The New York Sophist

A recent trip to BookCulture, and amazing bookstore I love, reminded me how terrifying a bookstore can be. And insightful. And nostalgic. And cozy. And again raised the question that haunts me these days: Why do we only think to assign books about form rather than explore the form we purport to teach through other texts? 

This bookstore is indimidating simply because it also houses the required texts for numerous Columbia University courses. It’s a peephole into the minds and thoughts and desires of those teaching at Columbia. So there’s a bit of, “Oh, that’s a great idea!” mixed with “I’m not sure what that professor is up to.”  This is of course never an invitation to critique the professor. Instead it’s a direct line to self-criticism, concern that there are texts and ideas out there beyond you, that you are unfamiliar with, that you need to learn and need to know instantly. 

I inquire about a book I want and I’m told it would cost 31 dollars to order it and it would arrive in 4 days. My friend says, “Did you check Amazon?” I do, and find it for 20 dollars available tomorrow. So the bookstore can also make you feel like a capitalist jerk as well. But he says: “We spend so much money on books, it’s only fair we try to save some when we can.” It’s true. And I spent 40 dollars on some great finds, things I didn’t really need but converted them into need using amazing self persuasion skills.

See how cozy it is? This is a lovely shot of fiction blending into literary criticism. I browse a bit, pull off the shelf a book written by a poet about walking in New York. Now, this is cool. I could assign this book and we could have a debate about it. Something about transit, about walking, about sidewalks – there are a number of things there. And through that, we could easily come to terms with the necessities in a debate and the things that make debate good. But what we’d be immersed in is a text about the world, not about a form. Who wants to read about rules and strategies for rules? That’s a debate/argumentation textbook. How about a book about plants? Or the history of Spain? That’s a class.

Now, why can’t I have these thoughts before I order textbooks and before I draft a syllabus? I sort of like the syllabus I’ve put together. But not anymore. I like the idea of reading some strange books and putting a debate together from them. Debate does have a nice material and cultural history that is worth exploring, and we’re doing that in the course through a few good texts, but it would be pretty cool to just set up some debates that are about something other than debate. Most debates set up for classes, or for campuses, are mostly about the debate. It’s little wonder, considering our political debates suffer the same affliction.

Debate people should be book people. We sort of are – I am always talking to folks at tournaments about cool stuff to read and writing down titles. But why doesn’t that love transfer over into debate itself? Neither in the teaching of contest debate nor in the argumentation classroom do you find the study of novels, poems, or books about science (Weird pop-press books about plants or about stars would be immediate go-to starting points for me) assigned or suggested as ways to get better at debating. I’ve assigned two books about Zen and two about debate. We’ll see how that goes, but Zen is also pretty obsessed with form and it’s dissolution of it into and as content and meaning.

American policy debate seems on the cusp of becoming something a bit more mimetic to academia, where people can generally reference a couple of books to support their argument, or use a small quote from a major work to back up a point. This will never quite reach this point because due to the constraints of the tournament, i.e. fair competition, the evidence must be contextualized (meaning very long) and it must be strategic (meaning pretty academically obscure, which is a very, very strange and small corner of the book-world, but definitely cozy). Obscurity and depth are a formula for winning debates, whereas a formula for engaging in high quality debates would be depth and familiarity. This might happen after the debate world, but is pretty heavily coded against for those currently competing. 

This place is so cool. I think there should be a rule that before one comes up with or decides on what a production class (meaning a class where students are evaluated primarily on the texts they produce instead of familiarity with a theory, or a set of material, like testing or exams over essays and presentations) consists of, they must wander a large, preferably academic or intellectually oriented bookstore to make sure they don’t fall, as I always seem to, into some sort of teacher’s rut, where the books assigned are the books that match the drab colors of the cultural sediment surrounding what a class should be. 

My Amazon book came the next day (today) and I still haven’t really gotten into the books I bought from here. But I’m already considering a return trip. This time not for my own consumption but for inspiration in the production and design of a course, a course that has little to do in title or content to the books assigned. But through speaking and debating, perhaps we can create connection.

