The New York Sophist

Just finishing up the amazing book, Organizing Enlightenment and it has surpassed my expectations which were pretty high. The book chronicles the history of the formation of the research university in Europe, and the reasons behind it. The short version is that the Ph.D. oriented research university that we all know and some of us love more than others was a reaction to perceived information overload.

The ethos of books and printed matter was eroding in the 18th century. The transformation of books from the source of knowledge to commodities created a crisis in confidence about information. The university was the technology that stepped in to move the ethos of information away from a collection of print to an ethic – a group of people committed to working on a particular ethic of knowing – and through that commitment, they can know which books are valuable and which are not. But collecting books and memorizing them no longer served as the site of knowledge. The university community was that site. 

Long after that came the American Land-Grant college project, which gave land and resources to create huge state colleges and universities on the principle that the university creates things that are not only valuable to those who don’t attend the university or work there – the members of society. Many land-grant colleges worked in tandem with farmers and engineers to test designs and do experiments that would benefit them, change methods, or test out ideas they always wanted to try themselves, but the stakes were too high.

After reading this book, I feel an essential tension exists at the university today – the tension between creating ethical subjects of knowledge and providing a social and societal benefit seem like they could be at odds anyway, but add to the mix that most universities are now focused on student careers, individual “branding” of students, and spending a lot of resources showing them how to get internships, write cover letters, and other menial tasks. University as job-placement center doesn’t clash with these two larger aspirations – it erases them. 

Faculty are also caught in the echoes of this rhetorical DNA of the university, often adrift to find a viable identity outside of publishing niche essays that are barely readable in journals that have no coherence from essay to essay, which are hardly read as a journal, but serve more as repositories for resources for future journal creation. It’s like the verbal version of the sci-fi clone organ farm come to life. 

What we need is a faculty-led move to make the university an agent of intervention again. Organizing Enlightenment shows how a few thinkers managed to be convincing that the orientation of the university should move away from books to people as the locus of knowledge. The land-grant project still haunts us – are our graduates the only social benefit we produce? This essential tension – between serving students who we are to make the ethical loci of knowledge vs. the obligation to also benefit society through our work and research – should be the focus of faculty intervention. And it can be a great source, historically rooted, with which to fight administrations who are dug into the perspective that the university should be engaged in job-placement services across the board. 

There are many ways to do this, more than there are faculty I bet. But the important thing is not to find the solution, but to think about that essential tension in everything we teach and write. The faculty need to adopt an ethic of knowing first, and there’s no better way to do that than through practicing it in little ways, every day.

From Irvin Peckham’s excellent blog, Personal Writing in the Classroom, Here are the rules for good writing assignments:

Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn’t a very good assignment.

It is also the case that if these are not present, the public speaking assignment will suffer as well.

Presentations as evaluation should follow the same guidelines. Why assign speeches or speech topics that are not enjoyable?

What happened to the pleasure of speech in our courses? We’ve twisted it for the most part into a festival of failure – where student speeches on pot legalization or gun control become the cynical evidence that our students are helpless and sad in the world. We chuckle about it and do nothing to fix it.

Instead, let’s stop working so hard to make public speaking a sad and vapid experience. Let’s work to make it pleasurable and enjoyable. Who cares about the politics. Who cares about the knowledge displayed. What we need is a return to the sheer joy of hearing the orality of an other engaged in what should be enjoyable – the art of speech.

From Irvin Peckham’s excellent blog, Personal Writing in the Classroom, Here are the rules for good writing assignments:

Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn’t a very good assignment.

It is also the case that if these are not present, the public speaking assignment will suffer as well.

Presentations as evaluation should follow the same guidelines. Why assign speeches or speech topics that are not enjoyable?

What happened to the pleasure of speech in our courses? We’ve twisted it for the most part into a festival of failure – where student speeches on pot legalization or gun control become the cynical evidence that our students are helpless and sad in the world. We chuckle about it and do nothing to fix it.

Instead, let’s stop working so hard to make public speaking a sad and vapid experience. Let’s work to make it pleasurable and enjoyable. Who cares about the politics. Who cares about the knowledge displayed. What we need is a return to the sheer joy of hearing the orality of an other engaged in what should be enjoyable – the art of speech.

When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. 

Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered catastrophic losses in debate biodiversity (assuming you are with me in the idea of an equivalent sense of biodiversity for intellectual practices). This chart, taken from Nichols & Baccus’s 1936 volume, Modern Debating, hoped to guide the reader through the dizzying array of different events that would be called debate. For students in the early 20th century, debate could take on many forms, and these forms could all co-exist. 

