The New York Sophist

Jack McCordick’s recent essay on the corrosion of debate that surfaced at the end of October didn’t blink on my radar, probably because this fall had the most concentrated collection of anti-debate journalism that I think I’ve ever seen. Responding to all of it has been frustrating as most of them, including this one, have been pieces meant to get readers rather than advance conversation. Most of these stories also speak in a tone to end discussion rather than open it up, and do all of the negative things they claim debate is supposed to do. But since they are journalists they never dig deeper than a few apparent instances and their own reflections in order to create a story.

McCordick’s piece is no exception, claiming that suddenly debate has been corrupted, corroded, from within and that corresponds to our poor political communication environment. Never mind that fistfights and near-death physical attacks were commonplace in the U.S. Congress up until and after the Civil War, or that in the early days of the 20th century, many debate scholars believed debate had been corroded already. Teddy Roosevelt in his memoirs proudly announced that he had never been a part of Harvard’s famed debate team because they merely teach people to speak glibly on topics, not how to have a backbone. And in the 1950s, intercollegiate debate nearly shut down when the national topic seemed to require students to develop arguments supporting Communist China. But for McCordick, debate began “all the way back” in the 1970s. McCordick proves one problem with contemporary debate pedagogy: the lack of practice of deep research. This is the most shallow and undeveloped piece on debate in the U.S. that I have ever read.

The 1970s were one of the more recent iterations of the question of what debate is good for.  The 1970s saw the very first official developmental conference on debate, the “Sedalia” conference, a place for debate teachers to come together and discuss the increasing crisis of the practice of debate. These issues resolved about 10 years later, with the division of policy debate into the NDT and CEDA, very different organizations at the time.

This is significant because for McCordick, and all other high school students who practice policy debate, their experience is curated deterministically by current collegiate debaters and debate coaches. The experiences that debate students have are governed in nearly unchecked totality by professional debate sports-enthusiasts, not people with education on the mind nor with much training in educational theory and practice. Whatever is happening at the high school level in the U.S. can be directly traced to collegiate determinations of what’s best, which is often the answer to the question, “What’s best for a fair and fun competition?” High school educators often have little say in what arguments will be developed, but more importantly have little say in how arguments will be crafted and prepared. This should give anyone pause. Not everyone benefits from a program designed to produce competitive argumentation designed to be deployed in a very specific forum for a very specific purpose. The major critique of debate, as practiced today, would be tangential to what McCordick offers. The problem is that debate isn’t taught at all. It’s coached, like a sport, and if that accidentally generates healthy views on politics or economics, that’s a bonus. The goal is to get people quickly crafting winning arguments by surveying texts rapidly for useful munitions.

His articulation of the history of Lincoln Douglas and Turner Debate (now Public Forum) is also not totally correct. Both formats are far from their idealized goals to be sure, but the corrosion came from the orientation away from educators. Both forms of debate are in the province of the so-called “Debate expert” or the Debate Coach, someone who knows very little about argumentation theory and even less about educational practices and norms. Debate should be at the very least a co-curricular experience, or one rooted within the curriculum as method, not a subject on its own, something that you can study in absentia of any particular topic.

Of course, McCordick might not be to blame. He might have asked his national championship debate coach for some of the history here, and determined that debate started in 1970. This would be typical, as most debate coaches do not see a value to the historical development of contest debating. This is very telling, as it indicates that what arguments are considered “good” in debating is arbitrary. Whatever are the feelings and flavors of the moment help indicate what arguments win in debates. There’s no historical progression from poor argument to good argument. If there were, every championship debater would be able to recite that development, and we wouldn’t have such ahistorical treatments of debate floating around. History has little to do with what wins. What wins has the most to do with what wins, and that development, if any, is arbitrary.

The piece has a lot of strange issues besides its historical poverty. McCordick also presents a confusing contradiction in his piece. He argues that contemporary discourse is complex, long, and must be read and processed quickly, like the EULAs from Apple Computers. He then says policy debate is terrible because it encourages these abilities. If the world is getting more complex and more fast on the textual level, policy debate seems like a solution rather than a problem here. Quick information processing and evaluation is exactly what is needed when the devices that govern and control so much of our personal and business lives are in the hands of corporations. Why wouldn’t this potential weakness in public address be a great way to teach critical assessment and judgement?

Even TED Talks, something I assume McCordick would like because it looks like “good” political discourse are based on large amounts of information processing that happens off-stage, as well as important concepts such as issue selection, evidence evaluation, and speech organization. McCormick’s argument is governed by a fantasy of what public discourse should look like, and that vision is one of simple correspondence. Good thinking should look the way he thinks good thought should look. And that’s about it. Since he doesn’t see a connection between rapid delivery and weird argumentation, he doesn’t see a value in it.

