arguments that lead judges to a decision so we can win the debate. Thinking together is the only way that can be accomplished.

We can improve the lot of university pedagogy by switching this one preposition around – instead of thinking about students, start thinking with students. It seems simple, and it is. But it asks professors to give up some long held assumptions about their power, their role, and the nature of the subjects before us in the classroom that we call “students.”

Debate done well should place all participants on a level of equality. This is most forcefully advocated by professor William Hawley Davis in 1916 when he argues that debate works best when it maintains verisimilitude to the external world. In most problem-posing situations in daily life, nobody knows the proper course of action, but beliefs are plentiful. Debate shows us what to do and how to act when we are faced with such a situation. We must think together, not about one another. 

Students in a classroom are very often thought about. What do they need? What can I do for them? What can they handle? What is it that they are going to try to do to get out of this paper/test/assignment? There are no questions that appear these days that don’t associate to the preposition “about.”

Alternatively, think like a debate teacher.  What does this topic mean? What can we say about it? What are the best sources? What are the controversies here? – all of these questions require posing to the students – they require “with” in order to work. I cannot answer these on my own, because I don’t know. Argument is a collective activity, as we know from Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca. We cannot argue unless we are with. 

Assign reading that is new to you as well as to the students. If you assign writing, do it with them. If you design a test, think about how the test can assist the student, instead of figuring out what they are about. When they offer interpretations in the classroom, try the Peter Elbow suggestion of playing the believing game with them, rather than finding what’s wrong with it. Considering the students as with you in the class, instead of what the class is about, will help the experience become better for the professor and the student. Colleagues, not creations. Students arrive in courses fully formed, not lacking. Professors do too. Focusing on being with allows all participants the chance to contribute to something greater than what the total of the classroom provides. Planning a course about the students’ needs encourages a construction of students that is lacking, incomplete, and needy. And the attitude of the professor will also come off that way. Nobody wants to be receptive to someone like this.

I suggest that we start thinking with students rather than about them. We can make them allies and colleagues, or we can make them products and representatives of what our collegiate brand is. The latter is what our collective discourse suggests to us that we should be up to. Perhaps something as simple as a change in grammar can change our motives and our actions – and eventually our classroom culture. 

Welcome to the new blog site! I thought a change was in order after not posting for so long. 

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role and place of debate in my life. As I am assessing this, I take a lot of notes. I make a lot of lists. I think about the books that debate drew into my life, and the types of texts that debate pushes out of your life. 

Mostly what I have been considering is what I no longer find enjoyable about debate. But the more I think about it, these are things that might not be debate at all. 

If you were to make a list of all the things you wish debate would dispense with in order to improve, what would it look like? You should try it. I do it often. 

Now examine that list, and ask the basic philosophical question – which of these are necessary to debate? 

My guess will be that very few would be related necessarily to having a valuable, engaging, challenging debate. I would assume that many of the things you listed are accidental properties of debating. 

Now shift the question: How many of the practices on your list are necessary to having tournaments? I bet most of them. Most of the things we assume are debate practices are actually debate-in-tournament-setting practices. 

The next step is to try to imagine debate without tournaments. What remains? If you strip away all the tournament practices that you find distasteful, what can you have? What do you have? 

This system of questioning works well on a lot of things. I first encountered it when I was studying the works of Herbert Marcuse. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that a key restriction on thought perpetuated by modern society is the loss of the ability among people to distinguish between the “ought” and the “is.” The inability to make normative claims is one thing – it takes practice. But not seeing the necessity to make them, i.e. seeing the world as set and non-fungible – is something very different. It is to the benefit of an ideology of practices that the realm where normative statements can be offered disappears.

This is where we are with debate. It seems that we have great difficulty imagining debate without tournaments. Which means that the ideology of the tournament has pasted itself onto our idea of debating. Perhaps this is why so many debaters have trouble appreciating debates that occur in public spaces. Public debates, hosted by many clubs worldwide, often engender the rhetoric among team participants or observers: “Well, if this had been a real debate. . .”

