The New York Sophist

Spring break ended too soon but I did get one final draft out and have another one underway. We’ll see if I can make the NCA deadline.

I get a lot out of NCA but it comes out of the cracks. It’s not a direct path to the value of it. I always have a few moments that stick with me and that I use to help me in my thinking.

But for the most part, NCA is run by and loved by dilettantes who see themselves as people who would be NPR journalists if they did not think they were smarter than NPR journalists. There’s a lot of chat about what’s going on on this or that series, latest episodes of Frontline or whatever the journalism show de jour is, discussion about podcasts and Rachel Maddow – stuff like that. It’s a huge cocktail party – over 4,000 people – so some dilluding of the content is expected.

The only papers worth hearing I feel are those from the top paper panels. These are people who have put in the time and are trying to make a contribution beyond NCA, beyond scholars, and perhaps shift the field a few millimeters ahead. Unfortunately NCA schedules most of these to happen at the same time, so you have to pick. This shouldn’t happen, but it shows how far removed the idea of attending panels to learn something is from the planners’ minds. It’s also not nefarious; it is most likely that NCA is way too big, and people are too forgiving in letting in ideas rather than fully thought out papers.

NCA is good for graduate students, I always assumed, but there was a lot of strange stressful discourse from grad students I spoke with last year in Utah. Maybe faculty put too much pressure on NCA these days because the percentage of valuable content at NCA is getting smaller and smaller. It could also be that since people no longer read hyper specialized journals casually (why would you?) the face-to-face at a bar or after a panel is much more important for making connections in your career. Not sure why this is but if you are an advisor, stop stressing out your students about NCA – it’s a place to learn and grow, not to nail a virtuoso performance.

So I’m not sure I should invest so much time into writing for the NCA conference unless I have a really good idea. The past few years I have had some great ideas, and my current one – about Myles Horton’s pedagogy and the distinction between deliberation, dialogue, and debate – isn’t one of my better ideas. I’ve just decided to write it and see how it goes and if it doesn’t hit the NCA conference deadline, that’s fine. I’m not too worried about it.

There’s also our journals, which are not widely read at all – barely read within the communication field – making them poor organs for the distribution of ideas or larger persuasive goals about normative aspects of rhetoric and pedagogy. They are very good organs if your goal is to have a conversation with the 10 or so other scholars who engage in the work you do. That’s how they are designed.

I have nothing against this design except for the fact that nearly 100% of all publication effort in rhetoric is aimed at these 5 journals with a readership that is in the hundreds. If we design our journals this way we should couple that with the discussion, or the obligation, to publish for broader outlets about our ideas.

I like blogging, but this week has me thinking that my new model for writing should be this blog coupled with publication elsewhere. I like the model of a Patreon, where people subscribe to your work for a small fee and then can request or put in ideas for future writing or podcast-type publication. This might be a good way to put a premium on non-academic style work and reach an interested public who self-selects given their interest. I might give this a try.

The only thing I didn’t really do well at this spring break was outline my short book idea. I should just start writing it and get a rough draft out to a publisher in a month. This might be pretty good timing for the upcoming political debates. It’s an untested method, but I think the thesis of the book is going to be to flip the Presidential debates (or any political debates) from refined final product to raw material, a set of commonplaces, or topoi, for us to use to craft a refined set of political principles to defend.

The biggest success story about spring break was how much fun I had playing Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online. I really do think that if things went haywire in the academic world I could stream video games all day for 5 to 6 days a week and have a blast. Of course, any engaging, fun, and exciting creative work can turn into a “job” – one that you despise and resent – very quickly. Just look to how that leaks out in the negativity many professors present toward their students!

Spring break is here and the only thing I’ve done so far is play about 5 hours of Fallout 76 before getting ready to go out to eat at one of my favorite spots before hitting a bar to wish a friend happy birthday.

There is a productive hope for spring break including:

• Finishing my NCA paper for this year on Myles Horton’s pedagogy and the artificial wall between discussion, dialogue and debate.