He’s not the first to be critical of debate as a public-facing political laboratory, or a simulation of political discourse for students. This is debate at its weakest. Debate at its strongest has little to do with political discourse. It has a lot to do with identity, and how we know and manage who we are and who we want to be. Debate is a practice of how we would like to be in the world, and how we practice maintaining who we are and what we could stand for. It’s a practice in the relationship between motive and attitude.

Debate might be a terrible way to produce a 19th century-looking political discourse (What McCordick seems to want, without the regular violence) but it’s a fantastic way to teach quick evaluation and judgement, if done properly. It’s a great way to connect speaking one’s mind and thoughts with questions of quality of research and quality of supporting evidence. All these things should be present in a good debate curriculum, and often they are not. But this isn’t why public discourse is corroding. It’s always corroding and always failing us. This is the nature of language, when we hold it up to the ideas of rational thought. If we abandon the ideals of rationality and come to terms with the limits of language, we find ourselves not in control, but in the river, lashing together what floats with us in ways that keep us above water. And if we get good at lashing together the material around us, we can invite others on to our raft, or perhaps better termed, our platform.

Recognizing this relationship with ourselves and language and argument is jarring and produces a feeling of powerlessness. Good. McCormick incorrectly believes he can spot and know the arguments that are “outlandish.” I would say, “Outlandish to you? To the audience? To who?” The idea that debate experience makes you a universal arbiter of sensemaking speech is dangerous. It is better to teach that such a figure cannot exist. Such a position rises up through the hard work of the rhetor to examine audience norms and attitudes and craft the argument and the position of the audience. In order to do that, one must not only recognize the uncertain status of knowledge, but revel in it.

I agree with McCormick that political discourse could be better. I find it spurious at best that debate practice has something to do with this. I find it more reasonable to think that debate is suffering from the same corrosive influences on speech and thought that politics are. And I believe these aliments are much, much older than we think. They might not even be ailments. Or perhaps, they can be either, if it helps our audience understand what they are to do with our utterances. At the worst, debate should prepare people to craft appropriate judgement based on looking for and toward evidence and assessing it quickly. At best, debate should encourage those who practice it to step away from the seat of arbiter, taking comfort in the swirl of uncertainty and all the possibilities open for the good rhetor. It should do this by using the extant information and research about topics within fields that are out there, showing students the diversity of argument that exists within all disciplines.

Discussing the so-called “intellectual dark web” with a friend of mine and the phrase really struck me as odd. This title, this identity communicates a lot about the desire of the identity of these thinkers and speakers and not much of the political position or the policies they would support.

Anyway, I love this video a friend sent me as in this clip Jordan Peterson suggests the best way to engage with leftist ideas is unavailable to them. They don’t know anyone who authentically holds a left leaning view across the board, and is able to engage them on the level and the way they like to develop their rhetoric.

Is this a gesture toward switch side debate? I think it might be much more than a gesture. I think Peterson is saying that they need to find someone who would agree to represent the views they are against in a panel format. This is similar to the suggestion made by David Bohm in his book On Dialogue where if nobody believes the opposing viewpoint, people should be assigned to represent it fairly, or as best as they can.

Switch-side debating was not created because of its educational value, but because it solved a big problem in number of people who could debate at a tournament. As the tournament model of debate eradicated all other avenues for debating, allowing colleges to enter one, or possibly two affirmative and negative teams became too few. If teams were disconnected from permanent advocacy it made it much easier to expand the tournament to accommodate the demand for participation.

The educational value of switch-side debate arose as a discourse of justification for this competitive choice. It was a very well thought out, strategic response to the tradition of debate education which had been based on an ethic of accepting student position on a debate topic as legitimate. That is, no debate instructor would encourage or force a student to take a position against what he or she walked into the club believing. This history can be examined by reading Darren Hicks and Ronald Greene’s excellent essay about it.

The arguments in favor of switch-side might have risen out of a bureaucratic need and desire to have more weekend competition speakers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the claims in favor of switch-side should be dismissed out of hand. On the contrary, there are a lot of really great reasons to make someone study argumentation this way, most notably for me the idea that it puts debate and argument in the subjective driver’s seat, making the student the object of study. In this way, debate study using switch-side makes debate similar to the study of spiritual identity and the relationship of being to the wider world, like the study of the koan in Zen Buddhism. Of course, this defense is my own and not represented in the more traditional defenses, but many of those are good because they too push an ethic that it is important to de-center students’ ideas and beliefs in order to stimulate more reading, thinking, and discussion about ideas.