Real debate? Or real tournament debate? The elimination of conceptions of debate practice outside of a tournament model eliminates the difference. 

We don’t have the luxury of something like baseball here, where “real” baseball follows from a set of rules that are maintained by a professional league. We don’t even have the small comfort of something like mock trial or legal mooting competitions where connection to the law itself maintains some semblance of “real” practice that is not just the norms and ideology of the competition. 

What does debate have? 

We seem to have the reasonable person standard, which has transformed itself into the average reasonable voter standard, which is slowly and silently becoming the average reasonable debater standard – that is, instead of a public or simulated public evaluating our debates, it’s a simulated private. Without some external check, the norms of debating become synonymous with the norms of tournament debating. 

Connection to something other than what works at a tournament is essential to allowing debate space to change to benefit the practitioners. To allow the tournament to transpose itself onto debate is to eliminate a number of possibilities for engaging, challenging, and interesting debate practices to emerge. 

Welcome to the new blog site! I thought a change was in order after not posting for so long. 

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role and place of debate in my life. As I am assessing this, I take a lot of notes. I make a lot of lists. I think about the books that debate drew into my life, and the types of texts that debate pushes out of your life. 

Mostly what I have been considering is what I no longer find enjoyable about debate. But the more I think about it, these are things that might not be debate at all. 

If you were to make a list of all the things you wish debate would dispense with in order to improve, what would it look like? You should try it. I do it often. 

Now examine that list, and ask the basic philosophical question – which of these are necessary to debate? 

My guess will be that very few would be related necessarily to having a valuable, engaging, challenging debate. I would assume that many of the things you listed are accidental properties of debating. 

Now shift the question: How many of the practices on your list are necessary to having tournaments? I bet most of them. Most of the things we assume are debate practices are actually debate-in-tournament-setting practices. 

The next step is to try to imagine debate without tournaments. What remains? If you strip away all the tournament practices that you find distasteful, what can you have? What do you have? 

This system of questioning works well on a lot of things. I first encountered it when I was studying the works of Herbert Marcuse. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that a key restriction on thought perpetuated by modern society is the loss of the ability among people to distinguish between the “ought” and the “is.” The inability to make normative claims is one thing – it takes practice. But not seeing the necessity to make them, i.e. seeing the world as set and non-fungible – is something very different. It is to the benefit of an ideology of practices that the realm where normative statements can be offered disappears.

This is where we are with debate. It seems that we have great difficulty imagining debate without tournaments. Which means that the ideology of the tournament has pasted itself onto our idea of debating. Perhaps this is why so many debaters have trouble appreciating debates that occur in public spaces. Public debates, hosted by many clubs worldwide, often engender the rhetoric among team participants or observers: “Well, if this had been a real debate. . .”

Real debate? Or real tournament debate? The elimination of conceptions of debate practice outside of a tournament model eliminates the difference. 

We don’t have the luxury of something like baseball here, where “real” baseball follows from a set of rules that are maintained by a professional league. We don’t even have the small comfort of something like mock trial or legal mooting competitions where connection to the law itself maintains some semblance of “real” practice that is not just the norms and ideology of the competition. 

What does debate have? 

We seem to have the reasonable person standard, which has transformed itself into the average reasonable voter standard, which is slowly and silently becoming the average reasonable debater standard – that is, instead of a public or simulated public evaluating our debates, it’s a simulated private. Without some external check, the norms of debating become synonymous with the norms of tournament debating. 

Connection to something other than what works at a tournament is essential to allowing debate space to change to benefit the practitioners. To allow the tournament to transpose itself onto debate is to eliminate a number of possibilities for engaging, challenging, and interesting debate practices to emerge. 

It fell out from the back of the book I was flipping through, looking for a quote for a piece I am writing about conceptualizing debate as a spiritual practice.

Upon seeing this paper, in a book on koans, of all things, made me realize that debating, for me, has always invoked a certain rhetoric of connection.