• Taking my 1694-ish rhetoric textbook to the bookbinder for much needed repair.

• FInishing reading all the books I’ve checked out from the library on Roman education

• Grading all of the podcasts and videos from my online public speaking course

• Getting a jump start on two big essays due in April/May.

So that’s a full week I think but without any other demands on my time such as getting decent, walking to the campus, sitting in the office, and such it can really free up a lot of time. This is why I hope very soon to be teaching mostly online if not entirely online.

I’ve been looking forward to spring break ever since I fell behind on my semester plan about a week and a half ago. Things happen and it’s okay. I am just glad that I have some time to catch up a bit.

The other big thing that has happened is my mega-computer, the one I built and rebuilt a couple of times, has just started giving me blue screens all the time now. I shut it off and put it aside, but that meant I had to rearrange my home workspace. Now I’m typing this on an Asus Chromebit, and my second monitor I brought up to the university to plug into my old desktop computer I had up there for debate. Since I don’t do debate anymore, I no longer needed that computer for that project so I just moved it into my office to use it for work. So far so good, but on compressing audio (WAV to MP3) it is very, very slow compared to the mega computer. Not very happy about that, but maybe if I decrease the quality of the recordings I’ll have better results. I’ll work on fixing the big computer in May/June, once the term is over.

So we’ll see how the week ends as next Sunday I’ll most likely post “The End of Spring Break!”

Next Tuesday (March 5) I am appearing in a performance about speeches by actual speechwriters and writers of that hardest form of rhetoric, comedy. They told me I can speak about anything I want related to rhetoric, so I think I’ll speak about the upcoming season of political debates, Presidential and otherwise. It’s always a good idea to follow Cicero and “prepare the minds of the audience for what they are about to hear.”

It looks like it will be a good time. I have 7 minutes (the fingerprints of debate practice are everywhere) and I’m not sure what the venue will be like. I have a lot of ethos questions too. As the professor in the bunch, will it be necessary to read from a paper? Will it lose credibility if I just speak about it without notes? I’m definitely wearing a coat and tie, so if I feel that is an integral part of the ethos, why do I have questions about reading notes? A professor would do that – at least that’s what the audience might think.

I’m very happy I get to be a part of this mostly because of my recent obsession about reaching publics frequently with rhetorical insight, and Roman educational perspectives, where listening to, evaluating, and giving speeches were all a part of learning how to be a citizen and function politically in the day-to-day life of the Roman Empire. We seem to have lost that in the U.S. (among other places I’m sure too) and I’m very interested in exploring how to recover that. My hunch is that the loss of the town hall, the church meeting, or whatever was the forum for handling local problems goes hand-in-hand with the loss of our rhetorical abilities to deeply investigate our views and work to reject simple binaries on complex issues.

Part of this project is to raise questions about who controls the agenda for public discourse, and there’s no better place to start than with those who control most of our public imaginary about what debate looks like and should be used for – the Commission on Presidential Debates. We have a lot of scholarship on how bad the debates are, but not a lot of scholarship on how to make them better, or how to make what we have a positive thing. Perhaps we should approach the Debates like the TV show Chopped? “Open your basket, you have to use these awful ingredients.” Maybe there’s something nice that could be made from the random assortment of statements a Presidential debate provides.

I should get my comments together this weekend and practice a few times before Tuesday night. As someone who is old and grumpy, 9PM is quite late to be doing anything, let alone starting something! But I’ll just down a few coffees before I go and things should be good. They said they might video it as well so if that turns out to be the case I’ll post a link to the video in a follow-up.

More strange than academics engaging the public is the idea that academics engaging the public is strange. In the field of rhetoric, we’ve nearly totally pulled away from this idea. Debate teams exist at the margins of rhetoric and communication departments, structured like sport teams. Faculty push to publish in journals were 7 to 10 people will read and possibly use their work. Rhetoric and communication courses are taught with total fidelity toward theories and principles from the academic literature, not with an eye toward helping students improve their ability to capture audience attention and persuade. Courses at the higher levels draw on and celebrate ideas and writing that have little to do with the rhetor’s art of crafting meaning and working to carefully untie the knots that moor audience belief. The field is almost totally inward looking.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and how to engage in rhetorical work that’s valuable while reaching a broader audience. I don’t think rhetoric exists without audience; you could have all the other elements there to it and not have rhetoric. The audience is the thing that is necessary for the rhetorical.