Peterson’s idea of switch side isn’t meant for this purpose. He very clearly wants to have something for the sharpening of his own arguments, and the arguments of those he’s in conversation with in the video. It cannot be denied that switch-side can be used to close off, intensify, and make a set of commitments appear even better. It can be practice for a political project of some kind as opposed to using its power to remind us that our perspective is always limited.

It is this use of switch-side that requires that switch-side debate practices don’t forget that they are meant to represent alternative viewpoints on topics, not just an opposition to whatever is brought up by the affirmative side. There should be something beyond mere fidelity to argument. In Peterson’s model, at least the way he discusses it here in this short clip, his fidelity is to the argument as a thing, as something that has a “final form” or “best form” that can be recognized. This can be done rhetorically with the use of the universal audience, which I don’t think is ever far from their minds. Concern with how the audience reacts to and engages with these arguments is much more important to quality than any fidelity to argument as a closed system. The difference is whether or not your purpose in arguing is to be right or to be convincing. Obviously, everyone would like to be both. But to be both requires recognition by those to whom you are presenting your ideas. You must convey rightness in recognizable standards. Which is why using switch-side practices to refine an argument on its own terms, or in some absolute terms, will never be able to do that.

Instead, switch-side is at its best when it is allowed to threaten you with decentering your beliefs and making you think again about the support for them. Without the element of real threat, or real fear that one’s ideas could appear unsupported, the pedagogy doesn’t work. This is also why an audience is necessary, and one that is approached in the terms of the universal audience – without resorting to inside appeals that only a vanguard would understand.

Also, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a wealth of literature easily accessible to people who want to engage ideas discussing switch-side debate and other rhetorical practices, such as declamation, that can not only help one articulate one’s beliefs, but form the beliefs themselves. This aspect of rhetorical education is always present and often ignored, mostly to our peril. We are being shaped, and shaping others, through something we treat as throw-away style or transmission. It’s not just a “fun” thing to do, it’s a dangerously transformative practice. I guess it’s fun in the way that playing with chemicals in a chemistry lab is fun. But respect for what one is handling is paramount.

What can we do as rhetoric scholars to create a wealth of information about the practice of the oral expression of arguments for the purpose of intellectual investigation or critical inquiry? Where are the public intellectuals of the art of practicing how one says something as a method to determine what one is going to say? And more so, speaking out your ideas as a way of crafting and creating them? When are we really going to take this mantle on? When are we going to take responsibility for our scholarship and its incredible importance for the creation of thought, belief, and attitude among millions around the world?

books by Professor Lionel Crocker, Ph.D.

There was a time when professors of speech were proud to be called professors of speech and wrote a dizzying array of analytical texts, dancing the rhetorical line of textbook and study. What happened?

Professors of speech were proud to teach students about orators and oration, and proud to encourage them to speak up and out, to give oral presentations in class. Now it seems mostly what we do is grade poorly written papers of half-assed explanations of French critical theory. It’s half-assed, because it’s borrowed. It’s not ours. We are embarrassed of what we own, we want to pretend it’s not ours. We want to own something cooler. We are anxious about being “mere” speech teachers.

I really miss The Journal of the American Forensic Association because it was an example of what we aspired to be and what we gave up on. I don’t have actual nostalgia because I’m not old enough to have professionally interacted with the journal before it was transformed into the much cooler, but not quite French Argumentation and Advocacy. The shift in content is palpable if you look through the legacy of JAFA. Gone are the concerned pieces about doing right by students. Present are a lot of essays that claim to have “figured out what really happened” in a public controversy that is over 3 or 4 years old. I prefer and miss the accounting of teaching, the concerns about obligations, ethical and otherwise toward students who are speaking and creating rhetoric, and the concern about evaluation and assessment. I don’t think that A&A, or any of our communication journals are terribly interested in these conversations. Sometimes it’s unclear to me what the Taylor and Francis journals are, except file folders for academic essays. Who goes through and reads one particular journal over another one?

I accidentally discovered Lionel Crocker and his work and it’s like a breath of fresh air, sort of like the Druidian canned air in the film Spaceballs. Crocker was a “generalists generalist” and lost nothing from it. He taught public speaking, a very problematic class worth talking about called “The Great Orators” (that would be fun to see that syllabus today), Debate and Argumentation (the way I prefer it phrased anyway) as well as other courses on politics and speech. He also regularly gave speeches himself and some were published in Vital Speeches of the Day. He was also listed in Who’s Who in the United States several times. He felt confident and comfortable teaching 7 classes and then spending the afternoon writing about whatever he felt he wanted to share scholarly opinion on.