Today what do we have? We seem to have a number of forms, but our entire tree is structured from the roots of the tournament. CX, LD, PF, CEDA, NDT, NPDA, NPTE, APDA, EUDC, North-Ams, BP, CUSID BP Nats, USU, WUDC.  All acronyms, save one, and all derived from types of debating done for one purpose – tournament style contests. 

Take a look at the variety on the above chart and think – if such a chart were made today, there would only be one line – the argumentation line – and on it would be all the competitive formats. The persuasive line – where debaters reached out in a competitive sense to broader audiences – has evaporated. 

The division the authors make is interesting to say the least – argumentative forms are more competitive forms: These are the types of debate that focus on competition the way we understand it today. Persuasive forms are more general: They can be competitive or not – really depends on the audience.

Perhaps the division is one of audience. Persuasive forms focus on an audience with a high concentration of members of the public. Argumentative forms focus on an audience that has little to no public. However in 1936 it is hard to imagine a debate contest that wouldn’t draw community interest. Today we don’t have to expend any effort to imagine that. 

Today’s chart would be one line. Purely argumentative. We don’t even bother teaching debate students anything from the persuasion line. In fact, recent attempts to help debate pedagogically, such as the Guide to Debate produced before WUDC Malaysia, attempt to flatten the distinction: What is argumentative is persuasive, and vice versa. Why keep the distinction when the people watching and evaluating your debates are so homogeneous that the consideration of variance in how they hear you has been eliminated with a joyful medical precision?

Most current collegiate debaters would see the loss of the persuasive line as no big loss at all. Those are side projects to the “real” work of debating. Others would say the distinction is false: Contemporary debate focuses on persuasion. I wonder. What would be needed, and what would be the value, to teach all these forms in a contemporary debate program? The monopoly of tournament contest ideology is a difficult regime to break. Returning to history might be a good way to show the impermanence and newness of the “tournament as debate” model of debate instruction that is thoughtlessly reproduced pedagogically across the world.

When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. 

Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered catastrophic losses in debate biodiversity (assuming you are with me in the idea of an equivalent sense of biodiversity for intellectual practices). This chart, taken from Nichols & Baccus’s 1936 volume, Modern Debating, hoped to guide the reader through the dizzying array of different events that would be called debate. For students in the early 20th century, debate could take on many forms, and these forms could all co-exist. 

Today what do we have? We seem to have a number of forms, but our entire tree is structured from the roots of the tournament. CX, LD, PF, CEDA, NDT, NPDA, NPTE, APDA, EUDC, North-Ams, BP, CUSID BP Nats, USU, WUDC.  All acronyms, save one, and all derived from types of debating done for one purpose – tournament style contests. 

Take a look at the variety on the above chart and think – if such a chart were made today, there would only be one line – the argumentation line – and on it would be all the competitive formats. The persuasive line – where debaters reached out in a competitive sense to broader audiences – has evaporated. 

The division the authors make is interesting to say the least – argumentative forms are more competitive forms: These are the types of debate that focus on competition the way we understand it today. Persuasive forms are more general: They can be competitive or not – really depends on the audience.

Perhaps the division is one of audience. Persuasive forms focus on an audience with a high concentration of members of the public. Argumentative forms focus on an audience that has little to no public. However in 1936 it is hard to imagine a debate contest that wouldn’t draw community interest. Today we don’t have to expend any effort to imagine that. 

Today’s chart would be one line. Purely argumentative. We don’t even bother teaching debate students anything from the persuasion line. In fact, recent attempts to help debate pedagogically, such as the Guide to Debate produced before WUDC Malaysia, attempt to flatten the distinction: What is argumentative is persuasive, and vice versa. Why keep the distinction when the people watching and evaluating your debates are so homogeneous that the consideration of variance in how they hear you has been eliminated with a joyful medical precision?

Most current collegiate debaters would see the loss of the persuasive line as no big loss at all. Those are side projects to the “real” work of debating. Others would say the distinction is false: Contemporary debate focuses on persuasion. I wonder. What would be needed, and what would be the value, to teach all these forms in a contemporary debate program? The monopoly of tournament contest ideology is a difficult regime to break. Returning to history might be a good way to show the impermanence and newness of the “tournament as debate” model of debate instruction that is thoughtlessly reproduced pedagogically across the world.