One of the strangest things about competitive debate is the inordinate pressure on the judge to get the decision “right.” Judges are struck, dismissed, sent to “bad rooms,” preferred low, or made fun of behind their back for their inability to judge the debate “the right way.” Such a judgement of judges is only possible if one maintains a very strict ideology of what things in a debate work and which ones don’t. This is a minority view of debate among scholars, who almost universally agree that debates are situational, fluid, audience-dependent, events. The speakers work hard, under pressure, to please the judges to get the result they want. 

But in collegiate debates we often see debaters berating their judges for being unable to make the correct decision. This is a very strange reversal of the way debate within democratic institutions function. We have the image of the candidate, or the persuader, nervously planning how she is going to get the audience to her side, carefully selecting arguments and evidence that will appeal to that audience, and feeling bad if the audience decides to go another way. What collegiate debate presents is a non-democratic model, something akin to North Korean politics, where if the public does not get what the speakers are saying they are punished for being enemies of the state. 

There is one exception that could redeem collegiate debate from its strange association with totalitarian rhetoric, and that is to argue that collegiate debate associates itself with the democratic practice of law. This makes a lot of sense: In the United States, collegiate debate in the 1960s saw sweeping changes to its performance and its rules for operation based solely on the numbers of law students and legal professionals who believed in debate and wanted it to reflect legal argumentative practices. Things like blocks, the structure of the Disadvantage, procedural arguments, and the like could have come out of this transition, along with the establishment of “flowing” and line-by-line argumentation. Other countries might have similar traces present in the history of their formats, but I doubt it – many other countries locate the heart of debate, or the ideological model of debate in the legislature instead of the judiciary.

The better argument (or easier to prove without a lot of archival work) is to make the connection of debate to the judicial through the presence of stare decisis. This is standard American jurisprudence, but appears in many different legal traditions. It is the belief that matters that have already been decided should guide decisions on future matters.  If evidence of type X was considered to be inadmissible in a particular type of case, that evidence should be ruled inadmissible in other future similar cases. The law should be consistent, and should provide reasonable people expectations of how their cases would be considered by the court. The presence of these decisions as a part of legal record allows lawyers (and others) to construct arguments as to whether one case should be decided this way or that. 

Debate’s pressure on the judges to get it right is the functioning of a stare decisis on the ideological level. The lack of presence of textual records of judge decisions limits access to legal-types of argumentation (“The judge in the semifinal last month decided this or that phrase was important to the extension being established”). I believe this to be incredibly dangerous for debate, no matter how you articulate the value of it. The danger comes from replacing reason, and reasonable argument, with the ideology of what is reasonable and fair. That ideology comes to debaters from their history, their experiences, and the comments of judges from the past. The ideology is built on the idea that debaters are working to improve, and each decision provides evidence on how to get better. Each debater is deeply involved in a stare decisis that has no textual trace, nothing written about it, but an oral tradition that may or may not be respected by those who will judge you in the future. It definitely won’t be respected by those outside of the insular debating community. A stare decisis on how to judge debates with no intersubjective verification except by those who have “won enough” or who “break” as judges, rooted purely in a semi-shared ideology of “what good debates are” is nearly cult-like. It’s inaccessible to those outside of that identity, and once one gets inside that identity, one is heavily invested not to disrupt it. As a university sponsored and supported activity, even if in name, there is something really disturbing about this practice, and how everyone accepts it as not only normal, but the best way to run a debating competition.

The solution for this is activist judging – something I can’t wait to try once I stop tabbing so many events. Activist judging can be understood as judges “legislating from the bench,” making decisions based on what’s good for justice in their view even if that judgement neglects the legal tradition in some way. This is not “trashing” the law, as the critical legal studies movement would advocate, nor is it willful ignorance. In debate, this means the judge focuses on the larger picture of good argumentation, reason, and support that would work outside of the debating tournament, outside of the community of debaters. Their fidelity is to larger questions of persuasion, argument, evidence, and the like, and not to what works as a whip, or what works as an extension – those elements are important for fair competition, to be sure, but they are subsets of a larger practice that the entire democratic world depends on for good governance. Getting it right in a debate is not nearly as important as getting it persuasive for the reasonable person – and yes, reasonable people exist who make excellent decisions and have never attended a debating competition.