In the Buddhist traditions, statements such as “here is there, there is here” are so frequent to be commonplace. The rhetoric of such utterances is meant to de-center the comfortable position of subject vs. object when relating to the world. Instead of critiquing that position, or offering an alternative, Buddhism’s rhetoric attempts to provide a comfort with the dis-comfortable notion that such dichotomies are both constructed and real, both something that we have made and something that exists out there that we must take into our accounting. This reformation of the relationship of things to self is hardly a reformation at all in one sense. The koan acts to disrupt the belief that these relationships are not constructs simply because they are constructs. It’s moving around the items on your desk precisely to place them all back where they just were, but you know that they can be arranged.

Debate functions this way, and I’ve written some about the relationship of the koan to debating. But thinking of the entire process of debating as a pedagogical practice stretches the limits beyond just the act of debating. It stretches them to include the travel, the people, and the milling about as a part of the practice of debating. The people on this list, and me, have been moved around by debating. Are we where we were as subjects? Perhaps so, perhaps we are a little different. But the point is that we have been moved in a way that allows the chance to recognize the potential for the movement of that we consider subject and that we consider object in the world.

Does debate fundamentally change people? This seems to be something that we agree on and share narratives about. But how does it change them? The traditional explanations that it makes people critical thinkers, better lawyers, or the like become less persuasive when we try to identify the elements of debate practice that link up with critical thinking as defined by most CT scholars. When we try to find things analogous to law school or the practice of law, we find more differences and gaps present between debating and practicing law. Perhaps the practice of debate itself, in all of its elements is a koan, designed to dissociate our conception of self vs. others, subject vs. object from reality and into a space of fungibility, a place where we realize most of these relationships are posited and convincing, that they are things we have invented that have the force of the real, in all of that immutable sense we associate with reality.

This receipt tucked into this book about koans serves as a koan for me. Who were these people? Where were we going? Where are we going? Who are we now? Without debate, things would be just as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. With debate, things would be as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. The practice of debating changes everything in exactly this way.

It fell out from the back of the book I was flipping through, looking for a quote for a piece I am writing about conceptualizing debate as a spiritual practice.

Upon seeing this paper, in a book on koans, of all things, made me realize that debating, for me, has always invoked a certain rhetoric of connection.

In the Buddhist traditions, statements such as “here is there, there is here” are so frequent to be commonplace. The rhetoric of such utterances is meant to de-center the comfortable position of subject vs. object when relating to the world. Instead of critiquing that position, or offering an alternative, Buddhism’s rhetoric attempts to provide a comfort with the dis-comfortable notion that such dichotomies are both constructed and real, both something that we have made and something that exists out there that we must take into our accounting. This reformation of the relationship of things to self is hardly a reformation at all in one sense. The koan acts to disrupt the belief that these relationships are not constructs simply because they are constructs. It’s moving around the items on your desk precisely to place them all back where they just were, but you know that they can be arranged.

Debate functions this way, and I’ve written some about the relationship of the koan to debating. But thinking of the entire process of debating as a pedagogical practice stretches the limits beyond just the act of debating. It stretches them to include the travel, the people, and the milling about as a part of the practice of debating. The people on this list, and me, have been moved around by debating. Are we where we were as subjects? Perhaps so, perhaps we are a little different. But the point is that we have been moved in a way that allows the chance to recognize the potential for the movement of that we consider subject and that we consider object in the world.

Does debate fundamentally change people? This seems to be something that we agree on and share narratives about. But how does it change them? The traditional explanations that it makes people critical thinkers, better lawyers, or the like become less persuasive when we try to identify the elements of debate practice that link up with critical thinking as defined by most CT scholars. When we try to find things analogous to law school or the practice of law, we find more differences and gaps present between debating and practicing law. Perhaps the practice of debate itself, in all of its elements is a koan, designed to dissociate our conception of self vs. others, subject vs. object from reality and into a space of fungibility, a place where we realize most of these relationships are posited and convincing, that they are things we have invented that have the force of the real, in all of that immutable sense we associate with reality.

This receipt tucked into this book about koans serves as a koan for me. Who were these people? Where were we going? Where are we going? Who are we now? Without debate, things would be just as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. With debate, things would be as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. The practice of debating changes everything in exactly this way.