The New York Sophist

A student said to me, “I really wish you could write me a recommendation letter, but you haven’t ever been my professor.” This student has been studying debate with me for several years, so I pushed on this to get the response: “It’s not academic, so it doesn’t count.”

Debate not academic? How could this be? We’d spent hours engaging in what I believed to be fairly intense, deep investigation of countless political and social issues. We’d spent hours in the evening giving and listening to critiques of the persuasive use of the human voice, of the fragility and power of language, of the intense agony of not being able to get your very clear point across to other human beings. This is a clear trajectory of intellectual practice that started in Athens over 2,500 years ago. It was picked up and carried through Europe, and has been at the heart of the spiritual and intellectual training at the finest historical Universities from India to China to America. What is the litmus test for academic, if not this?

I tried not to be angry, for what was obvious to me is very rarely obvious to anyone else (you might notice, this comes with the human experience for free. Everyone gets it as a sort of bonus). Let’s try to look at this question from the perspective of the contemporary undergraduate for a more fair answer. Academic appears to have changed color, shape, and flavor.

Academic, for these students, involves several things. First, there must be an official record of study – to go to the library and read a book on a topic you are interested in is a strange idea. I push this every semester, and every semester the students are confused. When they want to learn something, they decide to take a class – a class, I might add, they will not attend frequently, barely skim the readings, halfheartedly attend to the lectures when present, question the professor’s ability based on whether or not she can command their attention through days of sleep deprivation and mobile phones, and finally end up complaining about the quality of the class, even though they started the final paper after allowing the time allotted for its preparation to whittle down to mere hours.

Secondly, academic requires some sort of abstracted, hierarchical assessment. Without a grade, or hours on a transcript, how will we know we learned? There have to be moments of bizarrely calculated and abstracted “good” for students to indicate to others. Most of the time, grades are refered to as evidence of a “brush with death” – i.e. “I can’t believe I was hung over every single class and got a B.”  But students have conspirators here – professors who get a sick thrill out of equating physical presence – such as attendance – with points or other nodules of achievement in the course. I hear the weeping up and down my office hallway every term as faculty explain that the student fails to get a B- because they are missing 3.75 attendance points. Reading is assigned punitively; exams are our enforcement of punishment. Far too often things are so abstract from the reality our examinations are less like Bentham’s panoptic system of justice and much more like Lindsay England’s – celebrating the torture of a student as a metonymy for a general hatred of students in general. Abstraction can bring you torture, or it can bring you self-regulation. Directionless, yet containing everything valuable about the course – that is what counts as academic.

Finally, there must be some sort of “professionalism” associated with the academic experience. Whether that’s distance, or some sort of role-play between professor and student, the impact is that less and less important moments for teaching are properly attended to. Distance is the idea that the professor is somehow “too busy” for students, and the time given to them occurs mainly in the classroom. Even then, the students are too frightened to indicate need, ask for clarification, or perhaps are fed-up with being addressed in a dismissive tone. Role-Play also factors in here; the professor pretends to be a great Sage evaluating whether or not the students are really capable of receiving the great wisdom only he or she knows. Sometimes it’s a customer service model where the student is told to indicate dissatisfaction or confusion as if they were at the shopping mall. Encounters outside the classroom are devalued, as presence in the classroom is celebrated to the point where it is indistinguishable from other forms of good academic performance. Too often I hear, “Well, she attended every class” as a reason to grant a higher grade. No wonder our students don’t read – they know they don’t need to. The more the University interest turns toward creating job seekers over thinkers or even contemplators, the

This brings us back to debate, that strange game/auto-didactic experience that is often led by a faculty member but never controlled by one. It takes more time and energy to get the equivalent of a C in it, but students can’t wait to spend their whole weekend working at it. The line between student and teacher does not, and will not exist – no matter how hard some members of the community push for its clear existence. The time in the classroom is derivative of the time outside of it, and the assessment is always already situational, immediate, and inapplicable to ontic ways of doing persuasion. Debate haunts you all the time, not just the day before the test. It appears in your daily interactions, and makes you think twice about what you said. It’s always, and never, on the test. In short it rails against everything the contemporary University and undergraduate have unintentionally conspired to create.

Will my letter be solicited? I hope not. I have nothing to say inside such a system. My voice would not be recognizable as “voice.” Even such work with such students over years would not be understandable as valuable by the system’s criteria.  Perhaps my student is more right than she knows – my work doesn’t count, will never count, in measurable ways.

But is debate academic? God, I hope it never is.

A student said to me, “I really wish you could write me a recommendation letter, but you haven’t ever been my professor.” This student has been studying debate with me for several years, so I pushed on this to get the response: “It’s not academic, so it doesn’t count.”

