The New York Sophist

It might be upside down because of how it was mass-scanned with a lot of other paper material that I cleaned out of my filing cabinet years ago, but this appeared today as I was moving some files around, cleaning up, and making sure to get most of my documents out of my University administered OneDrive account. The way politics are going at Universities and with AI scraping and all that nonsense, it's time to leave Cloud City before a deal is made to keep the Empire out of there forever. You know what sort of deal I'm talking about. I've been at my university around 18 years now and I guarantee they would sell me out to any agency for a low price. Furthermore, they would sell all my OneDrive data to an AI miner and never tell me about it. So goes the OneDrive terms of service!

But back to the list - this list hit me with nostalgia and impressed me. In 2005 I was a second year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. I knew I wanted to study and write about the Beat Generation - not as poets but as communication and rhetorical theorists. This list indicates that. But also it indicates a student who feels their foundations aren't quite there in rhetoric or in what inspired the Beats. It's a great list from my point of view but it also makes me want to make a summer reading list 20 years later. What should be on it? What do I need to know as I move forward into the next big project, teaching against the rising waters of authoritarianism and the dismissal of process in favor of "known truth?" There's nowhere to go; the blue waters are just as dangerous. What readings will help create an island, a base of operations? Stay tuned.

(This link is an example; there are tons of NDT debates to watch on the Policy Debate Central YouTube channel)

The National Debate Tournament is seen as a tradition, the oldest, the most continuous, and the highest level of debate competition in the United States for intercollegiate debate. What’s funny about it is that the NDT is most notably an index of change. The more people think of the NDT as some traditional institution that always does debate in some traditional way, the more the motives are fanned to defend that tradition so the more changes are made to the way debate is done to preserve it. “We had to rebuild the village in order to keep the property values high!”

The NDT has changed so much even in my brief brushes with it never as a competitor, barely as a coach and most commonly as a critic and scholar of debate pedagogical history. The most important thing that has changed in order to preserve the NDT’s hold on the purest, best, most rigorous form of debate is technology resistance.

Even though we have laptops, internet, and all kinds of tools to word process and share information with one another it is still a necessary and incontrovertible part of the NDT that speeches must be orated in a room live at the same time as opponents. In contemporary debate anywhere but the NDT, recordings, blogs, social media posts, and video editing are a part of powerful arguments. It seems even a slight modification here to avoid the super spreading speeches would be for all cases and 1NC arguments to be released by the teams to one another so the speech time could be spent in investigating the connections, missed connections, and gaps in the arguments. I think this would improve the quality of debate but leave many people unmoored once they discover they have no expertise in argumentation or debate and plenty in how a tournament should be run. The gap here is huge and unnoticeable until you start trying to make the NDT look more like reasonable debate that occurs in contemporary institutions of all kinds.

Secondly is the desperate amount of energy spent to insure that nobody knows the NDT is happening except the NDT participants and the converted. If a tournament of this quality with this caliber debaters was happening at my university, I would be sure every single person walking around the perimeter of the campus knew it was happening and that I and my department (or division) were responsible for it. Such attention is unwanted, who knows why. Perhaps the NDT believes that their event is unintelligible. Most participants don’t notice this because the practice is a part of their traditions and culture. They also have the full text of anything being chirped in the air by a speaker on their computer. There’s nothing being preserved here except a very quirky and very esoteric understanding of “good debate.”

In rhetoric we have a very simple way to understand good debate: Look to the audience. Are they getting something out of it? NDT answers this question by rug pulling – there won’t be an audience; we will work hard to exclude one. Seems strange if you are the most prestigious debate competition for undergraduate students in the United States.

All this would take is the small adaptation of some video guides, commentary, commentators, and things to look for. Audiences could have access to outlines of the arguments that are coming. They could have video and audio access to expert commentators saying what’s going on in the debate and why it was a good move. NDT could keep their professional sport model of debating and just do what every other professional sport in the world does – offer commentators to explain the action and why the audience should be impressed. Also, allowing most of the debate to happen online prior to the NDT – the sharing of arguments in particular so the speeches can be more general – would be great. If you need a model for how this might play out in practice and still produce good arguments, look to the U.S. Supreme Court or any Federal District Court.

The biggest change, and the strangest one to me is the eruption of Go Fund Me pages of all kinds to bring our team to the NDT. If a team qualifies for the NDT, why don’t they just get to go? It seems like something that should be funded regardless of the institutions commitment to the tournament or debate in general. NDT should try to gather sponsors for this, but this also means accessibility must be a part of the tournament. This cuts against – like all the suggestions I’ve written above – the idea that the NDT is preserving some kind of true or better form of debating than could exist outside the annual terrarium that it puts together in some midwestern hotel. This is obviously false; there are tons of good forums (fora?) for debating out there that simply don’t meet or click with those who have identified the accidental sentiment of practice that has been passed down to make a tournament easier to win with being good at debating. There is no necessary connection between the habits of good NDT debate and good debate. There might be other good reasons to do the NDT, but those will vanish too unless the NDT and the practitioners of it can solve the funding issue.