How do we get back to this? Hyper-specialization has made us concerned about the material ownership of our teaching and research, and has made us wary of sharing ideas with others in an accessible way. Our tenure and promotion standards are based on the question, “How few people can understand your work?” And teaching is considered to be a grueling labor that one must tolerate in order to do the real work: publishing some esoteric thing in a very expensive, very pay-walled journal that many people will never see. We should question why we feel such anxiety about where we are, what we study, and why we wish it were something other than what it is. I’m not suggesting everyone abandon their research agendas. Far from it. I’m suggesting that there is an old abandoned mode of performing “rhetoric professor” that should be recovered, explored, tested, discussed, and possibly adapted for performance. Don’t young people today call this a ‘reboot’?

Concerning ourselves with the public and shared nature of oratory, concerning ourselves with the American, oratorical tradition of public speaking and public address, concerning ourselves with this as a dangerous and influential set of powerful and revolutionary ideas (which is why looking at the Great Orators course syllabus would be a class in itself on modes of exclusionary politics), thinking about rhetoric as a daily practiced lived thing among all people who argue and think and engage one another regularly is what we should turn our attention toward, scholarly and pedagogically, and realize that what we own, what our tradition is, and what we are able to teach is nothing short of subversive. In the physics lab they do not let the students actually construct nuclear bombs. If they only knew what we hand over for practice in our courses.

A few years ago I thought about writing about another of these highly influential, highly thoughtful generalists of our field who are forgotten (or ignored?) Arthur Kreuger. There are a ton of these people who should still be thought about, and potentially emulated in some respects , most notably people who want to engage the world around them with scholarship and pedagogy instead of a few hundred people who “get it.” I get so much out of looking at what they did, but I wonder what the research agenda looks like? At the last Tokyo Argumentation Conference, David Zarefsky gave a presentation on Douglas Ehninger, another of these generalist types, and how and why his research matters, or speaks to us today. Many of you know I love Ehninger, but his legacy is hardly one that needs recovery.

Who else out there do I not know about? Who might I bump into next? I can’t remember where I found out about Crocker, but I think this sort of approach to rhetoric is one that we are missing and would really, really benefit from in ways that we have forgotten about.

The scientific metaphor is dangerous. We get it all the time though, so it’s something we don’t pay much attention to. But the scientific metaphor of knowledge isn’t going to work unless you have some stable quantities at some point in the operation. So a debate laboratory seems like a bad metaphor, the sort I would critique here. Stabilizing debate, however it’s done, adds elements of artificiality into the process that trade off with pedagogical value. For example, stable notions of what arguments “beat” other arguments give a sense of debate practice that just does not hold up in front of audiences, but it sure makes tournaments possible.

So to call a debate conference a laboratory really surprised me. Earlier this month, I attended the debate laboratory at the University of Padua in Italy, arranged by Professor Adelino Cattani. Here the stable element was the most obvious one: What is best for the student?

The invited speakers at the 2018 University of Padua Debate laboratory.

This “best” needs some definition. Throughout the papers I heard there was a concern that debate was meant for other purposes than determining who had the best arguments or who was the best debater. Most debate practice, as demonstrated by the speakers, is aimed at improving student rhetorical ability – that is how to prepare reason, evidence, and argument for oral delivery in front of an audience where you will have live critique by an advocate for the other side at the same time.

Here are the big take-aways from the Padua conference:

1. There is great value in having isolated pockets of debate practice that are internally focused. A break from my previous views so it seems. Not exactly: These practices are absent a tournament circuit where there’s a number of set, “important” tournaments to attend, and the only goal is the competition that you are having right then. It seems that keeping debate practices localized and isolated from a large competitive circuit allows you to focus on student education and to be able to assess it outside of victories. One of the best examples of the poverty of intercollegiate debate education is the lack of any other metric than tournament success to determine if debate is teaching.

2. Focus on one element of debating practice can be intellectually rich. I was very curious what other people would talk about in Padua because the theme of the conference was judging. Can we create a good judging sheet that everyone can agree upon? I thought it was a strange topic, but I thought of an idea and wrote down some ideas I hoped were good. It turns out that this sort of focus allows for deeper and more sustained thought about a practice, one percentage of the total practice of debate that then becomes a symbol of the larger ideology operating within debating no matter how it is practiced.

