The New York Sophist

Thinking about how Little Thinking Goes into Teaching in Higher Ed

It’s Tuesday, and classes for the spring term start tomorrow. I work at an institution where teaching is such an afterthought that I still do not know my schedule. I suppose this should not be connected to such a large claim as “teaching is such an afterthought,” but in honor of rhetoric and the sophistic ethics and values I try to live by, I thought I would try to create this mountain while surrounded by traces of moles.

I think that teaching quality has little to do with the time of day and the classroom you are assigned. But this kind of thinking is dangerous. It permits one to determine what can be tossed aside and what can be centered. This is not only egotistical, but dangerous in terms of the desire of the professor.

“Desire” in this essay will be read by regulars to this blog in the Lacanian sense. This is not what I mean. I am thinking of desire in this essay in Buddhist terms – that which must be eliminated (Buddhism uses the word ‘overcome’ in English for this, but I am not certain of the Pali word). Perhaps it cannot be eliminated but it must be pushed to the back.

The moon is not bothered by the clouds that pass across it. Something like this is from a koan. I have written a couple of essays and tried to write many more about the value of the koan, that puzzle which will shut itself off forever if addressed with western reason (“logic” or “propositional thinking”). This koan encourages us to realize something that can only be spoken about and thought about at the same time.

There is little that is clear about what should go on in a classroom. The desire to have a clear, organized, results-oriented course with measurable outcomes can overdetermine the class. Like so many clouds, they can obscure our attention from the moon. We miss everything if we can only see something, only attend to one thing or the interaction of one thing with what we expect to see or understand.

University administrators, like phrenologists, alchemists, and those who try to create perpetual motion machines, encourage us to miss the point exactly this way. They focus so much on results they would rather there not be a process. So many of them reveal their horrible nature when they express, at the end of a spring term, how wonderful the campus is without the presence of students. “Oh!” they exclaim, “How perfect is the body without all those messy organs!” University administrators prefer the taxidermy museum to the zoo, primarily because it is so still and organized. Whether it offers understanding about animals, well, sure it does! We’ll figure out some way to figure that out. But for now, it’s open, clean, organized, and quiet.

Knowing the time of day, the days, the room – all are part of the larger teaching organism, and of no interest to those who administrate the university. As long as there is an instructor-of-record, who cares? That can be done at any point in the process, including apparently the first day.

Things have never been good where I work, but it’s incredible just how far they continue to tumble. Convinced they can create a perpetual motion machine, university administrators tinker all day and into the night with it while faculty stand by and wonder what the machine is meant to do, other than power itself eternally.

What’s missing is process. A koan, like teaching, is something that is all process, no result. If there is a result, it’s that a process has been indicated, and that process isn’t burdened by desire. All things are valuable to a process orientation. The university results-orientation doesn’t include process at all. Did the course run? Were grades submitted on-time? Everything is fine then.

The afterthought is process and process is really what teaching is. A process of figuring things is my best definition today. We bring in readings, practices, and conversations to the figuring, and then the students are released to continue figuring and improving those methods as they move through life. The afterthought model of teaching – where basics are basics, just show up and give some assignments – is probably the reason higher education is a dead industry that doesn’t realize it has died, wandering and wailing in the places it used to live, occasionally giving someone chills; waking them up wide-eyed.

This post wound up in a very different place than where I started. Perhaps “afterthought” is part of the figuring we should be doing ourselves. Can we do student evaluations a year or two after the class has ended as well?

The utterance and its relation to belief

I spent a lot of time watching these nomination speeches and votes in the House and found none of the speeches particularly compelling or interesting from the perspective of a sophist.

There’s not a lot to teach here, but one comment that Kevin McCarthy said after vote six really caught my attention:

“We have 90% of the votes,” McCarthy added. “I’ve never seen a body where 10% is going to control the 90%. It just doesn’t happen that way.”

This is such an incredibly wrong argument, and like all incredibly wrong arguments, it depends on the context to find it oh so wrong. Sophistry is the art of engaging argumentation and reason from the perspectives of the situation, the audience, and what counts as reason in the moment. Reason, often touted as a safe harbor, often depends on the wind and waves, and can offer varying degrees of safety. To be sure we are in a good place, we need a large resource of questions to pursue when we encounter claims.

Some would argue that the Republican party supports this idea as part of their party platform – that only the wealthy should control what happens to the rest of the population. Or that the moral and religious views of a minority of interpreters should govern what people can or cannot do with their lives and bodies.

We could also say that the military is a body like this, and without much controversy at all compared to the previous paragraph. This is how it should be – the officers should say what the soldiers should do, and they should do it.