If a Dean or VP of Student Affairs saw the video linked here they would probably feel very confident about their decision not to fund intercollegiate debate on their campus. They need an interpreter – and anyone who loves American debate traditions needs one. The NDT along with commentators needs a team of Sherpas to help those interested and not part of the high school workshop to debate recruitment pipeline understand what they are seeing and why it is powerful, it matters, and most importantly why it’s a necessary part of university life that is quickly being eroded into a job training site. The crowdfunding angle is so depressing to me and I see it everywhere. I think it should be addressed by the NDT directly and with an eye toward preserving whatever the value of doing NDT debate might be (I’m unfamiliar with the evidence other than the anecdotal and the post hoc law school success stories. There’s got to be better data out there somewhere ya?). It might be that the NDT has nothing to do with teaching rhetoric, debate, or argumentation and it does something quite different than the package suggests. We should change the packaging, or make the appeal coherent in some way to ensure that the funding will be there to have such an event.

The other solution is to distribute the NDT away from a center and to the margin. NDT could be a style of debate meant to inquire after complex, complicated, deep disagreement about national and international policy. It could become a way to approach it, much like TED has become that for research ideas or socially trendy curiosities. It could become like The Moth has become for storytelling. Both of these organizations are models for the NDT’s future – what’s the brand? High intensity, high structured debate on a policy question that is research heavy. It’s not evidence based debate, it’s evidence centric debating. That brand could make NDT something that is replicated in small venues here and there not to discover a champion, but to discover the insights on policy issues that only NDT debaters know can be revealed. The fact that the amount of people who truly get what this style and approach to debate can reveal about thought, evidence, the mind, and human communication is so slim is a source of embarrassment. It can be addressed.

As I discussed on In the Bin, National Parliamentary Debate Association nationals had about 20 teams at their championship tournament.

Cross Examination Debate Association, by contrast, just had their national tournament and hosted 86 teams.

Globally, the World University Debate Championships held in Panama hosted 232 teams the last two weeks of December at their championship, which an American team won from Dartmouth.

Why the disparity? If debate is dying, how do you explain these numbers?

Debate is not dying; debate is inconsistent based on context. I agree these numbers are not what they were 20 years ago, but what was the same as it was 20 years ago? Nothing!

What are some explanations as to the relative health of some debate formats and not others?

The best explanation of the distinction between NPDA and CEDA is CEDA has a long history of being rooted in the curriculum of speech communication departments. There are still a large number of Boomer and tons of Generation X professors who came up in a system where a CEDA/NDT program was just an unquestioned part of the department whether they participated in it or not. There could still be some tensions in such departments between those who don’t understand or aren’t a part of the debate program and those who are. This is mostly because of a failure of the debate program to communicate to the larger department what they do.

I remember being profiled as “not a debate person” when I visited the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. there. Since it was CEDA nationals weekend, the students I met were not from the debate tradition, and were quite critical of debate and the people involved – mostly because there was not much communication about what goes on in the debate program, and these graduate students had to put it together based on what they saw from time to time. This is not their fault but the fault of the program to communicate its curricular connection (or even better, necessity!).

Having an assumed curricular connection is not working for debate in CEDA or NDT as the discourse is much more akin to sport today. Social media and University coverage of debate accomplishments is in the rhetoric of a NCAA team. This doesn’t help debate’s numbers because it doesn’t display fiscal need to the university. For example, the necessity of a lab to teach science or the necessity of a language center to help the foreign languages department is much clearer to a Dean than “We won a tournament!” appears. In that case, it sounds like athletics, which funds itself through donations and ticket sales (somewhat). This is directly connected to the large amount of “please donate to our debate team” crowdfunding posts I see on social media these days. Curricular connection is vital to the health of a debate program, but also requires the debate director to do a lot more than go to 13 weekend tournaments in one format as their entire program.

NPDA’s issue I think is related to this “assumed curriculum” connection where there is no basis for understanding it among the faculty. Most who did CEDA might not understand or see the connection to communication or rhetorical theory at all. Most debate directors have a lot of anxiety about having faculty come watch practice – either the practice will not be valuable (edited to look like some imagined 19^th century debate to deceive the faculty member) or it will be a real practice, risking alienating the faculty member and making them really question the value of the program. The best way through this is of course to integrate the debate program into the campus life very much how writing programs have done it.  NPDA should try to connect it's more open style (although it has really raced toward the CEDA model as a way to survive) from the earlier days to things on campus such as democratic deliberation centers, the writing center, dialogue initiatives, and the like. The contrast would be very powerful: NPDA format could be another addition of things that can be done to investigate a controversy, share perspectives on it, or help people find their way through disagreement.

