The New York Sophist

I made the choice to change my debate course to something more active from something where we discuss and analyze the role of debate in society through the meta. In the past, students would discuss, write, and speak about various debates in a hope to evaluate the role and purpose of the discourse we call “debating” in society. I started off with a survey of the spread – very much like a fungus or mold – of the U.S. Presidential debate format around the globe. Part of this is the work of the Commission on Presidential Debates but another big realization of this gross growth is that politicians recognize what a beneficial format the U.S. Presidential debates are for them. They can say whatever, they can hide, they can claim they looked great through a future supercut. It doesn’t benefit any of us at all.

I moved away from this to something more active – a series of debates that students would perform. I felt that experiential learning would be the way to go in online debate. But I have never really taught debating in an asynchronous online format before. It’s all kind of radically new, and making me think differently about how I teach debate – particularly the assumptions I make about what’s available to us when we enter a debate.

The idea that there’s no space and time to practice arguments is one issue that I think I can address by being more lenient in terms of when a “final” speech will be due. I think that the idea of constant revision, or low-stakes debating, is the way to give students the time and space to become comfortable with their own voices and their own approach to practicing advocacy on various issues. The entirety of college becomes practice from this perspective, if you think about it. I believe that adopting a serious process of revision and practice is one of the most valuable things that a rhetorical education can give to people. So now I’m considering adopting it into all of my courses regardless of modality.

I’ve been teaching through video, and here are a couple of the lectures I’ve done so far on debating.

I just love the thumbnails that YouTube chooses for my videos

These two videos took a bit longer to produce than the standard in-class lecture. I think it’s something that I am still not adjusted to – the idea that I can’t base a lecture on the presence of students in the classroom. They provide a lot of material and a lot of indicators of where to go next when giving a lesson. Without that, I just have to look into the camera and hope they are following along well enough.

This is an argument for making much shorter talks and then gauging student opinion on where they are through some short assignments designed to measure what they got out of the video. The next one can adjust to that. I have my online public speaking course arranged like that and it works pretty well.

We are a couple of weeks away from the first debates, which will be audio or video files posted asynchronously, with plenty of time for the other side to respond. At the end I hope to edit them all together to seem like one debate, but we’ll see how well that works. It would be nice to have one contiguous file to listen to later and see if people could tell that the debate was not done in a traditional, aka “in person” format. I think they’ll be able to.

Teaching in asynchronous online format courses that have been traditionally predicated on being in person and next to one another is not a novelty, but something we should explore and create resources to address now. We are going to be using it a lot more in the future, more than we can imagine now.

I have been attening the NCA Convention nearly every year since 2003. At first I was enamored and loved it. Now, almost 10 years later, I’m a bit more cynical about it. Going into a nearly empty room to hear someone read a paper composed for the eye in a soft voice is not necessarily my definition of “good communication.” Another would be the fact that I know two to three conversations a night will be ended with “Well I better go up to my room to write my presentation.” But this is a tired old performative critique that doesn’t really advance the goals or the scope of the organization. I want to suggest a different way to go.

Photo by David Nicolai on Unsplash

Debate is on fire right now. I mean in a good way. The Munk Debates along with the Intelligence Squared Debates are very popular hosts of debates that make it into the podcasting universe. Furthermore, these debates excite and engage the public on controversial matters that need to be discussed. I think the events are great in spirit, but they lack the input of scholarship. A scholarly touch on the theory of debate, the theory of argumentation, or just some good old fashioned public speaking best practices would catapult these organizations to the next level, where they honestly want to be. The Munk Debates and Intelligence Squared have peaked as “journalism by other means.” What exactly is the difference between a Munk debate and a long form panel discussion or interview with a top journalist? The insights are about the same. Debate should not be a modality of journalism we engage with when we are bored of the standard interview format.

NCA should get involved here by hosting a big debate at every convention they hold. The cities that NCA takes place in are huge, and they have huge intellectually-charged publics who, if they felt welcome, would attend an event like this. You only need one name, maybe not even that to hold a compelling debate on communication issues: politics, race, interpersonal issues, or social justice are just a few of the topics that NCA members publish about and are by any estimation, bonafide experts.

