The New York Sophist

Brad Smith on the University of Rochester campus, during the debate tournament held there in 2003 (My friend Ken Johnson is in the background)

Debate has been a lot of things to me, but perhaps the most (or only) valuable thing about it has been the relationships I have made with people who are also attracted to, driven by, and influence debate. Some of these people love debate and give a lot more to it than they get from it, and their contributions to debate really highlight the latent and significant educational power debate has.

Last week I learned that Brad Smith passed away. Brad was a fixture in University of Rochester debate; I believe I met him very early on in my first week of work as an assistant debate coach there in 2001. Brad’s official job was research librarian, but you wouldn’t know that. It seemed his job – or maybe his role or passion – was supporting debate at the University of Rochester. This photo was him attending the tournament that was named in his honor by previous Debate Director Sam Nelson.

Brad’s debate encounter started later in life for him. As a research librarian, he met Sam and wondered what sort of strange research this guy was doing. Unfamiliar with debating, he decided to sit in on Sam’s class and attend the team practices from time to time to see what debate was all about. He was instantly struck – inspired, or moved in some way – with a vision of the role of debate, the library, research, and education that gave him a mission and a perspective on things that he would pursue for the rest of his time there.

Brad was not an argument innovator, nor was he a compelling speaker. He wasn’t a strategist of any kind. He was someone who loved researching, loved learning, and loved information. He was passionate about finding answers to questions, which is probably what he saw as best about debate – how it pushes those of us with a background in it to constantly be on the lookout for the next amazing piece of evidence. Debate can be seen as the ultimate library patron; someone who never gets tired of asking begged questions that lead to further investigations.

Brad was really nice to me. If I was in the library when he was, and I could find him we would chat – every spring he made it a point to take out the coaches who were still around after the term ended to lunch at this Ethiopian restaurant he loved. He was always interested in talking about whatever we were interested in talking about. As someone who read a lot, and was curious about a great many things, he could keep the conversation going.

At one of these lunches he told me about his childhood, growing up as a native Manhattan resident, watching them build the United Nations from his childhood apartment window. You can’t really find a better symbolic story than that for someone who would be found by debate much later, excited to contribute.

I often think about people like Brad, people who don’t have the opportunity to debate as young people, in school or college or whatever, and whether or not that’s regrettable. I think the obvious answer is that every young person should have the chance to debate, and programs should be expanded to provide these opportunities. But obvious answers should always give us pause. Maybe debate’s incredible influence, power, and goodness is not fully realized by merely expanding it in the schools, to school-aged people. As usual, we don’t really ask debate what it wants, even when debate is trying to speak to us, and getting what it wants all the time.

Debate is something that humans do, it’s where humans are, and it might be too limiting to conceptualize debate as a school activity, meant for schools, and meant primarily for young people to figure out how to learn and think. It might be that we leave out an entire practice of epistemology when we conceptualize debate as a powerful and fun tool to the end of learning instead of thinking of it as learning itself.

The debate community is unfortunately limited due to the concept that members of it are simply the competitors, and most of them leave when their university or high school time expires. What about reaching out with a debate program to the other communities that compose the university, or see the university as a part of their composition?

I got to know Brad through the more open conception of a debate program that Sam practiced, and that I modeled what I did in debate after. But more importantly, Brad’s encounter with debate was one that excited him – anyone could see it when he talked about debating; when he sat in the debate class term after term. This excitement I think we all have felt about debate. The last, and continuing contribution that Brad will make to debating is to keep us thinking about who gets to feel that way and how. How are we defining participation and membership in our debate programs? What is a community?

Thanks Brad for your enthusiasm, excitement, and deep interest in debate, a model for those who respect this powerful rhetorical and educational practice that is so hard to define.

I thought I would start making the Monday post something a bit more personal and reflective, a snapshot of where my mind is for the week, and make the other 2 to 3 posts more “publishable” posts than the Monday ones.

I’m thinking blogging is far superior to social media as it forces you to explain yourself a lot more. There’s no thrill or excitement in posting a take-down, two-line clap back here. It’s a lot more satisfying to write about a thousand words and send it out there into the universe for response and thought.

So here’s what’s on my mind on Sunday afternoon, the time when I traditionally get out my paper planner and start to think about goals for the week, what I want to accomplish, and all that.

What’s that Sound?

