The New York Sophist

There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix.

Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a sediment on top of American debating; a sediment left there by decades of debate practice influenced by a positivist view of language within a legalistic, punitive system of rules.

The sediment is thick. The metaphor here is not dusting, but more nautical archaeology. Nautical archaeology of ancient Greece or something. It’s a lot of sticky mud. And pulling it off too quickly threatens the treasure below. There is a high risk the patient will reject the new organ of WUDC style debate that is being slowly transplanted across the country.

This is the first of a few posts about these concerns. They are in no particular order.

Student Judges


Debate’s history in the United States has always been a faculty directed program. There was a brief period of time in the history of Colonial Colleges that debate teams were student run, at the dawn of tournament debating. The rise of the Speech Communication department along with the G.I. bill ended that, but it still remains as a relic only at the most elite of American Universities (the most persuasive theory being that elites who attend elite schools do not need any directed or professional speech instruction; people will simply believe them based on class, wealth, power, or simply networking with friends of dad solves the need to be persuasive. Also the name on the degree doesn’t hurt).

This sediment has led to some very comfortable rules. Judges are all graduates, done debating. They are responsible employees of the University. They are to speak as a teacher, or perhaps an expert. They judge the debate based on expert opinion on debating.

Worlds Style debate has no such system or luxury. The development of the consensus system is a judge training system built into the format. It also serves as a simulated public – a very different idea than the judge as “debating expert.” There are no experts in Worlds debate; there are simulated publics, there are “reasonable persons” judging each debate. Breaking judges are selected, in theory, based on the most attentive and responsible of the judges at the tournament.

I don’t know where or if the fear is a motive here. But one huge assumption is that debating is to be preferred to judging. If a student can debate, they should. Judging comes later. They could unfairly tip the ballance, they might not know enough to make a good decision – and they might not understand the rules of debating well enough to judge it. They might also be bad teachers.

The result of these fears is a comfort that is misplaced, putting one or two judges in a round as long as they know what they are doing. They are comfortable having expert single judges judge a room, which is problematic. All the arguments are directed toward a public ear, not a private expert reviewing the case. There is a shortage of judges because debate directors have to fight the feeling that putting a student in as a judge is a waste. Deliberation solves this, because deliberation forces the students to make and remake the arguments they’ve heard. They have to repeat them, explain them. They also have to articulate how they clashed with every other team in the round. In short, they have to develop a critical debating mind, and they do it through articulation with and to others. They also have to hear the articulation of others, and reflect on it. They must reflect and speak about the rhetoric of others. This is better debate training than any professor at the chalkboard can provide.

Couching judging as 50% of the experience of being a Worlds debater might help us overcome this. The argument must be made that the pedagogy depends on both. We must use the metaphor of the card, or the cross examination, or research, or something like that to convince those transitioning over or adding to their existing adversarial debate program that student judging is a requirement, not an option.

Everyone benefits from this. The more judges, the more something that was lost can be located in a round. The more the judging students can see how judges work, and how decisions should be made. They gain valuable exposure to a variety of argument in practice. And they learn how to explain why and how it worked for them. Students before judging explain why they were persuaded circularly (i.e. “It’s good because it is true, and it’s true because it is good”). After making them judge, they are much better at giving reasons why they were moved, instead of just assuming it was truth moving them around.

Many of the older coaching generation will have trouble accepting students flipping from judging to speaking between tournaments. Questions of eligibility and fairness will appear. But in Worlds, no divisions are needed, as we are not learning an expertise-based argumentation style. Natural language argumentation is available everywhere. We just express the warrants with more explicit language (not swearing, ha ha, very funny you) and more direct expose of interactivity. And that might be a good thing. Well, it’s good if a reasonable person can understand it and assent to it.

Will a student be a bad teacher? The student is the only teacher available. Teacher, understood as a figure of authority, or someone holding onto a sacred and complex set of disciplinary rules, is not a good understanding. The experience is what teaches in Worlds style debating, not a particular expert judge. The experience of the debate teaches, both in the doing and the decision. Everyone learns from the interaction, and they learn something about how people are moved by words.

