The New York Sophist

Nearly didn’t make it. Had one of those 13 hour days that you always hear about professors having. Working continuously with some short and nice breaks, but having too much to deal with in order to really do write-thinking which is different than get-these-tasks-done thinking. 

Had a pretty good day of debate interaction which made me think a bit differently about some of the concerns in yesterday’s post. The idea of something being curricular or curricularly related, i.e. a debate “center” or advocacy “center” is a bit different than having a debate society which would function as an “intellectual community.” This changes up the model a bit. 

The intellectual community on campus is fragmented, tiny, and exclusive. Professors are such specialists now that it is rarely within the same department that they find such colleagues. They meet at various events and form bonds that way. This is not a place or a time based community but an accidental community of a couple of people who imagine themselves as taking part in a larger university community if only by acting in opposition to it or critiquing it.

Contrast that to the well-run debate society which is a place to come share intellectual problems and have discussions about hard thinking. The format is to the side of the whole thing.  The tournaments are irrelevant. This is not a sports team like so many programs are. 

Contrast that to the advocacy center which is a place to practice the art of rhetoric and persuasion and learn to argue orally.

So we do have two separate organizations here. Two distinct roles that have a lot of crossover. This can still be combined with opening up events to the campus as a whole. This can still be combined with events for the university. 

At the activity fair I had some trouble articulating what the Debate Society is now that we are divesting from tournament competition. We are all victims of the tournament discourse and its ideology. You can feel the pressure a lot of times if you are trying to do something different. Students signed up and we are emailing them and the club should be off to a great start.

This wasn’t what I wanted to post about today, but time is up. I think this is some okay reflection, not really the best, but it does raise a big question: Is meeting the self-imposed daily blog entry deadline more important than providing quality content? 

I think any content that is thoughtful that I create and post on here takes some labor, makes me think and craft, and I think that’s a measure of quality for me. But readers might feel differently about the quality of it. If I feel it’s good for my thinking, and I don’t post it because I don’t feel it’s good for my audience, that is upholding a rhetorical principle that harms me and the express purpose of keeping this blog. If I post things that meet my standard, but I feel they are not good for the audience and post them anyway, I run the risk of losing credibility about what I mostly write about. The third combination won’t ever happen – I just won’t post. 

So there’s a clear line at least for one potential combination. 

Tomorrow is Friday and it’s packed full of stuff to do. If I am lucky, I should be caught up with everything Sunday. Then Monday and Tuesday to Ithaca; Thursday through next Monday, Montana. 

It’s Wednesday, but the University says it’s Monday so everything is flipped over. Because they want the teaching schedule to be a certain way (1 hour and 20 minute classes across the board twice a week with Wednesday as a more open day) they have to flip the schedule from time to time to make the New York state teaching hour requirements. It’s an odd move considering most of our students do not choose to work during their college experience, they have to. Or they don’t work for money – they are an important caregiver to a much older or much younger family member while others labor to keep the family solvent. It’s also something that I’m sure will dissolve as a marker of a bygone era as the university system as we know it begins to collapse. We will see this happen in our lifetimes.

Thoughtlessness governs the university at all levels. Since it was raining a professor and a staff member cuddled up right next to the door to the building to smoke. These same people will decry the thoughtlessness of all sorts of laws and political decisions, but they, of course, are the best judges of where and when they should cause direct harm to others. I work at a University; I expect nothing less. Everyone knows what’s right and best so they don’t need to think that critically about their actions in or outside of the classroom.

it’s really Wednesday so nobody is here. Nothing works right. The internet barely functions. Pretty sure I remember reading some memos about the massive internet improvement work that was done this summer. Can’t access them though on the wireless that doesn’t work. It seems to get better, but I’m also working on some class stuff that doesn’t need the internet. I used to feel my work in debate was a respite from the classroom where I could get nothing good done. Now I feel the opposite way – my work in debate keeps me away from the good work that I could do in the classroom.

I think this is the part in the story where I should just walk away from the village, out into the woods and snow and wait. Metaphorically of course. It’s time to hang it up in the realm of teaching a debate program. I do sort of love my job, but not a lot of it.

I sort of love my job because it contains the promise that I could work along side people who want to do some thinking. The hard work of thinking. Like, reading a book or two together and talking about what it implies. This is something though that the university promises, yet delivers a morass of requirements, temporal obligations, and financial jealousies into the equation to keep people away from such work. 

Such work is not easy to measure – much easier to measure forms and exams graded and things like that. Hard to measure people sitting around drinking coffee discussing some notes or a book. This is tough. It’s like crafting an alternative grammar, and trying to sell it with arguments, paragraphs, and sentences written in the grammar of the failing order. 

