On the Frontier of American Debate

A Look at Downtown Billings, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last weekend, I was at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana to conduct a debate workshop and scrimmage for three schools there interested in moving from NPDA to BP debating.

I say interested – but in my opinion they were well on their way.

Director of Debate at RMC Shelby Jo Long-Hammond and I met at the International Debate Academy Slovenia two years ago and taught together this past summer at the IDEA Youth Forum in Leon, Mexico. She hosted the event, inviting me out to give a bit of instruction to her students and students from other colleges. She has transitioned her students over to BP expertly from what I saw.

Likewise for Carroll University, which is located about three hours from Billings. The students there are speaking very well and very persuasively. I think both teams are going to be quite a force in WUDC and BP to watch out for. It was great fun teaching BP in the west, a fantasy I have had for a long time. Great Falls University was there as well, and the two students representing that institution were new to debate and I think really enjoyed the tournament.

I think I overestimated the difficulty of transitioning to BP from NPDA. NPDA used to be a lot more like BP in speaking style and in types of acceptable arguments. To throttle back from the rapid and highly technical style of argument that NPDA has become might not be as hard as I thought it would be since NPDA’s roots of where arguments come from are nearly the same.

The transition from policy debate is more difficult due to the very different conceptions of refutation, rebuttal, evidence, and extension in the two formats.

These students might not be representative because they have had such good instruction before I got there. I would like to teach more of these sorts of weekend workshops in the future.

See for yourself the quality of the debaters – many of whom in this video are first year students. You will be very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the argumentation.

Debate: Images of Mohammad should be considered hate speech or incitement from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

MOTIONS FROM THE RMC SCRIMMAGE 2012

1. THB that the only people in society who should be allowed to possess firearms are active duty military personnel.

2. THW facilitate access for school administrators to the social media pages of their students in order to actively police bullying.

3. TH supports a unilateral strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

4. THB that austerity measures have failed to solve the problems of the Eurozone.

5. THB that professional athletes should not be permitted to compete in the Olympic Games.

F: THB that any contemporary depictions of the prophet Mohammad should be considered as hate speech or incitement.

On the Frontier of American Debate

A Look at Downtown Billings, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last weekend, I was at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana to conduct a debate workshop and scrimmage for three schools there interested in moving from NPDA to BP debating.

I say interested – but in my opinion they were well on their way.

Director of Debate at RMC Shelby Jo Long-Hammond and I met at the International Debate Academy Slovenia two years ago and taught together this past summer at the IDEA Youth Forum in Leon, Mexico. She hosted the event, inviting me out to give a bit of instruction to her students and students from other colleges. She has transitioned her students over to BP expertly from what I saw.

Likewise for Carroll University, which is located about three hours from Billings. The students there are speaking very well and very persuasively. I think both teams are going to be quite a force in WUDC and BP to watch out for. It was great fun teaching BP in the west, a fantasy I have had for a long time. Great Falls University was there as well, and the two students representing that institution were new to debate and I think really enjoyed the tournament.

I think I overestimated the difficulty of transitioning to BP from NPDA. NPDA used to be a lot more like BP in speaking style and in types of acceptable arguments. To throttle back from the rapid and highly technical style of argument that NPDA has become might not be as hard as I thought it would be since NPDA’s roots of where arguments come from are nearly the same.

The transition from policy debate is more difficult due to the very different conceptions of refutation, rebuttal, evidence, and extension in the two formats.

These students might not be representative because they have had such good instruction before I got there. I would like to teach more of these sorts of weekend workshops in the future.

See for yourself the quality of the debaters – many of whom in this video are first year students. You will be very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the argumentation.

Debate: Images of Mohammad should be considered hate speech or incitement from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

MOTIONS FROM THE RMC SCRIMMAGE 2012

1. THB that the only people in society who should be allowed to possess firearms are active duty military personnel.

2. THW facilitate access for school administrators to the social media pages of their students in order to actively police bullying.

3. TH supports a unilateral strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

4. THB that austerity measures have failed to solve the problems of the Eurozone.

5. THB that professional athletes should not be permitted to compete in the Olympic Games.

F: THB that any contemporary depictions of the prophet Mohammad should be considered as hate speech or incitement.

Urban Legend and the Sad Truth

Nobody to my knowledge has done any research or collected any data on the social norms, stories, and narratives that accompany debating tournaments. I do know of one research project that was a sociological study of high school debaters in the U.S., but nothing more than that.

I have a few strange books in my apartment, and one of them that is always interesting to flip through is a collection of American Folklore. This is the sort of thing I have in mind.

No doubt one of the most frequent and repetitive urban legends would take up a good chunk of that study. I don’t know what to call it, but the formula is something like this:

1. A team does very well running arguments based on a cutting edge thinker. They use cards from this author on both sides of the resolution.

2. People begin to also use cards from this same author, but not with the level of success as the team who first used it.

3. The reason for this is that the author himself or herself teaches at their University and is helping them with the argument, or they are in a special high level class with that famous thinker, where they get all the secrets about the thinker’s philosophy and advocacy.

I’ve heard this urban legend several times, about Shapiro, Spanos, Zizek, and Spivak. But I’m sure there are other names that would fit into this urban legend.

The trope would be funnier if it wasn’t for the tragedy in it.

The tragedy is that debate is still firmly connected to a modernist philosophical tradition. It’s evident in the way this urban legend operates discursively.

Instead of a team being successful because they have found a way to make a very complex system of thought palatable to an audience, the success has to come from the source. The debaters are closer to the source of the actual argument than anyone else, so they win more.