This is also very much like where I work, a university, where the vast majority of people there have no say about what courses they need or have to take, and a small minority of folks at the university tell them what they need.

But McCarthy is deploying this very strange argument in the context of democracy and voting. Although the House of Representatives is not really a democracy, per se – there are all kinds of previous restrictions on what can be argued there, brought up, and who can participate – the sense that the House is a place for open debate and argument and that the majority of votes should win after an issue is handled – resonates well with his audience that he’s trying to reach.

It just makes sense that 90% should overrule the 10% doesn’t it?

But where does that sense-making come from? I believe it comes from the context. There are many contexts where one wouldn’t want to deploy this argument at all.

When we see this sort of argument deployed, it’s multilayered to be sure. Who is in control? Who should be in control? What’s the support and evidence behind this claim? All these questions are very important ones to start with to engage what McCarthy said.

However what is often left out of such analysis is that the context of where and when he said it – what Kenneth Burke referred to in his theory of human motives as “scene” – overdetermines how these other questions can be asked. It also leaves out a very important line of questioning: Does McCarthy understand the scene he’s referring to?

Is the House of Representatives an open democracy? Is majority rule the way of the United States? Is that the way of a healthy deliberative body? What about the context, situation, and reasons why holdouts are holding out? These questions are important starters not only for engaging what he said, but the ideology behind it. His very conceptions as to how democracy should work are on the table after one starts to chase these questions.

Although no closer to determining if he will become Speaker, these sophistic modes of engagement with a statement open up a much more important line of reasoning: What are the appropriate conceptions of democracy, and does this candidate adhere to them? If not, is it close enough to the ideal for us to compromise our beliefs and values to support him?

Without detailed contextual lines of questioning, democratic governance becomes impossible, or at least difficult. Without context, one exists only in strict ideology where there is truth and fiction. And no compromise is possible. Without that, there is no chance for shared governance.

A few surprises already have hit me in 2023. One is that the government may not be that incompetent. I sent in my Passport renewal (it expires in March) on December 10th, roughly. I am pretty sure I remember the date because I had a couple of other things to drop in the mail that day and figured since I was done I would put my application in and get the Passport back in February.

I wasn’t in my apartment from December 22nd all the way to the 28th, where I returned and checked my mail to find my new passport in there. That’s roughly 18 days total turnaround, which blows my mind. This is normal processing not expedited.

I sent the whole thing to Texas and got the new Passport from Boston and then the old one came from VA, so who knows? I guess at some point everything was at the State Department.

The second thing is that I got a great new gaming chair so I hope to spend more time on my desktop computer than laptop. It’s much more conducive to writing and recording than my other methods of writing have been.

Mostly that’s the office, where there are a lot of distractions and things to do that are not sitting around writing a post, and a lot of great conversations to be had. The office could be a better place to write with a few schedule adjustments. More on that in another post.

My dead couch (it bottomed out a few months ago) sits on the curb tonight waiting to be collected by the Sanitation department tomorrow morning. I am very glad to be getting a new one and starting 2023 sitting on something better than fabric and broken wood a few inches above the hardwood floor. It is surprising how important a couch really is.

Writing for me is more than important. It’s a way I have for discovering what I think about various things. As a practicing Sophist and a teacher of rhetoric, I find it essential to always be able to think about alternative points of view on any issue (please note that I did not say the other side, this is not Stranger Things or some derivative).

I’m hoping that the new couch, new chair, and new passport which arrived in the opposite order that I’ve listed here (couch still has not arrived, but is on schedule) will establish a bit of a better environment for writing things fit for reading.

Hey there audience, hope you are gearing up for a Merry Christmas or happy holiday whatever it is you are into celebrating.

I’m deep in reflection on teaching as I often am this time of year so haven’t been publishing much here. But I hope to have some starting points soon. The biggest issue on my mind is how to adapt to people who experienced the transition to higher education and its demands during the lockdown.

This isn’t a temporary thing, nor is it going to go away in four or five years. The pandemic has given pedagogy “long COVID” and this means lifestyle changes to how we approach teaching and learning.

The end of 2022 is the end of caring what happens to intercollegiate debate for me. After attending the NCA Convention and hosting the Civic Debate Conference in the summer here on campus, I’m finally convinced the future there is self-serving, and completely devoid from what it should be about – how to teach people to make cases for what they think is best (aka: rhetoric; the rhetorical tradition).

In 2023 the plan is to try to bring what I love about writing studies and composition into what I love about debate as a practice and what I think is most valuable about the rhetorical tradition. These three things do not fit too well together for a lot of reasons, most of which are fake.

