The New York Sophist

Looks like I’ve already made myself sick. I have the weakest immune system – well, weaker than anyone I know. And after a week of student interaction, I feel pretty crummy. Lots of head congestion and slowness. But I won’t give up the blog challenge! I press on!

Another late entry. I think the later it is the more first-person it is. Spent the morning working on my courses, grading and such, and recording some upcoming podcasts. Great day, even though I could feel the cold coming on. 

Played a lot of Destiny 2 and the game is really awesome. They’ve really managed to beat expectations I think. The beta was such a letdown that I’m glad it’s really good. The story and the missions are great fun. And the levelling system makes sense! Amazing.

Tomorrow I have to go get Monster Hunter Stories which just came out. And next week is the new Metroid game. It’s an embarrassment of riches this month. I might also have to run by campus either tomorrow or Sunday and do some letterhead printing since I didn’t get up there today. 

This summer I read a great book by Andy Merrifield called The Amateur. In it, Merrifield argues that instead of lamenting the fact that people are skeptical of experts in public affairs and civic decisions, we should be encouraging the inclusion of the voice of the passionate amateur along side the voices of the institutional experts. It’s a great book until he goes full-on Verso Boy at the end and starts talking about the shadow resistance and the international shadow amateur takedown of the government that is coming. Could have done without that. 

But there is real merit in this argument about the need to have passionate amateurs informing how we weigh expert decision making. His example of Jane Jacobs, along with Rachel Carson are spot on. These are people who can inform themselves, but aren’t beholden to the systems and the agreed-upon way of seeing that experts come out of school using. Instead, they care and look around for reasons to support their points of view and what it is that they believe. It’s a really good way to think.

Debate should be about creating a space for the practice of Merrifield’s amateurism. This is where we should not be weighing expert versus expert to determine who is more persuasive, but participants add their own voice to the conversation in order to make sure the experts are not too “expert.” The Amateur doesn’t care as much about the method, so the expert can look around for other things to consider when making the call. 

American policy debate seems to be all about pushing on the limits of the expert discourse. Everything seems to fall back toward that in the sense that all debate is about questioning whether or not your proof is good enough. In academic debate, it comes down to published evidence most of the time, and whether that evidence is good enough to be deemed expert. Policy debate is eating itself alive over this question right now as it has started to question whether the skepticism of the questioning of the expertise comes from an appropriate positionality. 

BP should be the “amateur hour” of debate – that is, it should be evaluated on the terms of whether or not the speakers did a good job of informing the judges with passion, care, and information in order to make a decision. Debate is valuable because it allows us to find our amateur voices and then use them to evaluate the experts. Debate should not be about mastering the tropes of expertise, nor should it be about being a go-between from the expert information to the public. BP debaters so rarely look to expert information that this is bound to fail as a model for debating. The Economist, Vox, and other such sources are not good enough to use to learn how to thread the passionate voice of the amateur into the conversation. 

Likewise, the public speaking course could also be about the amateur. How do we get our voices into the conversation? I am not sure. It’s something to work on and think through. But I can be very certain that learning how to construct an MLA or APA bibliography for a speech is a fine way to show all students that they cannot and do not want to be part of the public conversation. Strict written bibliographies in a speech class only serve to teach students that they are wrong, that they are undisiplined, and that they do not want any part of the larger conversation in their communities.

Merrifield’s book is a must-read for those who teach debating and speaking as it gives a really great third way through the artificial binary of expert or public. I have to fight this argument all the time when I suggest reforms to competitive debate, where debaters – who are supposed to be able to argue – immediately respond with the worst possible caricature of the audience. Perhaps a model of the amateur – someone who is informed and cares and outside of the doctrines of the expert – can serve as a model for speaking and judging our BP debates. 

Taking expert opinion and blending it with an eye for public care and attention to others is exactly what training as an advocate should entail. It also has the added benefit of removing all this artificiality from BP debate about judging the “best argument.” My students regularly lose debates because they were amazing speakers, they were persuasive and said the most interesting things, but they just didn’t get the debate right. They failed to say the right magic phrase to get their side of the motion to the right conclusion. This is an artificial “debate expertise” that we have allowed to grow into BP like a fungus. I thought that at least on the East Coast of the US we established BP to get away from that and back toward the public eye.