It’s tough for students to accept that as work as well. They would rather be told what to do in a very simplistic way and then be told they did it well. Easy to measure. When i approach my classes and my work in debate with the “don’t know” attitude, it doesn’t work too well. 

On Tuesday I went to a session organized by some students to practice and improve debating. None of them wanted to speak. They wanted to be re-assured. There was no desire to do the hard work of thinking, making mistakes, diving deep, any of that. Granted, I suggested a difficult task that required an embrace of uncertainty and creativity. This is not what they have spent their lives in school doing. 

Is this what I am making? Or is this what I am fighting against in my teaching?

Is there a way to produce a recognizable opposition to the dominant discourse of work?  When actual mindful work appears to be invaluable, what then? Handouts? Simplistic formulas? Lots of lying saying, “that’s perfectly done,” when you know that all of the good research, scholarship and thought in your field all conclusively say, “it depends?”

How do I run a debate program when the students only seek praise for being already good at something that it will take decades to master? That they may never master? 

I sort of love my job because I can ask these questions. I can play with the dissolution of the debate program – something I have spent 10 years working on – and I can marshall reasons for and against the dissolution. 

The university will collapse because of the reasons I see in my debate program – students who want to go through motions to be praised, certified, or endorsed. Nobody wants uncertainty. Nobody wants to explore. Nobody wants to read. Nobody wants to do the difficult work of thinking. Nobody wants to be a “don’t know” person. They would rather be comfortable. 

I think that large, non departmental programs like writing centers and the transformation of things like debate teams into debate centers/programs are the future. Those will continue to live long after the department/degree/credit hour has become useless.

I wonder what my job will be like then. We will live through this change, that is certain.

I also sort of love my job because of the surprises. Tomorrow is the first new debate student meeting. A time to try again, to start over, to learn from your mistakes as a teacher. It begins again, again.

Currently Playing: Loreena McKennitt – An Ancient Muse

The old issues of The Journal of the American Forensic Association are some of my favorite things to leaf through to generate thinking. This journal, edited by debate teachers, was filled with the thoughts of those who immersed themselves in debating as a vocation. As the 1980s became the 1990s, the inexplicable rise of embarrassment at being a “speech teacher’ or “debate coach” infected the discipline, and the JAFA was converted into something “better,” The current journal Argumentation & Advocacy. The move was meant to make a journal about the teaching of debate a place for greater and broader insight about argumentation and issues that impact the world. I’m pretty sure that less people read A&A than they did JAFA. At least with JAFA a younger student would be motivated to have a look to see if there was something there to help them improve. 

The loss of this journal, and the other debate journals that were out there, was a blow to the practice of valuable debate via a loss of the idea of community. Now there was no forum for aspirational discussion about what teaching and coaching debate should be about. Yet the demands of the institutions for debate programs to justify themselves was directly increasing. As communication departments expanded to include those scholars who came up in cultural studies and other disciplines, the questions about debating became more common in faculty meetings. Instead of a faculty that all came up assuming debate “had to be” a part of a department, these new arrivals rightly questioned the small size of the programs, their insularity, and the trigger of cost. With the loss of a larger collection of aspirational tropes in the pages of JAFA, coaches who were caught up in the tournament slog, who thought preparing for the season was both the activity and the goal, were unable to defend themselves or their programs from this scrutiny. This was the end of the “golden age” of collegiate debate, and sparked a number of developmental conferences on debate preservation as a reaction. You could argue that Sedalia was the only semi-proactive response to the threat posed by the shifting communicative landscape in higher education. 

This brings me to one of my favorite books – Kruger’s Counterpoint, an edited collection of all of the best writing in journals like JAFA and others about the controversies that arose between thinking practitioners of debate education. In a lot of ways it reads to me today like the Hagakure, the collection of samurai wisdom put together by a former samurai who palpably felt the end of an era coming and wanted to preserve what was most important – the tropes, the points of invention for discourse about what it meant to be a samurai. Kruger’s book, published in the 1960s, was pretty far away from the very quick obliteration of debate programs twenty years in his future. Kruger, oddly enough, spent a lot of his career at C.W. Post University, a scarce 30 minutes to an hour from here in Long Island. I occasionally jot a note to myself to make an appointment with the University Archivist there to see what might be hiding out in the stacks from his work. I also happen to have his textbook, Modern Debate, in my collection as well. For me he symbolizes a time when it was a point of pride to be someone in the field of communication who not only taught speech production, oralcy, and verbal argument and debate, but who thought about it a lot, and who put their thoughts to paper to share with others. 