Debate not academic? How could this be? We’d spent hours engaging in what I believed to be fairly intense, deep investigation of countless political and social issues. We’d spent hours in the evening giving and listening to critiques of the persuasive use of the human voice, of the fragility and power of language, of the intense agony of not being able to get your very clear point across to other human beings. This is a clear trajectory of intellectual practice that started in Athens over 2,500 years ago. It was picked up and carried through Europe, and has been at the heart of the spiritual and intellectual training at the finest historical Universities from India to China to America. What is the litmus test for academic, if not this?

I tried not to be angry, for what was obvious to me is very rarely obvious to anyone else (you might notice, this comes with the human experience for free. Everyone gets it as a sort of bonus). Let’s try to look at this question from the perspective of the contemporary undergraduate for a more fair answer. Academic appears to have changed color, shape, and flavor.

Academic, for these students, involves several things. First, there must be an official record of study – to go to the library and read a book on a topic you are interested in is a strange idea. I push this every semester, and every semester the students are confused. When they want to learn something, they decide to take a class – a class, I might add, they will not attend frequently, barely skim the readings, halfheartedly attend to the lectures when present, question the professor’s ability based on whether or not she can command their attention through days of sleep deprivation and mobile phones, and finally end up complaining about the quality of the class, even though they started the final paper after allowing the time allotted for its preparation to whittle down to mere hours.

Secondly, academic requires some sort of abstracted, hierarchical assessment. Without a grade, or hours on a transcript, how will we know we learned? There have to be moments of bizarrely calculated and abstracted “good” for students to indicate to others. Most of the time, grades are refered to as evidence of a “brush with death” – i.e. “I can’t believe I was hung over every single class and got a B.”  But students have conspirators here – professors who get a sick thrill out of equating physical presence – such as attendance – with points or other nodules of achievement in the course. I hear the weeping up and down my office hallway every term as faculty explain that the student fails to get a B- because they are missing 3.75 attendance points. Reading is assigned punitively; exams are our enforcement of punishment. Far too often things are so abstract from the reality our examinations are less like Bentham’s panoptic system of justice and much more like Lindsay England’s – celebrating the torture of a student as a metonymy for a general hatred of students in general. Abstraction can bring you torture, or it can bring you self-regulation. Directionless, yet containing everything valuable about the course – that is what counts as academic.

Finally, there must be some sort of “professionalism” associated with the academic experience. Whether that’s distance, or some sort of role-play between professor and student, the impact is that less and less important moments for teaching are properly attended to. Distance is the idea that the professor is somehow “too busy” for students, and the time given to them occurs mainly in the classroom. Even then, the students are too frightened to indicate need, ask for clarification, or perhaps are fed-up with being addressed in a dismissive tone. Role-Play also factors in here; the professor pretends to be a great Sage evaluating whether or not the students are really capable of receiving the great wisdom only he or she knows. Sometimes it’s a customer service model where the student is told to indicate dissatisfaction or confusion as if they were at the shopping mall. Encounters outside the classroom are devalued, as presence in the classroom is celebrated to the point where it is indistinguishable from other forms of good academic performance. Too often I hear, “Well, she attended every class” as a reason to grant a higher grade. No wonder our students don’t read – they know they don’t need to. The more the University interest turns toward creating job seekers over thinkers or even contemplators, the

This brings us back to debate, that strange game/auto-didactic experience that is often led by a faculty member but never controlled by one. It takes more time and energy to get the equivalent of a C in it, but students can’t wait to spend their whole weekend working at it. The line between student and teacher does not, and will not exist – no matter how hard some members of the community push for its clear existence. The time in the classroom is derivative of the time outside of it, and the assessment is always already situational, immediate, and inapplicable to ontic ways of doing persuasion. Debate haunts you all the time, not just the day before the test. It appears in your daily interactions, and makes you think twice about what you said. It’s always, and never, on the test. In short it rails against everything the contemporary University and undergraduate have unintentionally conspired to create.

Will my letter be solicited? I hope not. I have nothing to say inside such a system. My voice would not be recognizable as “voice.” Even such work with such students over years would not be understandable as valuable by the system’s criteria.  Perhaps my student is more right than she knows – my work doesn’t count, will never count, in measurable ways.

But is debate academic? God, I hope it never is.

Here’s a recent email response I gave on the subject of videotaping debates, addressed to someone who asked me to remove a debate they were in that they didn’t care for their performance.

I have placed your video in privacy stasis – nobody can see it at all, and I hope you’ll test that to make sure that I’ve secured it properly. It will stay hidden forever, unless I show it to an entry-level debate course at my University in New York – about 20 people or so a year.