Judging the most persuasive argument is to consider what the expert things then to consider the right thing to do. It’s a good way to evaluate debates as it’s more honest, more like a human being thinks, and also everyone can learn from the exchange. Winning a debate because you were really compelling, not really right from the debate-point-of-view of what this motion “needed,” is a lot more satisfying and most importantly, it gets us all thinking about the role we play, or could play, in our communities outside debate.

Nearly didn’t make it. Had one of those 13 hour days that you always hear about professors having. Working continuously with some short and nice breaks, but having too much to deal with in order to really do write-thinking which is different than get-these-tasks-done thinking. 

Had a pretty good day of debate interaction which made me think a bit differently about some of the concerns in yesterday’s post. The idea of something being curricular or curricularly related, i.e. a debate “center” or advocacy “center” is a bit different than having a debate society which would function as an “intellectual community.” This changes up the model a bit. 

The intellectual community on campus is fragmented, tiny, and exclusive. Professors are such specialists now that it is rarely within the same department that they find such colleagues. They meet at various events and form bonds that way. This is not a place or a time based community but an accidental community of a couple of people who imagine themselves as taking part in a larger university community if only by acting in opposition to it or critiquing it.

Contrast that to the well-run debate society which is a place to come share intellectual problems and have discussions about hard thinking. The format is to the side of the whole thing.  The tournaments are irrelevant. This is not a sports team like so many programs are. 

Contrast that to the advocacy center which is a place to practice the art of rhetoric and persuasion and learn to argue orally.

So we do have two separate organizations here. Two distinct roles that have a lot of crossover. This can still be combined with opening up events to the campus as a whole. This can still be combined with events for the university. 

At the activity fair I had some trouble articulating what the Debate Society is now that we are divesting from tournament competition. We are all victims of the tournament discourse and its ideology. You can feel the pressure a lot of times if you are trying to do something different. Students signed up and we are emailing them and the club should be off to a great start.

This wasn’t what I wanted to post about today, but time is up. I think this is some okay reflection, not really the best, but it does raise a big question: Is meeting the self-imposed daily blog entry deadline more important than providing quality content? 

I think any content that is thoughtful that I create and post on here takes some labor, makes me think and craft, and I think that’s a measure of quality for me. But readers might feel differently about the quality of it. If I feel it’s good for my thinking, and I don’t post it because I don’t feel it’s good for my audience, that is upholding a rhetorical principle that harms me and the express purpose of keeping this blog. If I post things that meet my standard, but I feel they are not good for the audience and post them anyway, I run the risk of losing credibility about what I mostly write about. The third combination won’t ever happen – I just won’t post. 

So there’s a clear line at least for one potential combination. 

Tomorrow is Friday and it’s packed full of stuff to do. If I am lucky, I should be caught up with everything Sunday. Then Monday and Tuesday to Ithaca; Thursday through next Monday, Montana. 

It’s Wednesday, but the University says it’s Monday so everything is flipped over. Because they want the teaching schedule to be a certain way (1 hour and 20 minute classes across the board twice a week with Wednesday as a more open day) they have to flip the schedule from time to time to make the New York state teaching hour requirements. It’s an odd move considering most of our students do not choose to work during their college experience, they have to. Or they don’t work for money – they are an important caregiver to a much older or much younger family member while others labor to keep the family solvent. It’s also something that I’m sure will dissolve as a marker of a bygone era as the university system as we know it begins to collapse. We will see this happen in our lifetimes.

Thoughtlessness governs the university at all levels. Since it was raining a professor and a staff member cuddled up right next to the door to the building to smoke. These same people will decry the thoughtlessness of all sorts of laws and political decisions, but they, of course, are the best judges of where and when they should cause direct harm to others. I work at a University; I expect nothing less. Everyone knows what’s right and best so they don’t need to think that critically about their actions in or outside of the classroom.

it’s really Wednesday so nobody is here. Nothing works right. The internet barely functions. Pretty sure I remember reading some memos about the massive internet improvement work that was done this summer. Can’t access them though on the wireless that doesn’t work. It seems to get better, but I’m also working on some class stuff that doesn’t need the internet. I used to feel my work in debate was a respite from the classroom where I could get nothing good done. Now I feel the opposite way – my work in debate keeps me away from the good work that I could do in the classroom.

I think this is the part in the story where I should just walk away from the village, out into the woods and snow and wait. Metaphorically of course. It’s time to hang it up in the realm of teaching a debate program. I do sort of love my job, but not a lot of it.