It doesn’t have to be a real audience, but material. There should be the presence of a material manifest audience of some kind. So when I’m typing this blog entry I think about the report I see as to how many people clicked on the last one and what the monthly traffic is like to this site. When putting something on YouTube I think about the numbers of views and sustained minutes. These aren’t real as much as they are material. They are guideposts for what works, as long as you can honestly imagine what the audience might want.

I’m pretty disappointed we don’t have a journal dedicated to this sort of thing. Contemporary Argumentation and Debate always has promise, but is really trapped in a bad situation. As a debate journal, it has the twin prongs of 1)pressure to be something “better” than debate, the inferiority complex of debate as not a real thing passed down from the scholars-on-high who forget how their critical acumen owes a debt to intercollegiate debate for sparking it and 2) the event horizon of intercollegiate debate itself. When you are in the event horizon, the rest of the universe looks askew and becomes a problem. As you try to move away from the singularity, you rely on distorted information – in this case light – to navigate. You could easily be headed right into the singularity as you start to move. Even basic information is distorted in the area of the singularity. So even well-meaning people can still be pushing a monastic, non-public model of debate and scholarship while claiming they are getting out of it. As an example think about the following attempts to break the event horizon: Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ted Turner (now Public Forum), CEDA Non-Policy Division Debate, and finally British Parliamentary debate. All these forms are now nearly inaccessible to audiences without a lot of training about how to stop doing what they would normally do when listening to arguments, and instead “follow the rules.”

I do hope that some debaters take seriously the pieces/interviews that Shanara Reid-Brinkley gave a few years ago about how debaters are scholars. This can be true, although I don’t believe it’s automatically true. A well researched position in a debate is aimed at winning a tournament, so it suffers from that. But what’s the difference between that and the conference paper or journal article written by an academic in hopes to fatten a tenure file or lead to a promotion? The utilitarian element of a paper or a debate case need not be totally deterministic of the quality of the work. What’s missing is a venue, or a way out of the event horizon of the tournament. Similarly, the event horizon of the academic department, or bureaucracy is equally devastating. I wonder what publication possibilities there are out there.

Currently working with many others on the reboot of Timely Interventions and perhaps this journal could be a place where debate arguments could transform themselves into interesting pieces for a broader audience. Debate podcasting that is not about debate would help, but about the work, insights, and understandings that debate has brought to people. In The Bin was my podcast for a long time and some of the episodes seemed to bend that way, but the stronger forces were always toward talking about the tournament. Without legitimate competition to the tournament, debate will never provide all the possibilities for transformative education that it could. What is needed is for a few debaters and their teachers to imagine and implement serious alternatives to the tournament schedule, competitions that do not rely on tournament structure, and give debate back its rhetorical aspects – the big audience – in order for us to benefit from its power. I like the idea of debater/scholars very much, but I’m uncertain we can get there given the obsession over breaking, octafinals, and speaker awards. These don’t belong in scholarship. Yet, professional scholars run a similar conflicting system for tenure and promotion that strips away the possibilities of thought and research in the same manner.

We need local community platforming for rhetors, speech, debates, and argument. We have to lead it and we need it locally. We cannot rely on privately owned corporate communication platforms to curate, cultivate, and teach people how to engage in public deliberation and argument.

In the past the Town Hall was the way of doing this. People would attend and listen for a while before engaging. If they engaged too early, the collective body would push back on that speech making it conform to the recognizable, the actionable. Rhetoric’s discipline is meant to make something palatable, in the way that taste disciplines the cook’s imagination and provides limits that don’t stifle, but engage creativity.