I understand your concern to control your appearances online. A popular sentiment. But I’d like to point out just exactly who you are asking to control from access to your performance.

The video as of today has 572 hits since it was put up in 2009, almost all from the US and Canada. I think this represents the total audience for the video, since in the past week it has only received 8.

I think most people interested in seeing the video have seen it, as far as people looking for you or how you did. I bet most of the audience represented here would have been in the room if they could have been. Those who weren’t were probably restricted by work or school commitments or maybe something else. This video allows (allowed, I think they’ve done it) them to see something they would have seen anyway. 

More importantly, about once every couple of months I get an email from the developing world – India, Africa, someplace like that – thanking me for hosting these videos. Apparently they get the videos from internet cafes, download them, and use them in rural areas to train young debaters in how to speak well. Tournament performances like the one you gave and the access and ability to do them, we take for granted. This video, and the others like it that I host here, represent a level of pedagogical access that even 10 years ago people thought was a good element in a science fiction story. 


As far as future employers finding it, which is a common concern among debaters who don’t like to be taped, I highly doubt debating will achieve that much relevance to be a real threat. If they did find it, they’d probably be astounded that students do this sort of thing. Why our community chooses to fly under the radar is always a mystery to me. 

So I’ll keep the video out of the public eye until I hear from you again. I’m sure everyone who wanted to see it has seen it, and as for those who haven’t seen it yet – the people who really do need access to these videos – I’ll let you decide about them.

Best Wishes, Steve

Here’s a recent email response I gave on the subject of videotaping debates, addressed to someone who asked me to remove a debate they were in that they didn’t care for their performance.

I have placed your video in privacy stasis – nobody can see it at all, and I hope you’ll test that to make sure that I’ve secured it properly. It will stay hidden forever, unless I show it to an entry-level debate course at my University in New York – about 20 people or so a year.

I understand your concern to control your appearances online. A popular sentiment. But I’d like to point out just exactly who you are asking to control from access to your performance.

The video as of today has 572 hits since it was put up in 2009, almost all from the US and Canada. I think this represents the total audience for the video, since in the past week it has only received 8.

I think most people interested in seeing the video have seen it, as far as people looking for you or how you did. I bet most of the audience represented here would have been in the room if they could have been. Those who weren’t were probably restricted by work or school commitments or maybe something else. This video allows (allowed, I think they’ve done it) them to see something they would have seen anyway. 

More importantly, about once every couple of months I get an email from the developing world – India, Africa, someplace like that – thanking me for hosting these videos. Apparently they get the videos from internet cafes, download them, and use them in rural areas to train young debaters in how to speak well. Tournament performances like the one you gave and the access and ability to do them, we take for granted. This video, and the others like it that I host here, represent a level of pedagogical access that even 10 years ago people thought was a good element in a science fiction story. 


As far as future employers finding it, which is a common concern among debaters who don’t like to be taped, I highly doubt debating will achieve that much relevance to be a real threat. If they did find it, they’d probably be astounded that students do this sort of thing. Why our community chooses to fly under the radar is always a mystery to me. 

So I’ll keep the video out of the public eye until I hear from you again. I’m sure everyone who wanted to see it has seen it, and as for those who haven’t seen it yet – the people who really do need access to these videos – I’ll let you decide about them.

Best Wishes, Steve

Here’s a video of a middle school debate we did today on the subject of whether students should have a say in the courses that they are required to take.

Debating for public audiences (i.e. non-“debate community” audiences) is something I am finding more and more important to my pedagogy every year. I think it’s because I am becoming more and more convinced that any debate format – every debate format – naturally becomes a gravity well of practices and performances that become so attractive that no utterance can escape their pull. In other words, specific style of speech used to win tournament rounds becomes indistinguishable from “good speech.”

In this debate, I think one move that would help the debaters reach the audience would be to speak more in enthymemes – something that we tell new debaters to stop doing at practice number one.  The other skill here would be to encourage debaters to switch from the deliberative to the epidictic mode of argument. This would be argument fit for a day of celebration, the here, the now, the immediate.  Most motions and most “good debates” (as seen by the competitive community) focus on questions of policy (Aristotle would call them subjects for deliberative oratory). Deliberation deals with decisions about the future, and most of these questions are about something far removed from us and where and when we are – questions of international relations, for example.  The question is how to teach using motions that highlight these two areas of need.

What practices can help debaters attend to the audience in front of them without bowing completely to an ethic of total assimilation to what the audience wants. The audience needs to see what good clash looks like, and needs alternative models of debate compared to what they normally see on TV and the like. This is where the competitive aspects of debate have developed some really good things. This is what we can export to public audiences – as long as we can keep them engaged and keep them listening.