I sort of love my job because it contains the promise that I could work along side people who want to do some thinking. The hard work of thinking. Like, reading a book or two together and talking about what it implies. This is something though that the university promises, yet delivers a morass of requirements, temporal obligations, and financial jealousies into the equation to keep people away from such work. 

Such work is not easy to measure – much easier to measure forms and exams graded and things like that. Hard to measure people sitting around drinking coffee discussing some notes or a book. This is tough. It’s like crafting an alternative grammar, and trying to sell it with arguments, paragraphs, and sentences written in the grammar of the failing order. 

It’s tough for students to accept that as work as well. They would rather be told what to do in a very simplistic way and then be told they did it well. Easy to measure. When i approach my classes and my work in debate with the “don’t know” attitude, it doesn’t work too well. 

On Tuesday I went to a session organized by some students to practice and improve debating. None of them wanted to speak. They wanted to be re-assured. There was no desire to do the hard work of thinking, making mistakes, diving deep, any of that. Granted, I suggested a difficult task that required an embrace of uncertainty and creativity. This is not what they have spent their lives in school doing. 

Is this what I am making? Or is this what I am fighting against in my teaching?

Is there a way to produce a recognizable opposition to the dominant discourse of work?  When actual mindful work appears to be invaluable, what then? Handouts? Simplistic formulas? Lots of lying saying, “that’s perfectly done,” when you know that all of the good research, scholarship and thought in your field all conclusively say, “it depends?”

How do I run a debate program when the students only seek praise for being already good at something that it will take decades to master? That they may never master? 

I sort of love my job because I can ask these questions. I can play with the dissolution of the debate program – something I have spent 10 years working on – and I can marshall reasons for and against the dissolution. 

The university will collapse because of the reasons I see in my debate program – students who want to go through motions to be praised, certified, or endorsed. Nobody wants uncertainty. Nobody wants to explore. Nobody wants to read. Nobody wants to do the difficult work of thinking. Nobody wants to be a “don’t know” person. They would rather be comfortable. 

I think that large, non departmental programs like writing centers and the transformation of things like debate teams into debate centers/programs are the future. Those will continue to live long after the department/degree/credit hour has become useless.

I wonder what my job will be like then. We will live through this change, that is certain.

I also sort of love my job because of the surprises. Tomorrow is the first new debate student meeting. A time to try again, to start over, to learn from your mistakes as a teacher. It begins again, again.

Currently Playing: Loreena McKennitt – An Ancient Muse

The old issues of The Journal of the American Forensic Association are some of my favorite things to leaf through to generate thinking. This journal, edited by debate teachers, was filled with the thoughts of those who immersed themselves in debating as a vocation. As the 1980s became the 1990s, the inexplicable rise of embarrassment at being a “speech teacher’ or “debate coach” infected the discipline, and the JAFA was converted into something “better,” The current journal Argumentation & Advocacy. The move was meant to make a journal about the teaching of debate a place for greater and broader insight about argumentation and issues that impact the world. I’m pretty sure that less people read A&A than they did JAFA. At least with JAFA a younger student would be motivated to have a look to see if there was something there to help them improve. 

The loss of this journal, and the other debate journals that were out there, was a blow to the practice of valuable debate via a loss of the idea of community. Now there was no forum for aspirational discussion about what teaching and coaching debate should be about. Yet the demands of the institutions for debate programs to justify themselves was directly increasing. As communication departments expanded to include those scholars who came up in cultural studies and other disciplines, the questions about debating became more common in faculty meetings. Instead of a faculty that all came up assuming debate “had to be” a part of a department, these new arrivals rightly questioned the small size of the programs, their insularity, and the trigger of cost. With the loss of a larger collection of aspirational tropes in the pages of JAFA, coaches who were caught up in the tournament slog, who thought preparing for the season was both the activity and the goal, were unable to defend themselves or their programs from this scrutiny. This was the end of the “golden age” of collegiate debate, and sparked a number of developmental conferences on debate preservation as a reaction. You could argue that Sedalia was the only semi-proactive response to the threat posed by the shifting communicative landscape in higher education. 