Modernism is not a straw person. This should be apparent when people who regularly dismiss modernism as vapid and decrepit nonsense are the first to turn to the internal logic of it to explain why a team is doing so well when they are using new theories.

Why is a rhetorical explanation, an explanation that should be very closely hinged to what debate supposedly teaches, not persuasive?

The various ways of grappling with this question will reveal the sad truth of modern debate teaching practice. Emphasis on modern.

Podium Web Series on Rhetoric and Debate

On campus early today to participate in filming a new web series about public speaking, debate, and political discourse. I am even wearing a jacket, which lets you know how important today is.

The series is called Podium, and it’s produced by Radical Media. They are creating a new and contemporary series about political speech.

Today I am to be interviewed about debating, presidential debate, and rhetoric. I wonder what they will ask me. I’m interested to talk about our activities in competitive debating, but I wonder who would be interested in that outside of the usual monastic audience?

I see this as a challenge to connect my feelings and thoughts on presidential debating to how and what I hope I am teaching when I teach competitive debating. I hope I can figure out some interesting strategies.

I will post the final video in two weeks once the editing and post-production is complete.

Fear the Sophist

We were turned down for a grant. I sat in a room with my colleagues and University representatives as we stared at a phone. On the other end a woman from the U.S. State Department read us the reasons we were declined. A panel of experts from different areas evaluated our proposal – to offer a series of annual debating workshops and tournaments in Morocco – and said it scored poorly in the process.
But all the comments were positive, except for one that, in my mind, is the oldest criticism of all when discussing debating. 
The panelists felt our project would fail because we are not teaching advocacy about anything. We are just teaching debating and advocacy by itself. One panelist said that if we were teaching an issue-based form of advocacy – teaching the students something to stand up for – it would improve the project immensely. But she or he could not see how we could teach debating without a civil society or civil issue connected with it.
My thoughts drifted to the critique of rhetoric offered by Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias. Rhetoric has no substance of its own, so it cannot properly be called an “art.” Rhetoric – teaching people how to advocate without any proper subject matter – is akin to teaching people cookery without teaching nutrition, or teaching people the art of cosmetics without teaching how to care for the body properly. For Socrates and Plato, the concern with the reality behind the words is paramount, and it is impossible to imagine a good society placing  the focus of education on the quality of the advocacy without concern for what will be advocated about. The U.S. State Department agreed with this assessment, citing concerns that students would lose interest because there is no critical or social issue keeping them involved. There is also a fear – a fear about teaching young people the ability to change their minds and the minds of others without regard to a particular issue – which is also an ancient fear expressed by Plato. Without grounding in the good, how would a society know where to steer? We would just go wherever we pleased, and might not actually and really know whether we were doing real good or not. 
As I listened to the debriefing, I couldn’t help but cringe. I thought immediately I should have been clearer in my writing about what debate teaches – it teaches people to advocate for advocacy. It teaches the capacity for building civil society capacity. But then the darker side of this criticism came to light – the side that Plato conveniently forgets to have Gorgias argue in the dialogue. 
This is the side where connecting advocacy training, rhetoric, and argumentation to the investments of order and stability come into play. The U.S. suggests things like women’s issues and the issues of children not because of some alturistic sense of duty, but because these are important footholds for consumer capitalism to gain ground. Developing a taste for Western medical practices and Western ideas of dissimination of rights (which of course require particular material possessions to display that you have access to and enjoy certain rights) forego the possibility to imagine alternative ways of ordering society. Training in debate for the sake of debate, or educating people to advocate for advocacy – something I think that debate could be really good at doing – connects the practices of debating to the imagination, not to the superstructure that exists, churning away in a particular direction, deep under all of our feet in the realm of ideology. 
In contemporary scholarship we have the fears, particularly in the United States, that teaching students how to debate and advocate will ruin their ability to believe strongly – become people of conviction – as opposed to people who can manipulate minds as the occasion requires it. Teddy Roosevelt was very proud to write in his autobiography that he did not participate in University debating which could have ruined his conviction. Ron Green and Darrin Hicks wrote a seminal paper that traces the dispute among debate teachers and coaches in the middle of the 20th century on the value of forcing students to take certain positions in debates, or “switch-sides.” The concern was that this type of debate ruins the development of political and social beliefs, which are not the business of the debate coach to generate. On the other side, the effect of teaching switch-side debating is that democracy – at least the U.S. flavor of it – now has a subject position that is very attractive and very persuasive: Democratic thinkers can adapt both sides of a controversy and examine them.  Both results and both positions on the issue of advocacy as the “subject” of advocacy have made their point in the fact that either way, we teach in the service of some ideology.
We can’t help but serve such tectonic forces in our daily lives. But teaching rhetoric and the possibilities of argument and advocacy for their own sake might help us become a bit more aware of such massive forces, and steer the ship a fraction more one way than another. This is terrifying to those with a vested interest in how the world should look.
What is it that makes us host tournaments and encourage the people we like most to participate in debating? What forces are at work there? These questions are a bit beyond a U.S. Government grant application, but they are perhaps the root of better answers to the concerns of a government that wants to promote civil society – but only in a certain flavor. The U.S. State Department – convictionists? Socratics? Perhaps some sort of 21st century blend of both that believes, as we have for most of modern Western civilization, that debate is something you do after you have discovered the truth. Recovery of the epistemic role of debating is something everyone involved in debate should be spending some of their time considering these days.