This is a difficult task as debate communities worldwide have placed the preservation of the fairness of the contest above any other potential value in their motions and in their judgement. It doesn’t strike anyone as odd that debates about EU policy regularly occur just mere meters or sometimes a building away from a department that employs experts in these issues, yet we never invite them to our competitions. They are not necessary. We are not, as a collective, interested in persuasion or argument. We are interested in providing fair boundaries for a debating competition. The activist judge provides perspective for the debaters, a reasonable check on argumentation strategies that win debates but remain unpersuasive to broader audiences. Activist judging is to invite such scholars to the competition, or encourage conveners to do so. They are the ones who not only practice associative reasoning to larger communities in their competitive judging, but also within the communities that debate exists. The university, scholarly, student, and intellectual communities at the campuses where debate competitions take place are regularly unaware that such events are happening. Activist judges work to include these communities in competitions in whatever way they can.

Why reinvent the wheel? Debate competitions based on reason and persuasion are fun. They don’t require people to show up with little more than interest and desire for rhetorical challenge. Detailed briefings and guidebooks are not necessary to practice reasoned discourse. Only topics and rooms and judges are needed who are willing to practice an open-mindedness toward persuasive potential. Activist judging can point this out. Activist judging puts the practices of debate under question by the larger societal norms and practices of persuasion. They don’t vote for unpersuasive arguments that are part of the debate culture, the ideologically appropriate examples or what have you. They are happy to intervene and make decisions based on what debate competitions should keep at their core: “As a reasonable person, I simply wasn’t persuaded by that argument.” The absence of this phrase from RFDs does not give a good signal for debate’s future, as it peels its relevance away from larger communities in order to stick its own small community better together in homogeneity of practice.

One of the strangest things about competitive debate is the inordinate pressure on the judge to get the decision “right.” Judges are struck, dismissed, sent to “bad rooms,” preferred low, or made fun of behind their back for their inability to judge the debate “the right way.” Such a judgement of judges is only possible if one maintains a very strict ideology of what things in a debate work and which ones don’t. This is a minority view of debate among scholars, who almost universally agree that debates are situational, fluid, audience-dependent, events. The speakers work hard, under pressure, to please the judges to get the result they want. 

But in collegiate debates we often see debaters berating their judges for being unable to make the correct decision. This is a very strange reversal of the way debate within democratic institutions function. We have the image of the candidate, or the persuader, nervously planning how she is going to get the audience to her side, carefully selecting arguments and evidence that will appeal to that audience, and feeling bad if the audience decides to go another way. What collegiate debate presents is a non-democratic model, something akin to North Korean politics, where if the public does not get what the speakers are saying they are punished for being enemies of the state. 

There is one exception that could redeem collegiate debate from its strange association with totalitarian rhetoric, and that is to argue that collegiate debate associates itself with the democratic practice of law. This makes a lot of sense: In the United States, collegiate debate in the 1960s saw sweeping changes to its performance and its rules for operation based solely on the numbers of law students and legal professionals who believed in debate and wanted it to reflect legal argumentative practices. Things like blocks, the structure of the Disadvantage, procedural arguments, and the like could have come out of this transition, along with the establishment of “flowing” and line-by-line argumentation. Other countries might have similar traces present in the history of their formats, but I doubt it – many other countries locate the heart of debate, or the ideological model of debate in the legislature instead of the judiciary.