I have had a Synology NAS for quite some time and it’s never really worked correctly. Up until this past week it’s really just been a very expensive, very bulky flash drive, holding onto my documents and photos and such. It’s done well, but the power of an NAS is to have a central server for a great number of files, particularly things like music and video.

I spent several hours cleaning off the thing and now it works great. This means that now I have access to my vast collection of MP3 and FLAC music that I made and collected for years and years and years (remember when you could get free iTunes songs off the Pepsi caps?). But now they are all mistagged, mis-labeled, and they have to be deciphered. Spending a some time each day this week identifying various sounds from the past. Luckily, I have help.

Musicbrainz/Picard is a pretty amazing piece of software for having the computer listen to your songs and decide what they are. It’s not perfect, but it is bringing some order to this overgrown garden of sound.

Time to rediscover a lot of my old favorites that might not have made it onto Spotify (can it be?) and enjoy a different kind of sound quality. I think some of these FLAC recordings are much higher fidelity than the Spotify ones. It could just be nostalgia.

Style and Pedagogy

Question for the week: Why do old debate textbooks start with the importance of style and delivery, whereas modern debate textbooks start with a declamation-style defense of logic, reason, and argument for Democratic government?

One answer: Democracy was much more stable in the 1930s (hah!)

Another: We are starting to realize that Democracy is not that great if you don’t have a critical audience or a critical citizenry helping to shape it. Like a plant, it needs to be watered if you want it to keep looking nice (Jefferson had some interesting ideas about this). In the past, this was a given; today, not so much.

I think that a very productive investigation of why starting debate pedagogy with style is superior would be a great thing to take some notes on this week. I’m starting to work on some specific chapters for a book idea I have, and one of them is investigating Richard Rorty’s idea of the Liberal Ironist along side Ed Black’s idea of the Second Persona. These two concepts seem to me to be valuable pedagogical structures within debate education. Of course, my idea of debate education is not the popular conception of how to get my arguments right, but how to deal with only having access to arguments that are ambivalent. This latter conception is the Democratic norm whereas the prior conception is more for party vanguard, limited and expert audiences.

I might shoot a video or two about some of these older books as well.

Thanksgiving

It’s American Thanksgiving this week and although I’m not seeing anyone, going anywhere, or doing anything really special, I’m still excited. Looking for some Black Friday deals as well online and found a couple that might suit me. Thinking about the GoPro 9. My 7 is still great, but it might be nice to have one with a better built in microphone.

The holiday also marks the start of the end of the term for me, with only one assignment and some random redos left to grade. Last night I was in a Zoom call with some friends from graduate school, which I still think of as immediate, but it was quite a few years ago now.

That call brought up how weird it was not to have the tradition of attending the NCA conference. Although I’m not a big fan of this conference, I always wind up learning a lot, getting new insight from friends, and leaving with pages of notes for ideas in my notebook. This year what was highlighted was the importance of that ritual in my mental preparation for the winter holidays. Something to reflect on this week when the world has already changed so significantly, and there are no doubt more massive changes to come.

Debate Coach makes me cringe for so many reasons. I’m not sure I can list them all here. The first concern with this term I share with William Hawley Davis, Professor of Speech at Case Western in 1916, who worried that teaching debate for competition made his role “adjunct to sport.” If there is a debate coach, there is a debate sport. There should not be a debate sport, unless it’s something that is performed with everyday activities that can be evaluated as having moments of practiced excellence. For example, throwing or catching a ball, running, swimming, jumping – all are elements of things anyone can do, they understand how these things are done. Debate eliminates the connection with everyday rhetorical practices, providing their own “purified” modes of speaking, listening, note taking, evidence, that are designed to be inaccessible to everyday people, and they then call that inaccessibility excellence. There’s no recognition here of excellence, just something surprising.

I’ve always thought the best metaphor for debate is a martial art, where the competitions are based on mastering particular moves, and then mastering those moves in combinations. Most interestingly, martial arts competitions are examined for evidence of practice as communicated through form and execution. Tournament debate is often judged on what is novel and surprising; what exciting new position can be created in the moment. There are few techniques and even fewer practices that can be taught, or seen in evaluation, in tournament debate. It’s most often about surprising the opposition rather than relying on process to invent convincing arguments.

