It took forever - blame Taylor and Francis because, well, it's most likely their fault - but I finally got another essay out about debate theory and history.
This was a special issue that was supposed to come out a long time ago about the so-called 'joint championship' of Wake Forest that year, winning both the CEDA and NDT championship tournament. If you don't know what that means, that's fine - that was the point of the special issue. So join the club: What does it mean? What should it mean?
I reread my piece and it seems ok, however I prefer the one I originally wrote which bled a lot to bring this version to the publication. I'll present them both here for you to take a look at and determine which version of the essay you think is your preference. I wrote them both so I'm happy with however you feel about it.
In the age of digital everything, why don't we have a public "track changes" way of sharing our research and work? Seems like there would be a lot of value in there for those commenting on our work or moving forward in the areas we research and write about. Comparing versions of documents is easy and interesting, yet in most publishing we only see a "final version" as if it fell out of the sky. It can really be a great source of invention for an essay to ask the question "Why was that section removed or moved?" "When did that citation first get placed?" I figure sharing the first and last version might be a good starting place. Here's the original draft:
I'm really sick so I can't go to campus today. I could go and teach I suppose, but I don't want to spread germs. I always tell my students to stay away if they are sick to cut down on absences. And since it's nearly Final Exam Eve I don't want to be responsible for lowering someone's grade due to illness.
So this evening at 5PM Eastern time I'm doing a YouTube Livestream for my debate class, check it out if you like. It's open to everyone.
There’s a disturbing lack of rhetorical principles being applied to AI when they have been applied to a number of less-obvious targets like science, medicine, urban cityscapes, video games, disability signs in public places, mothering at academic conferences, air travel, grocery store aisles and so on. Maybe it’s just that AI is new, or maybe we aren’t sure how to write about it.
It’s becoming clear to me that the decline (not death) of debate is going to have a third act like the million dollar man - “We can build him back better than he was” so goes the show’s opening line. The rhetoric of AI and AI’s rhetoric and the rhetorical implications of AI in our daily life needs a lot more publications about it. I would like to contribute if I can, but when I sit down to write about it what can I say? It seems I don’t know enough.
Then I read this great essay in Time magazine (it’s always telling me about responsibility!). I think this writer gets how to rhetorically talk about AI and digital data in a rhetorical way that scholars haven’t caught up to yet. Or perhaps scholars are less interested in talking to their students and the public about these issues (very likely). I mean, why write about something if it can’t be in a paywalled boring academic journal that most people can’t read or can’t find.
Anyway the best part of this essay is the comparative aspects. The argument is very powerful about how something becomes policy through advocacy and then becomes an everyday way of speaking, and then an everyday way of speaking. I think this is a great start to a rhetorical theory of kindness!
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.