This brings me to one of my favorite books – Kruger’s Counterpoint, an edited collection of all of the best writing in journals like JAFA and others about the controversies that arose between thinking practitioners of debate education. In a lot of ways it reads to me today like the Hagakure, the collection of samurai wisdom put together by a former samurai who palpably felt the end of an era coming and wanted to preserve what was most important – the tropes, the points of invention for discourse about what it meant to be a samurai. Kruger’s book, published in the 1960s, was pretty far away from the very quick obliteration of debate programs twenty years in his future. Kruger, oddly enough, spent a lot of his career at C.W. Post University, a scarce 30 minutes to an hour from here in Long Island. I occasionally jot a note to myself to make an appointment with the University Archivist there to see what might be hiding out in the stacks from his work. I also happen to have his textbook, Modern Debate, in my collection as well. For me he symbolizes a time when it was a point of pride to be someone in the field of communication who not only taught speech production, oralcy, and verbal argument and debate, but who thought about it a lot, and who put their thoughts to paper to share with others. 

Such slowness of practice has immense value for the aspirational discussion about what we do when we teach debate, which then becomes a well of tropes we can draw from when times get tough. When the pressure is on from the administration to justify your cost, space, time, and energy we would have a resource. But it’s all dried up. The loss of this community has been gleefully replaced with a community of critics who wind up accidently giving credit to forms of debate and speech that probably don’t deserve that legitimation (i.e. an expert critiquing a political speech unwittingly or unwillingly confers upon it the status of “political speech” which draws some immediate borders in the imagination) and on the other side a community of people who are happy to teach eristics to their students because they have an intense faith that the practice of winning tournament after tournament is somehow going to teach them how to be excellent at crafting persuasive speeches, convincing arguments, and interesting debates. The “good” always comes later in critiques of debate teaching, that somewhere down the road debate will translate into success for them in life because it gives them “skills” or “portable skills” or “tools” or whatever. Such separation of the art of debating and oral production of argument from its context is like suggesting that a handful of false teeth is the equivalent of a mouth for chewing. Those who are interested in the teaching and learning of debate have to be satisfied with short, passing interactions in hallways of tournament competitions where a few ideas can be exchanged but only quickly as there is a round to judge, students to check on. Rarely is time given for the deep dive on the aspirational aims of debate education. In fact, we can count them! Sedalia, Sedalia 2, Quail Roost, and The Wake Forest University session. All suffer from a new fallacy I’m playing with that I call the “productive bias.” It works by assuming that if we have produced something, we’ve done something or accomplished something. All these conferences have produced similar documents that make similar claims and demands on the university. All have been similarly ignored by the University, and life goes on. 

I hoped to perhaps start a return to the slow, thoughtful exchange of ideas about the teaching of argument production. Without the recovery of teachers talking to one another in their capacity and identity as teachers, we don’t really have a chance of recovering inventional resources for the defense of debate.  My library has the full run of JAFA which I was hoping to digitize. You see, the journal exists only on microfilm or print. Since I doubt there is anyone out there willing to send me a whole print run of the journal, I thought it would be good to use one of the two microfilm machines (how things have changed) that the library owns in order to convert the run into PDF. This request was denied by the librarians, who not only are rightly concerned about the time I might spend monopolizing the machine, they also are wrongly concerned about copyright. If only it could be communicated how little my field cares about any conversation about teaching students how to make oral argument or persuade well – we are now in the business of creating critics of speeches. The turn of JAFA into A&A is pretty good evidence of what we value: commentary from expert receivers of speech instead of conversation from practitioners sharing and addressing issues in invention. 

A full PDF run of JAFA would have numerous benefits, most obviously the ability to full-text search the range of the journal for key words like “teaching” or “argument” and trace how those conversations played out over 30 or 40 years. I might still just surreptitiously begin this project with what little free time I have and just be patient.  It would eventually be worth it. More to come on this as I get ready for a day of listening to debate speeches, something that the ideological and hegemonic voices of the university and the field of communication tell me, in my head, is a waste of time, that I should be writing something for QJS. Both exercises, ironically, will involve the exact same number of people – about ten. 

To quote the philosopher Chuck D, “Hate is a strong word, but I hate the snow.” These are some of the words I most clearly remember from my days at Syracuse University. Syracuse is a place for people who love snow, or at least it doesn’t bother them. At Syracuse I had a lot of great experiences, but in planning out some future courses, I had a look at some old syllabi. I don’t remember them very well at all. I think the assumptions about what a syllabus should look like hurt our ability to engage students from the very first moments of the class.

A typical example of professor syllabus cynical humor/hegemony.

Syllabi are unmemorable. Why do we not recall what is on them, or when we go to check them out, they are totally uninteresting? It seems that I should remember more about why or how I got inspired to be in a course as easily as I remember an offhanded comment from a guest speaker. 