Debate competitions designed like martial arts would have elements of Roman declamation along with elements of exchange on an issue that everyone can access and discuss. What sets the excellent debater apart will be the ability to craft and deliver arguments in a way that improve the quality and the possibility of argument for the audience. The judge should be able to recognize someone who takes this art seriously and has practiced it, they have a process where the weight of engagement with the issue is communicated in the delivery and nature of the arguments.

This though is not a sport, which is probably for the best. It’s a way of self-assessment in your discipline to see how you measure up in your practice and focus on debating.

Debate Educator is a better term perhaps, but this term is often hijacked by tournament addicts to make their style or preference of tournament sound superior to the tournament style they hate.

I hear this term when people are trying to position themselves as a leader or influencer of some novel type of debate activity. The idea is a good one: Someone who educates through debate seems like something I’d support. But the reality is that these people are often educating about debate, i.e. the right way to do it.

The rhetorical understanding of debate, and some elements of the philosophical side of it, all agree that the correct way of debating is tied up intensely with audience. You cannot create a modality of debating and ship it wholesale onto an audience. They always have a say in what is going on. Or in highly rhetorical views, like my own, debate does not exist without an audience. If you have audience-free debate, you are doing something else. The fact that recordings and internet broadcasts of debate tournaments are not a required part of the competitions indicates the flat dismissal of the rhetorical perspective, placing debate tournaments out of synch with the history and theory of rhetorical scholarship.

A debate educator would be someone who would use debate as a significant part of a plan or a process of approaching pedagogy on a number of subjects. It would not be “this form of having a debate with other people is superior to this other form.” This is far too often what the debate educator sounds like.

Teacher is my favorite title for the sort of work that debate engenders, and it’s strange to me (although I do recognize the historical reasons here) that few professors like the title teacher, or consider teaching to be something praiseworthy. It was taught to me in my PhD program as something one tolerates in order to do the “real work.”

Debate Teacher has some weird issues with it that are similar to debate educator, or can fall into the same sorts of traps. Educator is rather snobby, and teacher sounds like and feels like someone who gets down into the trenches. An educator I can see speaking at a conference; a teacher brings to mind the image of someone leaning over next to the desk of a student engaging what they are engaging, ensuring and assisting something educational.

I’m very upset about how the title Professor of Practice gets a negative rap as the title that austerity administrators at the University are using to designate non-tenure track professors. I love the title, as it indicates a powerful relationship between the art of teaching, professing something (as in an emotional expression of what and how things should be in the world), and dedication to practice as the thing, not preparation for the more important thing coming later, which is how sports are coached. A focus on practice as practice is what rhetorical pedagogy needs and is and should be, all together. I love this title, but unfortunately it has been co-opted by the economic realities of the university.

Professor of Debate Practice might be cool. An emotive, passionate advocate for the practice of debating as a pedagogical orientation to the world. That’s what I have always found most exciting about debate are the moments when students start to look for process. Once they find something that works, they go around testing that part of process on everything they find worth thinking about. Tournament debate is so limiting in it’s methods and capacity for thought that eventually students grow beyond it pretty quickly if they are being taught right. They do preserve the element of process though and hopefully create connections between that experience and later inquiry.

In composition, they have the titles Writing Consultant (a bit too corporate for my tastes, but I get the idea) and Writing Center Director as well as Composition Professor or Rhetoric and Composition Professor which is really great, as it communicates that there are two elements here. But people from NCA oriented departments would never accept a title like Rhetoric and Oratory Professor because it would indicate too plainly that they teach, and there’s a weird negativity in NCA-focused departments on the teaching of public speaking. The representative anecdote for this is the story I heard from a pretty high ranking professor dismissing the idea that all new faculty hired should teach public speaking by saying, “We don’t want to punish them.” This is a pretty common attitude, and one that Writing Centers, and most Rhetoric & Composition people would find extremely alien. It raises a big question for me: Who would claim to be a Rhetoric Professor and not want to hear and help people gain new perspectives on their speech?

What’s in a name indeed. The naming convention of Debate Coach needs to transform into something that highlights the powerful elements of pedagogy that are deep within the debate experience. Coaching is a gestalt that brings forward sports and zero-sum games. It conjures the idea that there’s talent related to the democratic art of debate rather than this is a difficult necessity that all must learn how to do; all must struggle through the never-ending challenges of deliberation.

Not sure what title would work best, or what people would be proud of. I certainly hated being called a coach, but I recognize I’m in the minority. What title best communicates the complexity, power, and necessity of education through the act of creating and advocating two-sided arguments before an audience or judge?