Most of our educational efforts toward critical thinking – perhaps over 90% I would guess – are about reception. We think we can solve problems of shallow thinking and poor inference by addressing reception alone. We tend to fall into a trap of thinking that production of text, either writing or speaking, is a part of the problem. We don’t think of a critical thinking exercise as creative.

This is often apparent in bad assignment design where students are asked to replicate and repeat good, valid sources that are determined by the instructor. They are not encouraged to think about what they would like to contribute to the conversation outside of how they are going to quote and cite the sources that they found. Professors often establish a hierarchy of quality sources without the necessary discussion about why one source might be better than another. For many students, it doesn’t make a lot of sense why academic journals would be superior to their own eyes and ears. This has to be explained in a way that they can understand. But too often this is set out as dogma, and people who reject research are laughed at. This doesn’t make them respect professors or peer reviewed work whatsoever.

Professors are very scared to grade quality. They would rather grade via a rubric that establishes points per source cited, APA format citations, and the like. This teaches students that these requirements are mere arbitrary, bureaucratic demands to a functionary. They are not invited to see themselves as potential scholars or as people who belong in the conversation. They are more like file clerks, and as such, are eager to see the rubric so they know where they can cut corners – not where they can excel. Professors have somehow come to the determination they are there to police students, to discipline them, to show them when they can’t follow rules or instructions, without the necessary compliment of helping them improve the quality of what they are crafting and making. Following rules is the secret major that all college students are forced to take. What about inquiry? What about trying something new based on the readings? Why all this reporting on other things said by others? What about the development of the future ortators, future producers of smart texts?

Quality is a whole different issue and it is often a source of anxiety for professors who have become very comfortable in pointing to point totals and math to justify grades to worried students. It’s as if they too depend on the rubric to find meaning in the assignments they give. They cannot just talk about how a paper or a speech was not great, and give advice for how to make it better. They also don’t realize they could just have the student do it over – why not? What is the point to having university classes? It’s certainly not to follow rubrics as if they were laws.

The value of the rubric is in helping your blindness as a person when you are grading. There are tons of biases that instructors could have toward student work. Keeping names off of assignments is one way to address this, but that harms the ability of the instructor to grade on a continuum – to recognize micro-improvements as they happen for each student. The second way is a rubric that you use as a professor and perhaps don’t share with the students. This ensures you give equal time to all aspects of the assignment rather than just to one or two things that bother you about it. The things that bother you often are cultural or issues of privilege; what you think is appropriate and good. A rubric can help you snap out of these biases and look toward improving that student’s production where it is and how it is manifest.

Platforming speeches seems like a good rubric-oriented move as it lets students do the one thing that they never get out of public speaking and the like – an audience. The audience is the most vital element of speech instruction that you can have. But we teach our courses like swimming without a pool, like basketball with no court to practice on, and like chemistry with no laboratory experience. These would be considered incomplete experiences at best, and perhaps not the courses in another sense.

This can be achieved with community involvement of some kind, or perhaps community partnerships with the university. This requires a lot of work and a lot of investment. There might not be a good way to attract audiences to have a look at student speeches. The other way might be web videos, but these would have to be made for a web audience, not just a lateral of the classroom speech with broken podium and dusty chalkboard. Maybe streaming is a good way to do it? This is a nascent thing, but there are many programs out there in forensics who do a show night of their top speeches for the community as a fundraiser. I wonder if this could be expanded to the entire curriculum of public speaking (as well as related courses) as a starting place to see how these speeches play with the presence of a manifest audience.

It then must expand to club status beyond the university to give people space to practice oral engagement with others on ideas. Local interaction and normalization of this is very important. Part of the practice is the normalization, locally, of rhetorical styles. The idea that one attends a debate or a display of good speeches as a normal part of community should come back. This could be funded by the university, but it could also be a civic project as well. This interaction – serving only as consumers of persuasive speech rather than the creators of arguments – is responsible for a lot of our failing in political conversation today. And it’s a failing of those who should be promoting it – the rhetoricians.