The better argument (or easier to prove without a lot of archival work) is to make the connection of debate to the judicial through the presence of stare decisis. This is standard American jurisprudence, but appears in many different legal traditions. It is the belief that matters that have already been decided should guide decisions on future matters.  If evidence of type X was considered to be inadmissible in a particular type of case, that evidence should be ruled inadmissible in other future similar cases. The law should be consistent, and should provide reasonable people expectations of how their cases would be considered by the court. The presence of these decisions as a part of legal record allows lawyers (and others) to construct arguments as to whether one case should be decided this way or that. 

Debate’s pressure on the judges to get it right is the functioning of a stare decisis on the ideological level. The lack of presence of textual records of judge decisions limits access to legal-types of argumentation (“The judge in the semifinal last month decided this or that phrase was important to the extension being established”). I believe this to be incredibly dangerous for debate, no matter how you articulate the value of it. The danger comes from replacing reason, and reasonable argument, with the ideology of what is reasonable and fair. That ideology comes to debaters from their history, their experiences, and the comments of judges from the past. The ideology is built on the idea that debaters are working to improve, and each decision provides evidence on how to get better. Each debater is deeply involved in a stare decisis that has no textual trace, nothing written about it, but an oral tradition that may or may not be respected by those who will judge you in the future. It definitely won’t be respected by those outside of the insular debating community. A stare decisis on how to judge debates with no intersubjective verification except by those who have “won enough” or who “break” as judges, rooted purely in a semi-shared ideology of “what good debates are” is nearly cult-like. It’s inaccessible to those outside of that identity, and once one gets inside that identity, one is heavily invested not to disrupt it. As a university sponsored and supported activity, even if in name, there is something really disturbing about this practice, and how everyone accepts it as not only normal, but the best way to run a debating competition.

The solution for this is activist judging – something I can’t wait to try once I stop tabbing so many events. Activist judging can be understood as judges “legislating from the bench,” making decisions based on what’s good for justice in their view even if that judgement neglects the legal tradition in some way. This is not “trashing” the law, as the critical legal studies movement would advocate, nor is it willful ignorance. In debate, this means the judge focuses on the larger picture of good argumentation, reason, and support that would work outside of the debating tournament, outside of the community of debaters. Their fidelity is to larger questions of persuasion, argument, evidence, and the like, and not to what works as a whip, or what works as an extension – those elements are important for fair competition, to be sure, but they are subsets of a larger practice that the entire democratic world depends on for good governance. Getting it right in a debate is not nearly as important as getting it persuasive for the reasonable person – and yes, reasonable people exist who make excellent decisions and have never attended a debating competition.

This is a difficult task as debate communities worldwide have placed the preservation of the fairness of the contest above any other potential value in their motions and in their judgement. It doesn’t strike anyone as odd that debates about EU policy regularly occur just mere meters or sometimes a building away from a department that employs experts in these issues, yet we never invite them to our competitions. They are not necessary. We are not, as a collective, interested in persuasion or argument. We are interested in providing fair boundaries for a debating competition. The activist judge provides perspective for the debaters, a reasonable check on argumentation strategies that win debates but remain unpersuasive to broader audiences. Activist judging is to invite such scholars to the competition, or encourage conveners to do so. They are the ones who not only practice associative reasoning to larger communities in their competitive judging, but also within the communities that debate exists. The university, scholarly, student, and intellectual communities at the campuses where debate competitions take place are regularly unaware that such events are happening. Activist judges work to include these communities in competitions in whatever way they can.

Why reinvent the wheel? Debate competitions based on reason and persuasion are fun. They don’t require people to show up with little more than interest and desire for rhetorical challenge. Detailed briefings and guidebooks are not necessary to practice reasoned discourse. Only topics and rooms and judges are needed who are willing to practice an open-mindedness toward persuasive potential. Activist judging can point this out. Activist judging puts the practices of debate under question by the larger societal norms and practices of persuasion. They don’t vote for unpersuasive arguments that are part of the debate culture, the ideologically appropriate examples or what have you. They are happy to intervene and make decisions based on what debate competitions should keep at their core: “As a reasonable person, I simply wasn’t persuaded by that argument.” The absence of this phrase from RFDs does not give a good signal for debate’s future, as it peels its relevance away from larger communities in order to stick its own small community better together in homogeneity of practice.

