The New York Sophist

Trying to defend your ideas on cold medicine should be added to the graduate curriculum. I wish i was feeling a bit better, but i was called by my colleague to defend a lot of the critiques i make about debating. I should have recorded it.  Not because it’s good or worth preserving,  bit could be a good thing to examine for some later critique. The audience was a great one: someone who is into debate but did not come up in it, and who is really impressed with debate’s transformative power. The missing element is always rhetorical dimensions to the education of “good argument.” I wonder if nascent composition and writing across the curriculum programs also faced this similar problem. Just because you agree with something doesn’t mean it’s a good argument on universal or overarching standards. Just because the smartest people in the room think it’s a good argument doesn’t mean it’s a good one. A good argument reaches other people; most debate arguments are designed to perform exclusion, thereby making the participants think and feel they are exceptional people. Not the sort of art you want to practice in the service of a functioning, representative social model.

Also why are people misconstruing dissertations as “life work?” It’s 2017 people. I can accept that sort of read from someone embedded in the mindset that being a professor is all about “respect” and “disrespect” like some of the idiots around my place. It should rather be about craft and service, and practicing an art that is meant to provide encounters with difficult ideas to those who may not be ready to meet those ideas. A dissertation is a test, like any test, that then authorizes you to go work on what you value and be able to connect it to the standards of your field. That’s it. Proof that you can conduct a good research project. 

Anyway, it was a good chat in the car, then I flew back to NYC. Much, much better than Campus 2 Campus the Cornell bus. Might have taken my last Cornell bus trip! End of an era, but it was a good one. I am one of few people who can say that I have brewed a cup of Keurig coffee in the back of a 50 foot coach.

 I am very happy to be sitting in the Syracuse airport about to fly home to Queens. I can go to be office and work a bit as well as attend my own debate club meeting, which I often have to skip when I come up here. 

The meeting was great, and the debate was great. Lots of good, smart, young expressive people tonight. The debate was energizing and interesting. The take away for me tonight was: Don’t be satisfied with the first thing you discover you can argue on the motion, go 2 or 3 layers deeper. Try to narrow it down to the specifics of the charge provided by the motion. Ironically, this will provide a better, deeper debate. 

Wish I could type more, or be more substantive but after two days in a row that were over 14 hours of being up and doing stuff, I’m pretty spent. The flight was only 30 minutes so I spent it reading and resting my voice. Tomorrow is a day to play catch-up before it’s off to the airport again on Thursday. I’m wondering if I have the prioritization of this exercise right – instead of energizing me and getting me thinking fluidly, I feel like I’m obligated to type to meet a deadline before midnight. Not what I was hoping for at all. Instead of the blog working for me, I feel like I work for the blog. I think I’ll start with a morning post and then see how the day goes tomorrow. Might be able to get a few of these longer stories out of my head and notebook and posted here.

Is it cheating to write ahead? What if I type up something and have it post tomorrow or the next day? I think this might meet the demand of obligation to the deadline, but be absent the commitment to write daily. But If I am working on content daily, but it doesn’t post on the same day, that could work. . . .

Finish a two and a half hour lecture, head to the hotel for some decongestant and Emergen-C. Then type a blog post. Party time. Exactly how I imagined post-PhD life. 

This trip to Cornell University has really sparked a lot of things to write here. I really enjoy coming here and teaching these students about rhetoric. It’s not just coming to the hallowed ground of Wilchelns or anything like that (something like that). It’s more about things like a sense of purpose, or a sense of doing that thing that you thought you were training for in graduate school – spreading the joy of the perspective that you take for granted, but shouldn’t. 

There’s a lot to do, a lot to do. But right now I have to go to bed. Had a great dinner at the Statler Hotel here on campus as usual with my great friend and colleague Sam. We talk about teaching debate as the sun sets over the campus behind us. Then it’s off to his class. It’s the only class with rhetoric in the title offered at Cornell, at least speech communication style rhetoric. I bet there are a ton of composition people. One day, future allies in a unified program that will dictate the entire scope of the university, I hope!

Now I wonder why I come out here and do this every year. Why bother? What’s it for? What’s the point when we have such obvious problems on my own campus? Before my talk my student texts me about a Government professor who says evidence is simply “facts.” No justification or explanation as to what that means. No sense of epistemology. Just facts are evidence, evidence is the facts. No ability to discuss it either with someone trained in rhetoric (my student). Of course, he’s a lawyer in his other job. God save us from Universities that think lawyers automatically make good teachers of law, persuasion, or anything for that matter. Most lawyers aren’t even good at practicing law, which is why there are so many slinking around as adjuncts, taking jobs away from actual teachers.

I digress. Why come out here and do this? I am not sure. But I have a number of possible reasons. All to come over the next few days. Can’t stay up and write tonight as I’m meeting Sam again at 7AM to say farewell until the spring to do this again.

Teaching about rhetoric’s abilities makes rhetoric able. Saying the thing makes it so. I had a room of pretty disinterested folks really nodding and smiling by the end. I took a lot of liberties with rhetorical history and theory, but I think that even you, O professional rhetorician will find some value in the lecture. Posting it possibly tomorrow if I can get around to it. 