Such slowness of practice has immense value for the aspirational discussion about what we do when we teach debate, which then becomes a well of tropes we can draw from when times get tough. When the pressure is on from the administration to justify your cost, space, time, and energy we would have a resource. But it’s all dried up. The loss of this community has been gleefully replaced with a community of critics who wind up accidently giving credit to forms of debate and speech that probably don’t deserve that legitimation (i.e. an expert critiquing a political speech unwittingly or unwillingly confers upon it the status of “political speech” which draws some immediate borders in the imagination) and on the other side a community of people who are happy to teach eristics to their students because they have an intense faith that the practice of winning tournament after tournament is somehow going to teach them how to be excellent at crafting persuasive speeches, convincing arguments, and interesting debates. The “good” always comes later in critiques of debate teaching, that somewhere down the road debate will translate into success for them in life because it gives them “skills” or “portable skills” or “tools” or whatever. Such separation of the art of debating and oral production of argument from its context is like suggesting that a handful of false teeth is the equivalent of a mouth for chewing. Those who are interested in the teaching and learning of debate have to be satisfied with short, passing interactions in hallways of tournament competitions where a few ideas can be exchanged but only quickly as there is a round to judge, students to check on. Rarely is time given for the deep dive on the aspirational aims of debate education. In fact, we can count them! Sedalia, Sedalia 2, Quail Roost, and The Wake Forest University session. All suffer from a new fallacy I’m playing with that I call the “productive bias.” It works by assuming that if we have produced something, we’ve done something or accomplished something. All these conferences have produced similar documents that make similar claims and demands on the university. All have been similarly ignored by the University, and life goes on. 

I hoped to perhaps start a return to the slow, thoughtful exchange of ideas about the teaching of argument production. Without the recovery of teachers talking to one another in their capacity and identity as teachers, we don’t really have a chance of recovering inventional resources for the defense of debate.  My library has the full run of JAFA which I was hoping to digitize. You see, the journal exists only on microfilm or print. Since I doubt there is anyone out there willing to send me a whole print run of the journal, I thought it would be good to use one of the two microfilm machines (how things have changed) that the library owns in order to convert the run into PDF. This request was denied by the librarians, who not only are rightly concerned about the time I might spend monopolizing the machine, they also are wrongly concerned about copyright. If only it could be communicated how little my field cares about any conversation about teaching students how to make oral argument or persuade well – we are now in the business of creating critics of speeches. The turn of JAFA into A&A is pretty good evidence of what we value: commentary from expert receivers of speech instead of conversation from practitioners sharing and addressing issues in invention. 

A full PDF run of JAFA would have numerous benefits, most obviously the ability to full-text search the range of the journal for key words like “teaching” or “argument” and trace how those conversations played out over 30 or 40 years. I might still just surreptitiously begin this project with what little free time I have and just be patient.  It would eventually be worth it. More to come on this as I get ready for a day of listening to debate speeches, something that the ideological and hegemonic voices of the university and the field of communication tell me, in my head, is a waste of time, that I should be writing something for QJS. Both exercises, ironically, will involve the exact same number of people – about ten. 

To quote the philosopher Chuck D, “Hate is a strong word, but I hate the snow.” These are some of the words I most clearly remember from my days at Syracuse University. Syracuse is a place for people who love snow, or at least it doesn’t bother them. At Syracuse I had a lot of great experiences, but in planning out some future courses, I had a look at some old syllabi. I don’t remember them very well at all. I think the assumptions about what a syllabus should look like hurt our ability to engage students from the very first moments of the class.

A typical example of professor syllabus cynical humor/hegemony.

Syllabi are unmemorable. Why do we not recall what is on them, or when we go to check them out, they are totally uninteresting? It seems that I should remember more about why or how I got inspired to be in a course as easily as I remember an offhanded comment from a guest speaker. 

The syllabus has become (or perhaps has always served as) a disciplinary document, a marker of power, something that is supposed to affirm some difference in authoritative/disciplinary power between the student and the teacher. It’s an “invisible fence” or “shock collar” (are those the same thing?) meant to keep students “in line” and things like that. Doesn’t seem like a contract to me, but more of a badge of office – the sort of badge you’d find in a bad western where the sheriff and the deputies don’t seem to have any other plans or purpose but to be “in charge.” There’s nothing more to do but to display and exercise power. 

The syllabus cannot be a contract since there’s no way for students to amend it, add riders, or simply walk away. You might think there are, but with the low amount of sections offered by universities and colleges today, plus the necessity of students working nearly full time to pay for class, and the incredible expense of college requiring that they have to be done in an incredibly quick time-frame, there really isn’t an option for them to wait until another semester or for them to look for a different section. In the end most of the courses are going to be the same. 