Last week, debaters from St. John’s University (where I teach and learn) and Adelphi University (in Long Island), had a public debate about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. As someone who started both debate programs (with help at both places) it was a surreal and happy moment for me, watching this debate in a well-attended auditorium on the Adelphi University campus, thinking about how far debate in the New York City area has come. 

This debate, like most every good public debate, was an arbitrary side assignment affair, and I worked with our students to come up with compelling arguments for All Lives Matter. Not an easy task. All Lives Matter is difficult to defend, but part of the task of being a debater I think is to believe in the idea that perspectives in a controversy deserve an honest attempt at a good defense, like in criminal law perhaps. 

What we learned that night was the difficulty in making arguments that sound good in a classroom palatable in front of a hostile audience. It was rhetorically challenging to find space to distance our ideas from the racist implications of All Lives Matter. Those implications and expressions are there, and for the audience, constituted the entirety of the position of All Lives Matter. It was a great challenge. We got a lot out of it, including the experience of debating in front of a crowd that actively dislikes your position and communicates it through body language and other non-verbals. This is an element of rhetorical performance that never appears in the tournament environment. Sanitation, or too-clean a space, might be responsible for the development of asthma and allergies in children. What should we call rhetorical asthma?

We live-streamed the debate and I was so happy to see friends and alumni from all over the country tune into the debate. It was great fun to moderate the chat room and join in commentary with the viewers about the debate they were watching. One St. John’s Alumna, Erin Fleming, was taken aback by what she called the “debate ticks” present in the performances. I encouraged her to write something about these ticks, and she wrote a great open letter. I offer it here to you for your consideration. Tournament-oriented debating continues to increase in popularity, but not without some obvious problems. 

Thanks to Erin for writing this great piece. How to correct it? For public debates are seen as an exception to tournament debating, “normal” debating. This is out of order. Tournament debating should be seen as debate’s abnormal form, and events like this should be considered the normal place where debate is practiced. 

Last week, debaters from St. John’s University (where I teach and learn) and Adelphi University (in Long Island), had a public debate about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. As someone who started both debate programs (with help at both places) it was a surreal and happy moment for me, watching this debate in a well-attended auditorium on the Adelphi University campus, thinking about how far debate in the New York City area has come. 

This debate, like most every good public debate, was an arbitrary side assignment affair, and I worked with our students to come up with compelling arguments for All Lives Matter. Not an easy task. All Lives Matter is difficult to defend, but part of the task of being a debater I think is to believe in the idea that perspectives in a controversy deserve an honest attempt at a good defense, like in criminal law perhaps. 

What we learned that night was the difficulty in making arguments that sound good in a classroom palatable in front of a hostile audience. It was rhetorically challenging to find space to distance our ideas from the racist implications of All Lives Matter. Those implications and expressions are there, and for the audience, constituted the entirety of the position of All Lives Matter. It was a great challenge. We got a lot out of it, including the experience of debating in front of a crowd that actively dislikes your position and communicates it through body language and other non-verbals. This is an element of rhetorical performance that never appears in the tournament environment. Sanitation, or too-clean a space, might be responsible for the development of asthma and allergies in children. What should we call rhetorical asthma?

We live-streamed the debate and I was so happy to see friends and alumni from all over the country tune into the debate. It was great fun to moderate the chat room and join in commentary with the viewers about the debate they were watching. One St. John’s Alumna, Erin Fleming, was taken aback by what she called the “debate ticks” present in the performances. I encouraged her to write something about these ticks, and she wrote a great open letter. I offer it here to you for your consideration. Tournament-oriented debating continues to increase in popularity, but not without some obvious problems. 

Thanks to Erin for writing this great piece. How to correct it? For public debates are seen as an exception to tournament debating, “normal” debating. This is out of order. Tournament debating should be seen as debate’s abnormal form, and events like this should be considered the normal place where debate is practiced.