Cornell is such a nice spot. Really great. Makes me feel a bit nostalgic for Texas A&M. Didn’t take enough photos but it’s go, go, go when I’m here. Next time. There will hopefully always be a next time.

Sleep In Saturday was followed by Suck It Sunday, which started with a lot of joy and positive energy that within an hour of waking up collapsed into misery. My poor wonderful partner came down with food poisoning right before she was going to head to an event she looked forward to all week. It really crushed me too; September is a tough month for me to hold it together. 

I think I’m pretty over extended most of the time, and a lot of the projects I engage in involve students, who, for all of their wonderful positive qualities just don’t have the same level of investment that I do in these things. That, plus the natural feelings of immortality and hubris that come when you are near 20 years old just make me very careful and cautious about everything. This really stresses me out. September is pretty bad, but October somehow calms down – I suppose I get used to the demand. You’d think after so many years of doing this I’d be used to it. Well, I never took into account that I would get older and my feelings of security and worry would change. When I was 23 or 24, driving through the night with a van full of students was normal. Now I would never do such a thing, even the idea gives me a terrifying feeling. 

So anyway, I am at maximum stress with some sort of proto-sinus infection going on from re-entering the university, and then this happened, which really drove my day into the dirt. Destiny 2 helped a bit, as did working on some videos for my class (I’m missing a bit this week due to travel) but it was constant interruptions. Even the food delivery guy wanted to talk for 20 minutes about hurricane Irma. That’s a good representative anecdote for the level of quality of my day. 

Lovely Shot of Cornell University

Add to it learning that on Tuesday I am not going to get to hang out with an old friend and great interlocutor. I am headed up to Cornell University tomorrow to lecture, and I plan to video it and all that. I’ve done this lecture many times before, and I am considering linking them all into one post here so you can chart the differences – it’s really evolved over the years. But every time I go, my friend and I express sorrow that the visit is so short and we’d like to chat more. Well this time we scheduled it so that we could spend most of Tuesday together – until I learned today he’s booked solid starting at 11AM. So that means I get to sit alone for 5 hours until my bus leaves. Of course I have work to do and all that, but it’s just better to do that work at home – especially when my soundboard, mic, and nice computer are all here to do that kind of work. I hope I can get an earlier time!

I’m thinking about going to a book group at Book Culture on Wednesday night after I get back. They are an essay-focused reading group, and I should have more to say about that either on Wednesday or Thursday. Then Thursday – Monday I will be in Helena, MT doing some debate stuff out there. One of the newest debate tournaments that I’ve helped with sticks around to be one of the last that I’ll work with. Pretty funny how this is all phasing out. As I expressed to my wonderful partner earlier tonight after this really terrible day, the time has come for me to just teach my classes, read, and play some video games. I do feel that I have expired in the debate world, that the time for me to be there is done, and it’s high-time to work on some other initiatives regarding teaching, speaking, rhetoric, and debating. Not sure what those are yet, but I’m sure they will come stumbling down the road soon enough.

Woke up about 7:40 which is late for me. Allergies have subsided, so I don’t think I’m getting sick I just feel like I have a cold which is the special superpower of allergies: All the feelings and nothing you can do about it. I took a tablet and I’m just waiting for it to kick in. Also waiting to get hungry so I can eat something and get the day going. 

Today there are a few errands to run, then I need to make some PowerPoint videos for my courses while I’m out of town this week. I will have to make 3 – one for Monday when I’ll be in Ithaca, NY, and then one for Thursday and Monday when I”ll be flying to and from Helena, MT. I think that short videos that lead students through some things to think about are a great, easy thing to do when missing a class. 

One of my favorite things about travelling is that I can sit and uninterruptedly read for hours. I don’t get this luxury in my life anymore. In fact, when I was an undergraduate and graduate student, I actually had much more free time if you believe that. I had more time to just decide to go to the library and “read around” for the day. I thought about this on Thursday night when I was talking to some of the debate students about New Left historians and some of the Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson – I read History of the English Working Class as an undergraduate in the Texas A&M Library over a Friday evening/night, Saturday afternoon. I would say about 12 hours or so. Great book and it’s one that pops into my head every so often randomly. 

When I travel I bring a laptop, headphones, charger, Nintendo 3DS, and a stack of print journals I subscribe to. The goal is to leave the print journals everywhere and travel home with none of them. I want a bag with maybe one issue left for the flight home. Often I just leave them on the seat or in the terminal, or sometimes I give them to the flight attendants who don’t appear to be sure what Hedgehog Review or Poetry might be about. 

It’s a perfect September morning here. Sixty degrees and sunny. I think I’ll go run my errands and come back to this post a bit later. 

Ok, well today was lost in a Destiny 2 haze. It’s a few hours later, and it’s been a great day. 