We also have experts on debate and public address who can help structure the event to focus on the discourse produced rather than the “crucible” model of debating which is forwarded by debate promoting organizations. This theory roughly believes that sharing ideas and perspectives progressively moves us closer to the truth, if not permits us to obtain it unproblematically, after 90 minutes of talk. Debate does not work this way. Nor should it.

Debate should make us question the positions we hold as well as find elements of the positions we reject to be more attractive than we thought they were. It should also make us realize – through those feelings and others – that we just don’t know enough to make a hard and fast call on most controversies we face. The structure of the debate, and the theoretical ideas of what make debates good or productive can serve these ends.

This could become more normalized in the convention after the first couple of big ones. For years I have submitted panels featuring undergraduate debaters that received good reviews in the section only to be vetoed without explanation by convention planners and leadership. Apparently they don’t see the value to anything other than what they are familiar with or expect a boring academic conference to be. Our conservative nature in regards to expectation is always a problem.

Normalizing a plenary debate as an NCA tradition would normalize formal debate as a convention event. We’d have more panels that were debates more often. And that might be a way to make NCA more attractive and interesting to our students who are not Ph.D. candidates.

Furthermore, can you imagine the diversity and interest of a convention that would draw from the local community? The easiest and most on-brand thing we could offer would be a moment of public address on an interesting controversy that showcases our best and brightest from the organization. The costs would be minimal, and the payout would be massive. Imagine the NCA debate becoming a ticketed event that people look forward to. This could reduce convention costs massively, allowing those graduate students and those on the tenure-track, or seeking employment, to attend the convention at no cost or extreme subsidized cost.

On a recent episode of my podcast In the Bin (which I hope you listen to as well as read this blog) I learned about the Science Policy Forum, a plenary and public debate like I’m proposing that was hosted at the 1998 convention. There’s a transcript of the debate available here. I wonder if and how often these events occur. They certainly don’t become a vital part of NCA history or something that people look forward to. It seems that they exist as a rare oddity or something different that happens once in a while. I wonder why there’s not a lot of juice, desire, or push for the continuation of such events.

It’s upsetting to me how NCA remains silent and passive when private organizations, run by journalistic standards of argument, are allowed to crowd the public’s conception of “good debate events.” It’s past time for the organization to rely on its own experts and its own brand of being the national institution that focuses on communication, and enter the arena.

The latest In the Bin Podcast is about refusal to debate, or how we understand times when we can’t debate for various reasons.

Have a listen!

This special late night post is to let you know that In the Bin is back in regular production. This was a wonderful conversation between Matt and I about the issues facing debate and facing the university today. We discuss the role of debate in the classroom and the promise of creating a center for debate, an “advocacy center” which would be somewhat similar to a writing center.

Past episodes are available here in the feed, and for more visit the podcast here.

I didn’t mean to leave this site empty for so long. Unfortunately, I contracted COVID-19 and have been out of commission for nearly three weeks. I’m finally feeling better, and my struggles to summit this mountain of work are paying off. So it’s time to return to writing some interesting things from time to time.

I’d like to start by commenting about the winter. This is the roughest winter we’ve had in New York in several years. I managed to take some good video of the three different storms we’ve had so far.

The Noreaster on December 16th

And the Noreaster we had on February 1st

Then the follow up snowstorm on February 7th

This has pretty much been my view the whole time during quarantine. I’m very lucky and glad I had a mild case of COVID-19, confirmed by my antibody test. Things are returning to normal around here, even if we are still somewhat frozen over.

Classes are not off to a good start, but I’m trying to catch up by trying not to be such a perfectionist about every video I make for class. I think given another week I should be back on track. Then I’m going to start to work ahead in order to avoid such problems in the future. I usually do that, but this winter break I just didn’t. Is that one of the impacts of the quarantine?