The title of this post is a note I often get. I thought I’d make my common response public.

Don’t hire a debate coach to run your debate program. Don’t hire someone who has a record of tournament success.

Instead, hire someone who is a radical teacher, someone who is a critical pedagogue. You want someone who recognizes that the classroom, and the “outside the classroom” exist in a yin-yang relationship. Hire someone who is frustrated by the college classroom not because they have to be in there teaching public speaking, but because they are frustrated by the innate design flaws of such a system of teaching.

The outstanding debate program is one that supercharges your existing communication curriculum by providing engagement with populations, communities, and people in the world through rhetoric, oratory, and speech. The students who opt in for debate programs take what they get excited about in the communication curriculum out to these communities, they roll it around, and bring it back covered in insight from the audiences (and sometimes opponents) they encounter there.

In short, a debate coach is someone who is committed to creating students successful at navigating and mastering the norms of the debate tournament – an extant group of people who want to fold others into their norms of thought and speech. These norms unfortunately serve the norms of what makes tournaments work well, not what makes rhetoric work well, and certainly not open to the idea that we are being operated by these norms, put “through the motions” of speech and argument, spun like a top by the ideological commitment to tournament debating.

What you want is someone who is committed to teaching in a way that they find the classroom incomplete – it’s too antiseptic to be meaningful for teaching. They are someone familiar with student-centered, active and creative engagement, and have a healthy respect for assessment and rubric design over grading.

The model for a good debate program is the writing center. Over the past 40 or so years, the academic conversation among writing centers and writing instructors has moved to a place of student-focused creation of texts and their interaction with communities and ideology. Debate, as it’s practiced now, is more like 1950s or 1960s composition, where modality is taught, and the correspondence to a set of rules for modality is the sign of good writing. Debate though only has one modality to teach, and that’s what the tournament calls a “good argument.” At all BP or World’s competitions, for example, the notion of fairness of a motion is always held above any other conception of the motion.

If your university is considering a debate hire, or a debate program, hire a teacher who wants to create additional opportunities for students to engage other communities with the rhetorical and communication concepts that are taught in your classes. Have them return and share with these classes what they experienced. This model keeps argument, rhetoric, speech, oratory, and communication theory alive. It’s praxis, one of the best governing principles we have for determining if our pedagogy is sound.

I wave off most people from trying to hire a tournament-forged debate coach type. It’s better to hire a generalist in research who loves to teach, and the department can empower that person with a budget and some faculty-determined goals for the debate program. The rest should come as most of the best pedagogy does, action and reflection on that action to create theory that governs another action. This will provide the entirety of the students in the department with the benefits of an engaged learning program based on external partnerships. Perhaps the writing center mixed with an ecology program? A day trip to the forest, the wetlands, or the shore seems like a good metaphor for what I’m suggesting.

The last thing political discourse needs right now is a program that encourages people to believe that they have found the “right way” to argue, “real” debate, or any other such nonsense. What is needed are experiences to remind ourselves, and our students, how incredibly difficult it is to stand before an audience and offer them reasons to alter their attitudes about something. This moment never gets old, never is easy, and most importantly, is never the same. Debate education based on rules of fairness will never prepare people for this moment, it will only serve to encourage them to dismiss it in favor of other rules-based argumentation environments, such as the law. This fetishism doesn’t help create practice in the messy and frustrating necessity of debating in a democracy, which could be conceived of as a continuous “adaptation of adapting,” or the moments where you feel that pressure that you have to account for your position on something with mere words alone, nothing else.

It’s 202o, so of course PBS is airing the San Francisco Symphony and Metallica’s second live concert together. Such a strange combination might just be evidence of getting older, nothing else. Probably not going to get over that this is on PBS. But PBS is where I discovered Doctor Who, so perhaps this is on brand for them.

When S&M first appeared, it was a very strange but delightful combination for me. At the time I was thinking a lot about rock operas such as Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar and so the idea of symphonic heavy metal was quite nice. I thought it worked pretty well and still really enjoy that album.

Now watching the second go round, it appears they aren’t really changing up much of the set. It feels like a “lets do that again!” Or it could be the anniversary of the original S&M concert, somewhere around 1999 or 2000 I’m guessing. Could be an anniversary, or a marking of the moment.