Tomorrow though, less gaming, more planning. I have about three days of classtime I have to make up for next week (Monday, Thursday, Monday). I think doing some short lectures on video should be good. I usually use something from the gaming world, OBX or Open Broadcaster to record stuff for class simply because it just looks better than the commercial education video capture software. I might post an example, we’ll see.

So not only Destiny 2, but now I have Ever Oasis and Monster Hunter Stories for my 3DS, plus the new Metroid game coming next Monday. These are very good times if you like to have a lot of new games come crashing down on you all at once.

Looks like I’ve already made myself sick. I have the weakest immune system – well, weaker than anyone I know. And after a week of student interaction, I feel pretty crummy. Lots of head congestion and slowness. But I won’t give up the blog challenge! I press on!

Another late entry. I think the later it is the more first-person it is. Spent the morning working on my courses, grading and such, and recording some upcoming podcasts. Great day, even though I could feel the cold coming on. 

Played a lot of Destiny 2 and the game is really awesome. They’ve really managed to beat expectations I think. The beta was such a letdown that I’m glad it’s really good. The story and the missions are great fun. And the levelling system makes sense! Amazing.

Tomorrow I have to go get Monster Hunter Stories which just came out. And next week is the new Metroid game. It’s an embarrassment of riches this month. I might also have to run by campus either tomorrow or Sunday and do some letterhead printing since I didn’t get up there today. 

This summer I read a great book by Andy Merrifield called The Amateur. In it, Merrifield argues that instead of lamenting the fact that people are skeptical of experts in public affairs and civic decisions, we should be encouraging the inclusion of the voice of the passionate amateur along side the voices of the institutional experts. It’s a great book until he goes full-on Verso Boy at the end and starts talking about the shadow resistance and the international shadow amateur takedown of the government that is coming. Could have done without that. 

But there is real merit in this argument about the need to have passionate amateurs informing how we weigh expert decision making. His example of Jane Jacobs, along with Rachel Carson are spot on. These are people who can inform themselves, but aren’t beholden to the systems and the agreed-upon way of seeing that experts come out of school using. Instead, they care and look around for reasons to support their points of view and what it is that they believe. It’s a really good way to think.

Debate should be about creating a space for the practice of Merrifield’s amateurism. This is where we should not be weighing expert versus expert to determine who is more persuasive, but participants add their own voice to the conversation in order to make sure the experts are not too “expert.” The Amateur doesn’t care as much about the method, so the expert can look around for other things to consider when making the call. 

American policy debate seems to be all about pushing on the limits of the expert discourse. Everything seems to fall back toward that in the sense that all debate is about questioning whether or not your proof is good enough. In academic debate, it comes down to published evidence most of the time, and whether that evidence is good enough to be deemed expert. Policy debate is eating itself alive over this question right now as it has started to question whether the skepticism of the questioning of the expertise comes from an appropriate positionality. 

BP should be the “amateur hour” of debate – that is, it should be evaluated on the terms of whether or not the speakers did a good job of informing the judges with passion, care, and information in order to make a decision. Debate is valuable because it allows us to find our amateur voices and then use them to evaluate the experts. Debate should not be about mastering the tropes of expertise, nor should it be about being a go-between from the expert information to the public. BP debaters so rarely look to expert information that this is bound to fail as a model for debating. The Economist, Vox, and other such sources are not good enough to use to learn how to thread the passionate voice of the amateur into the conversation. 

Likewise, the public speaking course could also be about the amateur. How do we get our voices into the conversation? I am not sure. It’s something to work on and think through. But I can be very certain that learning how to construct an MLA or APA bibliography for a speech is a fine way to show all students that they cannot and do not want to be part of the public conversation. Strict written bibliographies in a speech class only serve to teach students that they are wrong, that they are undisiplined, and that they do not want any part of the larger conversation in their communities.

Merrifield’s book is a must-read for those who teach debating and speaking as it gives a really great third way through the artificial binary of expert or public. I have to fight this argument all the time when I suggest reforms to competitive debate, where debaters – who are supposed to be able to argue – immediately respond with the worst possible caricature of the audience. Perhaps a model of the amateur – someone who is informed and cares and outside of the doctrines of the expert – can serve as a model for speaking and judging our BP debates. 

Taking expert opinion and blending it with an eye for public care and attention to others is exactly what training as an advocate should entail. It also has the added benefit of removing all this artificiality from BP debate about judging the “best argument.” My students regularly lose debates because they were amazing speakers, they were persuasive and said the most interesting things, but they just didn’t get the debate right. They failed to say the right magic phrase to get their side of the motion to the right conclusion. This is an artificial “debate expertise” that we have allowed to grow into BP like a fungus. I thought that at least on the East Coast of the US we established BP to get away from that and back toward the public eye.

Judging the most persuasive argument is to consider what the expert things then to consider the right thing to do. It’s a good way to evaluate debates as it’s more honest, more like a human being thinks, and also everyone can learn from the exchange. Winning a debate because you were really compelling, not really right from the debate-point-of-view of what this motion “needed,” is a lot more satisfying and most importantly, it gets us all thinking about the role we play, or could play, in our communities outside debate.