There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix.

Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a sediment on top of American debating; a sediment left there by decades of debate practice influenced by a positivist view of language within a legalistic, punitive system of rules.

The sediment is thick. The metaphor here is not dusting, but more nautical archaeology. Nautical archaeology of ancient Greece or something. It’s a lot of sticky mud. And pulling it off too quickly threatens the treasure below. There is a high risk the patient will reject the new organ of WUDC style debate that is being slowly transplanted across the country.

This is the first of a few posts about these concerns. They are in no particular order.

Student Judges


Debate’s history in the United States has always been a faculty directed program. There was a brief period of time in the history of Colonial Colleges that debate teams were student run, at the dawn of tournament debating. The rise of the Speech Communication department along with the G.I. bill ended that, but it still remains as a relic only at the most elite of American Universities (the most persuasive theory being that elites who attend elite schools do not need any directed or professional speech instruction; people will simply believe them based on class, wealth, power, or simply networking with friends of dad solves the need to be persuasive. Also the name on the degree doesn’t hurt).

This sediment has led to some very comfortable rules. Judges are all graduates, done debating. They are responsible employees of the University. They are to speak as a teacher, or perhaps an expert. They judge the debate based on expert opinion on debating.

Worlds Style debate has no such system or luxury. The development of the consensus system is a judge training system built into the format. It also serves as a simulated public – a very different idea than the judge as “debating expert.” There are no experts in Worlds debate; there are simulated publics, there are “reasonable persons” judging each debate. Breaking judges are selected, in theory, based on the most attentive and responsible of the judges at the tournament.

I don’t know where or if the fear is a motive here. But one huge assumption is that debating is to be preferred to judging. If a student can debate, they should. Judging comes later. They could unfairly tip the ballance, they might not know enough to make a good decision – and they might not understand the rules of debating well enough to judge it. They might also be bad teachers.

The result of these fears is a comfort that is misplaced, putting one or two judges in a round as long as they know what they are doing. They are comfortable having expert single judges judge a room, which is problematic. All the arguments are directed toward a public ear, not a private expert reviewing the case. There is a shortage of judges because debate directors have to fight the feeling that putting a student in as a judge is a waste. Deliberation solves this, because deliberation forces the students to make and remake the arguments they’ve heard. They have to repeat them, explain them. They also have to articulate how they clashed with every other team in the round. In short, they have to develop a critical debating mind, and they do it through articulation with and to others. They also have to hear the articulation of others, and reflect on it. They must reflect and speak about the rhetoric of others. This is better debate training than any professor at the chalkboard can provide.

Couching judging as 50% of the experience of being a Worlds debater might help us overcome this. The argument must be made that the pedagogy depends on both. We must use the metaphor of the card, or the cross examination, or research, or something like that to convince those transitioning over or adding to their existing adversarial debate program that student judging is a requirement, not an option.

Everyone benefits from this. The more judges, the more something that was lost can be located in a round. The more the judging students can see how judges work, and how decisions should be made. They gain valuable exposure to a variety of argument in practice. And they learn how to explain why and how it worked for them. Students before judging explain why they were persuaded circularly (i.e. “It’s good because it is true, and it’s true because it is good”). After making them judge, they are much better at giving reasons why they were moved, instead of just assuming it was truth moving them around.

Many of the older coaching generation will have trouble accepting students flipping from judging to speaking between tournaments. Questions of eligibility and fairness will appear. But in Worlds, no divisions are needed, as we are not learning an expertise-based argumentation style. Natural language argumentation is available everywhere. We just express the warrants with more explicit language (not swearing, ha ha, very funny you) and more direct expose of interactivity. And that might be a good thing. Well, it’s good if a reasonable person can understand it and assent to it.

Will a student be a bad teacher? The student is the only teacher available. Teacher, understood as a figure of authority, or someone holding onto a sacred and complex set of disciplinary rules, is not a good understanding. The experience is what teaches in Worlds style debating, not a particular expert judge. The experience of the debate teaches, both in the doing and the decision. Everyone learns from the interaction, and they learn something about how people are moved by words.