What it isn’t is anything like the first one, even if they play the exact same set list in the level of mastery you’d expect from that many career professional musicians. The first collaboration is an example of kairos.

This ancient Greek term is poorly defined in many places as “opportunity” or “the opportune.” This makes kairos seem like a natural force, and those who can use it incredibly lucky. Or perceptive. Or a bit of both. Kairos has little to do with luck, and a lot to do with one of the most important practices that the discipline of rhetoric teaches: Recognition.

I think the best way to teach kairos is to couch it in layers of recognition: First being that we must recognize that any rhetorical intervention is temporary. That’s how it has meaning at all. It’s contingent, of the moment, and will have to be rearticulated, or created anew, at some point in the future. It also is the recognition of the complexities of the moment, situation, reason for the articulation, and the audience. It’s also the recognition that our words are always incomplete and that the audience isn’t there to receive them but to work with them.

One of my favorite definitions of kairos doesn’t come from professional rhetoric scholars, but from Paul Tillich, a theologian, who defined it as moments where “the eternal breaks into the temporal,” moments where one moment becomes hyperweighted, a moment of decision or realization, one where one is compelled to respond by the sheer weight of the realization of the moment and it’s relation to what has happened and what shall be coming.

There are a lot of great definitions that might be better. I’m a big fan of:

Roger Thomson, writing about the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, defines kairos as, “A moment of spiritual insight and propriety.” Also: “Invocation of the eternal during a specific moment in history to enact change.”

James Kinneavy: “Right timing and due measure” (seems almost like opposites?)

Augusto Rostagini explains Gorgias’s understanding as three fold: 1) Knowledge of the different forms speech can take, 2)adapt it to the situation before you and 3) harmonize it with the speech around you.

Eric Charles White defines it as the recognition that, “there can never be more than a contingent and provisional management of the present opportunity.”

Also: “understanding willing to begin again” and “A unique opportunity to confer meaning upon the world.”

John Poulakos says that kairos, “expands the frontiers of language and invites audiences to settle them.”

These are all present to some degree in S&M, but maybe not so much in S&M 2. Right timing and due measure seem obvious for musicians, so that one is present. But is the concert timed right? It seems like it’s the twentieth anniversary of the first S&M, so maybe that’s something. But that seems more like appropriateness. Perhaps there’s a kairos that is just for epidictic moments? This is more a celebration of the initial collaboration as not much changed. Reiteration can’t be kairotic, can it?

Perhaps it’s like White – this is the understanding of the initial combination of heavy metal and symphonic sounds articulating and understanding itself again. Maybe this is another “opportunity” to appreciate how weird, natural, or unique this music is.

Gorgias, through Rostagini, is the musician’s method here: Harmony. They know what they are supposed to do with their instrument and how to play it. But what applies to this new and contingent situation? How can I bring the form I know into concert with the situation that is unfamiliar? That’s the practice of kairos, or maybe rhetoric as a whole – not sure.

Poulakos is the most obvious really. Let’s push the envelope because we can, and let’s see the audience push back. The audience is a contributor at this point, and as we see many times in the concert, an additional musician.

There’s another definition I wish I had written down that I heard several years ago at the Rhetoric Society of America conference. It was a super weird Sunday morning panel, the last day of the conference. It had a woman working a loom in the corner, a speaker handed out porcupine quills to us, and another professor talked about how making lines on rocks 15,000 years ago was indeed rhetoric. I enjoyed the hell out of it. One of the speakers talked about kairos as being a term from weaving, which was related to being able to deftly move the thread up and down, between the perpendicular threads in a way that was efficient and good. Weaving is something we naturally associate with rhetoric (Weaving words, spinning a yarn, creating an argument out of whole cloth) but this really solidifies the connection, perhaps ironically.

Kairos might not be a big PBS aired concert like this, but playing the music together, hitting the notes at just the right moment together, would be. It is kairos to take a look at the music of a metal band and say, “I wonder how I can weave this into a symphony performance?” Kairos is not the memory of the concert, or even being able to go, but the recognition of a weighty moment that draws into contrast the expected, and compares the past to the future. I liked watching it, but it was nothing like the 1999 concert, more of a tribute to it. However there were still those moments of play in the concert that brought to bear the beauty and intensity of the symphony and Metallica’s music in ways that both heightened and dissolved those distinctions into meaning.