As for now I’m just going to read and enjoy the cold weather as we move through the rest of December

The mass tournament’s impact on debate’s potential

Tournament debating: Massive tournaments or debate education that is oriented toward speeches, time limits, and decision making that is within tournament forms must conceal the fact that it is a selection and deflection of particular notions of argument. Mastery of the tournament hopes to be mastery of argumentation overall, which, from a rhetorical understanding of arguing or debating, is impossible. How do so-called debate coaches and tournament champions maintain this idea that the debate tournament’s thin and limited presentation of argumentation is what debate ought to look like?

This has been discussed in the first half of the 20th century after the invention and immediate viral spread of the debate tournament, first held at Southwestern College by Dr. J. Thompson Baker in the 1920s. In the 1940s, educators like Dr. Elton Abernathy and others worked with NCA to ban debate tournaments as they seemed to provide instructions on how to paint a veneer rather than carpentry. Pearl Harbor cut these conversations short, and when the dust cleared, the tournament was the only game in town, save for those historical re-enactors who liked to annually keep a Triangular Debate circuit alive. But serious debate was now tournament debate. Dr. Douglas Ehninger criticized the debate tournaments ubiquity, arguing that what supports the idea these events are valuable is the “Fallacy of Bigness.” That is, if there are a lot of people entered into a debate event, it must be doing something good/productive/educational. He argued that debate educators are sewing the seeds of their own destruction without stronger rubrics and assessment models, and low and behold he was right.

One of the best ways to understand how the tournament is the worst form of debating is the concepts of the judging paradigm and what is called mutually preferred judging. The Master (S1) can dictate what knowledge is and what is to-be-known (S2) if it conceals the incompleteness of their identity ($). They don’t have all the answers and are just like us when it comes to the influence of argument. But this cannot be revealed if one hopes to control what argument should be.

The judge paradigm is the master’s identity. The paradigm is a listing of what the judge believes to be good argument, what they will support or “buy” in a debate, what sorts of argumentation they prefer. This is written in a style that absolves the argumentation forms, techniques, and standard “moves” from any defense whatsoever; the master indicates where they “lean” in on particular forms and lean away from other ones. As Marcuse identified in “Repressive Tolerance,” such indicators – no matter their revolutionary quality – always are in support of the totality of the system, making it seem even more legitimate by showing others how one positions oneself individually between options.

The important thing to note here is that a judging paradigm that said, “Speak to me like you would anyone,” would not be a judging paradigm. It would be seen as either exotic, strange, or just a waste of an opportunity to “tell us what we need to know.” This sort of demand from others from the master are never as satisfying as you would want them to be though, even when clearly stated. This would be seen as nonsense rather than a “bad paradigm” because it doesn’t tell you what you should know, be, or do.

This is frustrating, but it’s frustration of frustration. It stops the frustration that makes tournaments pleasurable – complaining about the judge. This is what Lacan indicates by saying the product of this discourse is “desire” or the “object cause of desire,” the objet petit a. The debater gets pleasure from having desire for a different outcome, or at least more correspondence between the master’s demand and what they know about the master (“they say they are cool with performance cases but they don’t really know what they are”).

Furthermore, contemporary Worlds debating exponentially amplifies this, making everyone the servant of some esoteric Master who might not even exist. I have written a lot about the judge guidelines for WUDC and their problems. This makes the tournament format itself the master, codifying rules for the debates as if they were something immutable, part of the rules of “good argument.” In this way, every debate becomes generative of desire for something, as the rules themselves are unsure, based on an equivocation that there is an understanding of what a “good argument” is that wouldn’t rely on context, situation, topic, or people listening ($).

The important thing here is that the worst form of debate is when the format takes over from the possibilities that discourse can create. If the result is a desire for “something else,” why not do something else? But pleasure, if you know where it is, is hard to turn away from. This might explain the ridiculousness of intercollegiate debate in the pandemic. Even though it was held on powerful platforms such as Discord and the like, the tournament kept the form of a weekend event. There was no attempt to innovate or provide something else to see where debate would go, what debate would make. It seems the leadership of the intercollegiate debate world is happy with the tournament because they have figured out the alchemy of making frustration pleasurable. They call this “pedagogy.” It seems like a lot of work not to try things out when faced with contingency. What happened to the spirit of the Shirley Debates?

The only cognate to the tournament format is the Presidential debates. Not the company that university-funded programs really want to be in. Or do they? Universities regularly pony up millions of dollars to host a Presidential debate. Providing a forum for the master’s incoherent demands is big business. But shouldn’t those who claim to teach debate, critical thought, rhetoric, and argument want more than the satisfaction of knowing everything is horrible?