In transit to the US National Open at the Claremont colleges, a tournament that expressly forbids the recording of any of the debates in any form, even with consent. There is a waver procedure you must conform with, and insurance that must be purchased before filming anything on the campus. So go the horrors of being a University so close to Hollywood.

Next weekend will be the Hart House IV, and I usually film most of the debates. Only occasionally do I have people object to it – but overall the mood about filming debates is one of fear and skepticism. Thinking about this compels me to outline as clearly as I can why we should try to record as many debates as we can, and post them to as many web sites as we can.

About a month ago I received correspondence from a teacher in India thanking me for posting debate videos. He was downloading them and using them in rural schools to teach debating, showing them off of his laptop. It’s quite accidental this is happening, but that’s the only way it could happen – nobody could imagine a better production and delivery system for educational videos than the Internet as a whole. The declining cost of internet and laptops, as well as the growing demand for good debating and reasoning in the world should be enough of an argument to encourage all tournaments to push the idea of recording and posting debates. This burden falls even more heavily on exclusive (meaning limited registration slots) and high-quality tournaments. This is perhaps the most materially real evidence for the internet being a democratizing, or at least, educational force in parts of the world that exhibit the most need.

But there’s also a more self-serving reason. One is the value of debating, and how it is pegged to the idea that we practice a public reason – our arguments are to  tailored to “reasonable persons” – and those who win do the best job of making persuasive arguments within this field (I am using Stephen Toulmin’s definition of field here, as in the common experiences and knowledge of an audience. We fake this in debate, but we fake it well and for a good telos, overall). This is something that we are working toward always in debates and in decisions – trying to extol the arguments that are most reasonable and persuasive, toward the end of creating even more good argumentation. This is why we encourage our first years to watch elimination debates (and if you don’t, shame on you). I call this the centrifugal force of debate, a force where we try to push the applicability of our arguments outside of the game, outside of the tournament, and make them adherent (or at least sticky) for audiences that don’t narrow the meaning of the term “extension” the way we do.

However there is another force at work, the centripetal force of debate. This force is the one that strengthens the community and the networks within it by paying too much attention to the immediate audience and immediate situation. A “reasonable person” quickly becomes a “reasonable person in debate” – and then we have changes in our style. Nothing too bad at first, perhaps a few inside jokes, a joke at the expense of a debater we all know and love, or something about the well-known food at another IV we all attend – quite innocuous. The problems arise when particular structures of argument that have been named by the community, or the community leaders, as “persuasive” become expected argumentation. When that expected argument is not made, or that cloistered form of reason is not presented (I’m looking your way, arguments about rational actors or Western Liberal Democracy frameworks) then the team receives a loss. This compounds over time to produce a discourse that is moving toward the center of the game qua game, without much attention to those outside the immediate debating audience present. This is damaging to the best effects of participation in debate – it not only avoids the teaching of persuasive argument to all audiences, it gives the debaters a false sense of superiority about their ability to communicate. They conflate good argumentation with debate, and then dismiss audiences who do not buy their arguments outside (or even often times inside) of the debate community. And as we learn from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s writing in The New Rhetoric, one can only dismiss part of any audience as incapable of being persuaded or one gives up the ontological hope of persuasion entirely.

Videoing and posting rounds is a curative (perhaps a corrective in my more conservative moments) because it reminds us that other people could be watching. Debaters get nervous about where that film might end up – and not all communities might find our humor or logic amusing or even relevant. Some might find it downright offensive. This is an argument for filming because it keeps us thinking about the limits of the reasonable person standard as a check on insular debating practices. The unblinking eye of the camera is the audience member who might not be amused at your offbeat humor, or your tricky logical refutation. It is a reminder that we are not all-encompassing in our ability to evaluate the “good” argument, and that one day we will have to face audiences that do not think we are clever straight away.  In short, it will temper the centripetal forces in favor of the centrifugal ones.

We don’t want a full centrifugal takeover either. We don’t need a talking fest, or the cacophony of the masses. We need a game to help us deal with that reality. It helps us hone and concentrate on what effective argumentation might look like. It cuts out the atomizing bits of public discourse that interfere – the coercion, intimidation, the financial inequity and privileged access to the podium, etc. But these still exist in some form in debate, although we do a good job of minimizing them.