What about the international numbers? This is explained through a few factors. First, debate is a club activity in most countries with no curricular connection whatsoever. There are some student club funds for that. But most importantly, non-American students do not have to pay huge tuition bills to attend university. This allows for the annual expense of travel and participation in an event that might be fun, interesting, and a chance to meet a large amount of international peers. Also the international attitude toward education is a lot less carceral than the American – not a lot of attention to attendance or completing a daily task to pass the course. There’s also not a lot of pressure to have a part time job to pay for school.  There’s more time for practice and engagement in debate as something enjoyable rather than another addition to an already stressful, surveilled college experience.

The biggest thing to increasing the numbers of participants in any debate format is more connection to a diverse, broad sense of audience. Although WUDC has its issues with how it theorizes audience, it offers an experience to debate the widest distinction between people with the widest cultural and geographic diversity of participants to judge. NPDA offers the most narrow in this experience. Diversity is great for rhetorical training as the rhetorical theory of argument isn’t about getting it right as much as it is getting it across. Practicing the same types of audiences before different types of people is educational. This is rhetorical education, something that a lot of people in debate don’t want – they want something more philosophical: The correct argument, with the correct information, said the correct way – and if you vote against it you are clearly stupid, wrong, an idiot, or worse, a conservative!

Shifting what debate’s goals are is the way to get the numbers up. Look at Worlds – the only distinction here is the diversity. It’s a tougher travel and a tougher amount of time to be away (although it is a holiday which makes the travel easier for those obsessed with class performance). This kind of integration might not be possible for NPDA or CEDA but imagination can come into play, as well as following the model of the writing center from composition studies.

Friends!

You might already be aware, but I'm back at it with the In the Bin Podcast. If you are tired of reading my ideas now you can find a new way to be tired of my ideas through the power of audio! The podcast keeps to its traditional roots of discussing intercollegiate and tournament debate but also uses debate as a way to offer critique and conversation of things going on in our broader rhetorical, argumentative, and debate world.

I've set up a page for the podcast as I don't want everything to get confused on this site, so if you want you can go subscribe to that blog here.

The podcast is available anywhere you already get your podcasts. Give it a listen, let me know your opinion, or if you have a subject you'd like me to cover, let me know and I'll make an episode about it.

What gives? I am reading Deliberative Democratic Theory for the first time – never really been much of one to have faith in democracy other than a rhetorical commonplace that really comes in handy – perhaps more than any other commonplace out there, even family (Sorry Vin Diesel). But this is some good stuff. It’s making me think that our Constitution in the United States won’t survive, since it – like deliberative democracy – is founded on the assumption that a particular kind and a particular intensity of literacy will be a given, a priori status. This is not the case. Perhaps this is the true security threat from social media, not the Chinese government.

Anyway for a bunch of people who bray and yap without pause about rights, freedom, liberty, and oppression, NCA rhetoricians who come from a debate background don’t really mention or even cite generally any deliberative democratic theory. I’m kind of surprised (but not really). Maybe it is because this stuff wasn’t really out and circulating when debate publishing was at it’s peak (I’m saying this is the early 1980s but you can disagree). It could also be the repeated pattern we see in NCA work where people don’t cite anything other than the popular and accepted sources. The NCA folks are nothing but trendy, all racing toward whatever the popular source is for their work. The funniest moment of this for me was a paper on Buddhist monastic debate pedagogy I wrote with a Buddhist Priest and submitted only to have it rejected because it didn’t include Heidegger. This is funny for so many reasons but tragic for the stand-out reason: People who volunteer to review are somewhere between cops and authoritarians, decrying people like Trump while enjoying enforcement of the “social norms” of NCA on submitted papers.

Deliberative democratic theory has the potential to rewrite debate pedagogy I’m thinking. It’s pretty incredible, and would solve a lot of the issues that contemporary NCA debate faces: Cost, tournament norms, high level of entry, lack of judges – the list goes on. What it seems to do (and I’m not going to say too much in particular as we are submitting this idea to Alta) is recenter the practice and pedagogy of debate on the idea of the second persona instead of some abstract, technical “rules” of debate arguments. Who cares if you link if the people believe it? Studying the reception not the accuracy of transmission is a turn in rhetoric that happened in the 1970s. We should stop ignoring it and start teaching it maybe.