I feel like most faculty get a secret perverse thrill out of the presence of the syllabus. Students won’t read it, so they know that in December they can sigh, pull out a copy, and show the concerned student that on page 14, bullet point 8 under section 3 clearly explains that they have no chance of passing the course. There’s also a lot of pleasure in the commiseration writ large on social media where professors tell stories of the students not reading or following simple instructions buried in a boring, nearly unreadable document. If we needed any more evidence that faculty are a bit disconnected from the world or “monastic,” this would be it. 

Taking a look at my syllabus, I find it to be the most boring thing I’ve read in a while. Stylistically it’s garbage. Content-wise it reads like a list of do-nots: “Here’s what we are going to read when,” “here’s how to handle this or that issue.” I wish I had spent more time on it, even though it’s just for public speaking, a course everyone has to take before they end their sophomore year at my college. I still feel I could do a better job presenting it. 

These things are important, but should they be the full scope of this document? If we answer yes, then we are losing some great opportunities to reach students. I think there are a few key assumptions we should keep in mind when generating a syllabus:

1. This is most likely the only writing you do that your students will read. If you are one of those obnoxious people who assigns his or her own work in the class, you have a lot more problems than I am addressing here, but you should consider the syllabus an introduction into your writing.

2. The syllabus is a common map, or grounding, for everyone in the class to formulate a plan for each meeting. It doesn’t have to work, it just has to provide the materials to execute the plan. Much can be learned from failure. 

3. The syllabus should not be written in a way that treats the classroom as a space of business, a transaction, or exchange of commodity. It has to resist the capitalist grammar. 

So with those assumptions in mind, what metaphors for the syllabus exist? 

Party Invitation

Here’s an invitation to a great party, a celebration where the guests will be the books we’re reading. The attitude of the syllabus should be one of excitement and promise of a great time to come. I often think about my course design this way – who should be the guest speakers or guests of honor for the course – but this creative and generative thinking never translates over to the syllabus writing. 

A Map for Visitors

Consider your field or your course a national park or a historical site. Your syllabus is the guide that is freely available at the entrance or ranger station. Visitors to the park should consult it so they don’t miss anything that the site has to offer, but of course they have the freedom to stick in one place as long as they like if they are really enjoying it. There’s no reason to rush around from site to site as there’s no real way to connect a “total” experience – that is, “we’ve seen it all” – to the pleasure or enjoyment or comprehension of the “meaning” of the site. Some suggested places to go and study the history of how the site was constructed (“who put this fence here and why?”) should be in there for conversation with the visitors should they ask, but overall the visit is governed by a moving through the guide by the visitors with assistance from the guide.

A Love Letter to your Discipline

This metaphor places the reader in the position of eavesdropper or the syllabus in the position of “found writing,” something that they, through fate and time, have become the audience for, but were not imagined as the audience by the author. This can lead to some really interesting views of the syllabus, including that of mystery that the readings and assignments unfold over time and through process. This metaphor also highlights the importance of working together to answer burning questions. Group projects are unpopular because they are designed by cynical faculty from a generation or two removed from this one. But if we look online we find gaming communities such as No Man’s Sky and World of Warcraft working hard in groups to solve puzzles and riddles. 

This does not need to be complex, but merely interesting. People love to see what a relationship is about and why someone might write something full of love and caring to something or someone else. You could cast the class in the role of interceptor – that the author and recipient are unknown – but by engaging in the list of tasks things can be revealed about that relationship that are insightful.

In Media Res

The class is thrown into the moment you are in right now as a scholar, facing some question or series of questions that are connected to daily life in the world. The writing must be connected to a world that the students can recognize, although the questions can be a little strange. Students then proceed through the course looking to solve the dramatic tension shown on the first day with the instructor as the “main character.” Everything bends back toward seeing if we have enough material or thought to bring to bear on the question. By the end of the term, it’s clear we have some resolution but everyone is curious about what’s going to be in the sequel (in a perfect play of this metaphor anyway). 

There are many more metaphors, I just haven’t thought them all through yet. The point of the syllabus should be to invite, welcome, and provide resources for the students entering a course, a place for exploration of an approach or a way of thinking. It shouldn’t be thought of as a contract (worst possible metaphor) nor should it be thought of as some sort of document that saves the professor frustration, time, or energy. It absolutely shouldn’t establish the course and the work of the course as commodities worth student investment of time in order to be sold later for high profit (re: grades). It should be as revolutionary as the rest of your thinking as a teacher, something designed to shake up the students, dust some assumptions away, or spark a fire that gives way to new growth after the burn of the term ends. 