Videoing puts things in perspective. Yes, a future employer might see you debate. They won’t judge you on the position you hold, per se, but they will judge you on your attitude and the turns of phrase you use. They might judge you on your demeanor, or the temper of your speech. In short, they might judge you on all the things the people in a boardroom might judge you on, or the people in your community. They might be real audiences, and we might just need a bit more of there presence, albeit in technological form, in our debates.

As a post-script to this idea, I am using the terms centripetal and centrifugal in a similar way to Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of language. Bakhtin argues that language is always struggling against forces that want to control and constrain the meaning of it, and forces that are always expanding it and making it mean a more new, for lack of a better phrase. He argues this is part of the natural way meaning operates, and can be seen best in novels as a form. If we imagine debate as a form of literature, we don’t have to work to hard to imagine these forces at work within our art. We have some people wishing to narrow and constrain, motivated by fair competitions, eristics, the need for good rules, etc. and those who want to broaden and new-ify it – sometimes going too far, or going far enough as to suggest debate become “something else.” These struggles are fantastically healthy, and I find the controversy over videotaping or filming debates to be a material “bubbling up” of these larger, usually submerged, struggles.

In transit to the US National Open at the Claremont colleges, a tournament that expressly forbids the recording of any of the debates in any form, even with consent. There is a waver procedure you must conform with, and insurance that must be purchased before filming anything on the campus. So go the horrors of being a University so close to Hollywood.

Next weekend will be the Hart House IV, and I usually film most of the debates. Only occasionally do I have people object to it – but overall the mood about filming debates is one of fear and skepticism. Thinking about this compels me to outline as clearly as I can why we should try to record as many debates as we can, and post them to as many web sites as we can.

About a month ago I received correspondence from a teacher in India thanking me for posting debate videos. He was downloading them and using them in rural schools to teach debating, showing them off of his laptop. It’s quite accidental this is happening, but that’s the only way it could happen – nobody could imagine a better production and delivery system for educational videos than the Internet as a whole. The declining cost of internet and laptops, as well as the growing demand for good debating and reasoning in the world should be enough of an argument to encourage all tournaments to push the idea of recording and posting debates. This burden falls even more heavily on exclusive (meaning limited registration slots) and high-quality tournaments. This is perhaps the most materially real evidence for the internet being a democratizing, or at least, educational force in parts of the world that exhibit the most need.

But there’s also a more self-serving reason. One is the value of debating, and how it is pegged to the idea that we practice a public reason – our arguments are to  tailored to “reasonable persons” – and those who win do the best job of making persuasive arguments within this field (I am using Stephen Toulmin’s definition of field here, as in the common experiences and knowledge of an audience. We fake this in debate, but we fake it well and for a good telos, overall). This is something that we are working toward always in debates and in decisions – trying to extol the arguments that are most reasonable and persuasive, toward the end of creating even more good argumentation. This is why we encourage our first years to watch elimination debates (and if you don’t, shame on you). I call this the centrifugal force of debate, a force where we try to push the applicability of our arguments outside of the game, outside of the tournament, and make them adherent (or at least sticky) for audiences that don’t narrow the meaning of the term “extension” the way we do.

However there is another force at work, the centripetal force of debate. This force is the one that strengthens the community and the networks within it by paying too much attention to the immediate audience and immediate situation. A “reasonable person” quickly becomes a “reasonable person in debate” – and then we have changes in our style. Nothing too bad at first, perhaps a few inside jokes, a joke at the expense of a debater we all know and love, or something about the well-known food at another IV we all attend – quite innocuous. The problems arise when particular structures of argument that have been named by the community, or the community leaders, as “persuasive” become expected argumentation. When that expected argument is not made, or that cloistered form of reason is not presented (I’m looking your way, arguments about rational actors or Western Liberal Democracy frameworks) then the team receives a loss. This compounds over time to produce a discourse that is moving toward the center of the game qua game, without much attention to those outside the immediate debating audience present. This is damaging to the best effects of participation in debate – it not only avoids the teaching of persuasive argument to all audiences, it gives the debaters a false sense of superiority about their ability to communicate. They conflate good argumentation with debate, and then dismiss audiences who do not buy their arguments outside (or even often times inside) of the debate community. And as we learn from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s writing in The New Rhetoric, one can only dismiss part of any audience as incapable of being persuaded or one gives up the ontological hope of persuasion entirely.