3. Better debate is happening outside of – not in spite of – the obvious locations. Travelling to Padua and hearing about debate in South America, France, Spain, and Italy really made me realize not only how possible, but how good it is to look for debate happening as part of curricula, part of a way of assessment and evaluation in university and other places of learning. All of debate’s negative characteristics stem from the idea that debate is meant for a competition that will recognize a winner. Attending this laboratory gave me faith in the project of practicing debate intellectually, as a teacher, and not as some sport coach trying to design plays that win prizes. One refreshing element was no discussion of what winners get or how to create a fair debate, as opposed to a debate conference I went to in the spring where over an hour of a two-day meeting was spent discussing the question “What prizes should they win?” It was very refreshing to find a community that is motivated more by the question, “Are we doing right by our students in how we judge their debates?”

So far this is what I’m reflecting on. There was a time when actual teachers ran debate programs in America, and were concerned about what was happening to their students and how debate was influencing and moving their thought and reading. Today most American students’ experience in debate is a very shallow one, motivated by beating others, winning awards, and creating argument “plays” that cannot be defended against. Far away from the study of how to motivate audiences, we have intercollegiate debate that renders thought into awe and conversation into silence in the presence of the definite master of argument. Perhaps a one-day conference on the question of one argument strategy, speaker points, or judging would benefit American practices as well, by allowing us a concrete and stable place from which we can reveal some of the trappings of ideology and whether we really want them in our art.

This trip to Italy has been great if unexpected. Just goes to show you that you should reach out to any random academic emails you get if you think that the person on the other end shares your ideas or area even a little bit. I speak tomorrow at the University of Padua as a part of a conference interrogating the idea of judging sheets, rubrics, or as we call them in the U.S. “ballots.” It’s such a cute American name for what is essentially a rubric but we love to keep that democratic exceptionalism dream alive don’t we?

I am super curious how the event will go. I’ve prepared my remarks, about 8 pages worth, that I’ll post on academia.edu after the conference concludes. I hope I did it “right.” You never know what people might expect at a European conference. Sometimes you really hit a nerve, sometimes everyone shrugs, sometimes they get really excited about your perspective. Mostly I’ve gotten option 3 out of that list because I think the combination of the American rhetorical tradition along with concern for student production is really engaging for people who feel that more can and should be done with students in the curriculum. I think it’s one of the best connections between American academics and Europeans.

I think that most of the other speakers will be tournament-oriented, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the tournament, per se. The concern is of course “teaching to the test” where the subversive nature of debate education is stripped away by desire to conform to the ballot for the pleasure of winning, or what Starhawk might call power-over others. The trick is to make debate events that focus us on her idea of power-with or power-through (not sure if that’s her idea, but I thought about it through her work so if not, it might as well be her’s).

For those who are interested, here’s my Trip to Italy Photo Album in Progress. I’ll update photos probably for the last time on the 9th after getting back to the U.S. This is everything from the past 24 hours so far anyway, and it will update as I upload. Trying to get away from Facebook as much as I can, and when the tools are as good as Google Photos and Squarespace, it’s super easy to do.

More on the conference after it happens. This is a reflection post and I’ve turned it into pre-gaming a conference.

I was in Venice yesterday and had a bittersweet moment and wanted to talk about it. I really like the connections between places that you visit more than once in your life. Here goes!

Hooray for the GoPro, the best blogging/vlogging device I own.

I wonder if I really am done with debate, or will debate continue to use me, or in Lacan’s words “Spin me like a top” in pursuit of it’s own pleasure, with me playing the role of the disciplinary psychotic?

The author of this blog in St. Mark’s Square, November 2004.

Have I done a good job with debate over the last 14 years? There’s nothing tangible, no rewards from the University, no support that I really needed, no clear legal protections for what I was doing (travelling with students all over), no assistance from parts of the university that you’d think would be available for assistance, and the list goes on. I am glad to be done with it for sure. But I’m also glad to have done it. Everything that’s happened since 2004 I couldn’t have possibly imagined, and whether it’s good or bad, successful or not, I’m very grateful for all the experiences that happened between my first visit to St. Mark’s Square and this recent one. It has been a good time, good meaning that even the negative moments are good in the fact that they were bad; all things lead us to some sort of critical reflection if we try.

What will have happened between this visit and the next? If past is prologue, expect that video around 2032.

Debate continues to interest me but not in the more traditional capacities. Here’s to hoping tomorrow is a Burkean mystic’s “peek around the corner.”