I am going to go on record with the commitment to try to post every day here. I have such a nice page, such a nice blog, and it gets ignored. It’s the perfect place to work on ideas by sharing them with an imagined audience (aren’t they all at some level?). So why don’t I do it?

It’s because I’ve been “spoiling my appetite” with social media – the posting and reposting on Twitter and Facebook fills you up and makes you feel that same sort of goodness that sharing thoughts on a blog does. But the blog comes with a bit more chewing, a bit more rumination. It’s the difference between the calories in a salad versus a sack of Oreos. But I’d rather eat Oreos anyday. . . .

The point of this spot is to work on ideas by sharing them. This is writing as epistemic to be sure, but writing as a critique of epistemology I hope. I hope I walk away from these posts feeling somewhat dissatisfied, ready to type again tomorrow when the time comes. I have a fear that it will be too much of the former and perhaps push me back to something easier. 

To start things off, I’ll share some thoughts about Staughton Lynd, the great historian of the New Left (he was a historian in or during the New Left might be more accurate since he talks little of that time period) and he makes me remember how I used to feel about history when I was studying it and taking classes in it at Texas A&M back in the day. Staughton Lynd wrote a great number of great things but here’s a line that has been haunting me since I read it earlier in the summer: 

from page 138 of From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader

What does this quote mean? For me it means that intellectualism is a constant labor/practice focused on clarification of problems as opposed to the distribution of answers. A former student of mine shared a pretty strange article today about a French mathematician who rejected teaching because he didn’t want to “be the one who knows.” Seems to me that the teacher has to be the most uncertain and flexible one in the room for there to be real intellectual practice in there.

Why is teaching intellectual practice? Lynd just assumes it. The reason, I think, is because teaching, no matter what you teach, is about practicing approaches to problems, whether with others or alone. We teach various approaches to identifying, clarifying, and questioning problems. This is what well-taught students can do, they can face things with the tools and experiences we provide as teachers. 

I hate saying “tools” because I do not agree with the black hole of discourse about education these days that simultaneously reduces teaching to both a simplistic material production (“the creation of tools”) and the training of people in right-wayness (“provision of skills and branding for the workforce”). Good teaching needs to be against both of these ideas simply because we have no idea, and should be honest that we have no idea, what problems are going to be out there for our students when they leave the school. 

Our teaching ought to last as well.  Critical thinking isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t last fifty some odd years longer than the class. We can cement this power, I think, by demonstrating intellectual practice and performance for the students ourselves by bringing in the difficult subject matter of our time. That might be the laptop computer or the mobile phone, or it could be Black Lives Matter, or the rise of American fascists (“rise” might be a stretch, maybe “appearance?”). Regardless of what the teacher identifies as the cause of the time, the identification and the bringing of it into the classroom is the first intellectual act modeled by the teacher for the students. That foundation has to be a good one if we hope to build anything over the course of the semester.

What is the “place” in Lynd’s assessment? I think here he means a physical, material activism but I base that on what I know about the man’s life. Does he mean this as a universal? I don’t think so. I think that’s what worked for him. But the question of “place” is a great one for us. I don’t know about you, but I tend to slip into thinking that the college campus is a space distinct from the rest of the world. It really isn’t. The students bring all of their experiences to the campus, and bad professors discount, ignore, or disregard these experiences as a teaching resource. The place to stand is right there with the students in the murk of it all and try to demonstrate for them the approaches you take to clarification. 

Place is also a pretty explicit call to politicize the classroom, which is a funny idea since it is already a deeply politicized space. People who reject politicizing the classroom are those who think that schooling is neutral, or at best objective, so they too need a lot of help with clarification and where to stand. It would be good if all teachers could be intellectuals, but they are not. The classroom remains politicized in favor of the workday, salary, career is your life value party which infects pretty much everything around me in my daily life. 

Politicizing the classroom is probably most frequently done by making the classroom part of the analysis of the class. The practices of the university, the school, or otherwise can come under scrutiny as examples and things like that. You don’t need to bring in giant on-fire issues from the community or society if that’s not for you. What you must do is bring in some reflexivity on the things that are being taught in order to give students some handholds on how this lesson, this class, or unit is not going to expire at the end of the semester – it remains connected. 

Lynd’s statement has the tone of a clarification but ultimately just makes me ask a lot of questions and investigate a lot of my practices. Perhaps that’s what good intellectual behavior is – to keep questions alive by continuing to pair down problems.