Videoing and posting rounds is a curative (perhaps a corrective in my more conservative moments) because it reminds us that other people could be watching. Debaters get nervous about where that film might end up – and not all communities might find our humor or logic amusing or even relevant. Some might find it downright offensive. This is an argument for filming because it keeps us thinking about the limits of the reasonable person standard as a check on insular debating practices. The unblinking eye of the camera is the audience member who might not be amused at your offbeat humor, or your tricky logical refutation. It is a reminder that we are not all-encompassing in our ability to evaluate the “good” argument, and that one day we will have to face audiences that do not think we are clever straight away.  In short, it will temper the centripetal forces in favor of the centrifugal ones.

We don’t want a full centrifugal takeover either. We don’t need a talking fest, or the cacophony of the masses. We need a game to help us deal with that reality. It helps us hone and concentrate on what effective argumentation might look like. It cuts out the atomizing bits of public discourse that interfere – the coercion, intimidation, the financial inequity and privileged access to the podium, etc. But these still exist in some form in debate, although we do a good job of minimizing them.

Videoing puts things in perspective. Yes, a future employer might see you debate. They won’t judge you on the position you hold, per se, but they will judge you on your attitude and the turns of phrase you use. They might judge you on your demeanor, or the temper of your speech. In short, they might judge you on all the things the people in a boardroom might judge you on, or the people in your community. They might be real audiences, and we might just need a bit more of there presence, albeit in technological form, in our debates.

As a post-script to this idea, I am using the terms centripetal and centrifugal in a similar way to Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of language. Bakhtin argues that language is always struggling against forces that want to control and constrain the meaning of it, and forces that are always expanding it and making it mean a more new, for lack of a better phrase. He argues this is part of the natural way meaning operates, and can be seen best in novels as a form. If we imagine debate as a form of literature, we don’t have to work to hard to imagine these forces at work within our art. We have some people wishing to narrow and constrain, motivated by fair competitions, eristics, the need for good rules, etc. and those who want to broaden and new-ify it – sometimes going too far, or going far enough as to suggest debate become “something else.” These struggles are fantastically healthy, and I find the controversy over videotaping or filming debates to be a material “bubbling up” of these larger, usually submerged, struggles.

<iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/29840075?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0″ width=”400″ height=”300″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/29840075″>Public Debate: Arab Spring demonstrates American Youth have a lot to learn from Arabic Youth</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user1253612″>Steve Llano</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

This is a public debate we participated in recently in Virginia. While watching it, it made me think of a couple of interesting things about teaching debate. This debate indicates a couple of gaps that need to be patched up.

First, the debaters assume the audience is already interested and attentive to their arguments. This is a serious problem – the principle of getting audience attention and trust is key to developing credibility as well as any sort of connection for the audience as to why they care about the issue. There needs to be a realistic appraisal of the audience. Many of the people attending were students who were motivated to come via extra credit. This is accounted for by some teams, but it’s not an overarching principle in how the debaters approach the debate.

Secondly, the refutation model of debate is not conducive to natural language argumentation. We see many teams here operate under the assumption that their own arguments will not be valuable unless all the points of the other side are refuted first. Tying the value of your own argument tied directly to refutation encourages a pattern of speaking that listeners will not automatically gel with. They want to hear what you are about first, then they would like to hear how that fits into what they’ve heard from other speakers. By prioritizing refutation, we train debaters to make sure that they are behind others in the attention front during public debates.

I wonder what the extant literature has on the connection between debate pedagogy and the public debate. My searches haven’t revealed much. Seems like an under-covered and vitally important source of data justifying and helping us correct what we do.