The syllabus has become (or perhaps has always served as) a disciplinary document, a marker of power, something that is supposed to affirm some difference in authoritative/disciplinary power between the student and the teacher. It’s an “invisible fence” or “shock collar” (are those the same thing?) meant to keep students “in line” and things like that. Doesn’t seem like a contract to me, but more of a badge of office – the sort of badge you’d find in a bad western where the sheriff and the deputies don’t seem to have any other plans or purpose but to be “in charge.” There’s nothing more to do but to display and exercise power. 

The syllabus cannot be a contract since there’s no way for students to amend it, add riders, or simply walk away. You might think there are, but with the low amount of sections offered by universities and colleges today, plus the necessity of students working nearly full time to pay for class, and the incredible expense of college requiring that they have to be done in an incredibly quick time-frame, there really isn’t an option for them to wait until another semester or for them to look for a different section. In the end most of the courses are going to be the same. 

I feel like most faculty get a secret perverse thrill out of the presence of the syllabus. Students won’t read it, so they know that in December they can sigh, pull out a copy, and show the concerned student that on page 14, bullet point 8 under section 3 clearly explains that they have no chance of passing the course. There’s also a lot of pleasure in the commiseration writ large on social media where professors tell stories of the students not reading or following simple instructions buried in a boring, nearly unreadable document. If we needed any more evidence that faculty are a bit disconnected from the world or “monastic,” this would be it. 

Taking a look at my syllabus, I find it to be the most boring thing I’ve read in a while. Stylistically it’s garbage. Content-wise it reads like a list of do-nots: “Here’s what we are going to read when,” “here’s how to handle this or that issue.” I wish I had spent more time on it, even though it’s just for public speaking, a course everyone has to take before they end their sophomore year at my college. I still feel I could do a better job presenting it. 

These things are important, but should they be the full scope of this document? If we answer yes, then we are losing some great opportunities to reach students. I think there are a few key assumptions we should keep in mind when generating a syllabus:

1. This is most likely the only writing you do that your students will read. If you are one of those obnoxious people who assigns his or her own work in the class, you have a lot more problems than I am addressing here, but you should consider the syllabus an introduction into your writing.

2. The syllabus is a common map, or grounding, for everyone in the class to formulate a plan for each meeting. It doesn’t have to work, it just has to provide the materials to execute the plan. Much can be learned from failure. 

3. The syllabus should not be written in a way that treats the classroom as a space of business, a transaction, or exchange of commodity. It has to resist the capitalist grammar. 

So with those assumptions in mind, what metaphors for the syllabus exist? 

Party Invitation

Here’s an invitation to a great party, a celebration where the guests will be the books we’re reading. The attitude of the syllabus should be one of excitement and promise of a great time to come. I often think about my course design this way – who should be the guest speakers or guests of honor for the course – but this creative and generative thinking never translates over to the syllabus writing. 

A Map for Visitors

Consider your field or your course a national park or a historical site. Your syllabus is the guide that is freely available at the entrance or ranger station. Visitors to the park should consult it so they don’t miss anything that the site has to offer, but of course they have the freedom to stick in one place as long as they like if they are really enjoying it. There’s no reason to rush around from site to site as there’s no real way to connect a “total” experience – that is, “we’ve seen it all” – to the pleasure or enjoyment or comprehension of the “meaning” of the site. Some suggested places to go and study the history of how the site was constructed (“who put this fence here and why?”) should be in there for conversation with the visitors should they ask, but overall the visit is governed by a moving through the guide by the visitors with assistance from the guide.

A Love Letter to your Discipline

This metaphor places the reader in the position of eavesdropper or the syllabus in the position of “found writing,” something that they, through fate and time, have become the audience for, but were not imagined as the audience by the author. This can lead to some really interesting views of the syllabus, including that of mystery that the readings and assignments unfold over time and through process. This metaphor also highlights the importance of working together to answer burning questions. Group projects are unpopular because they are designed by cynical faculty from a generation or two removed from this one. But if we look online we find gaming communities such as No Man’s Sky and World of Warcraft working hard in groups to solve puzzles and riddles. 

This does not need to be complex, but merely interesting. People love to see what a relationship is about and why someone might write something full of love and caring to something or someone else. You could cast the class in the role of interceptor – that the author and recipient are unknown – but by engaging in the list of tasks things can be revealed about that relationship that are insightful.

In Media Res

The class is thrown into the moment you are in right now as a scholar, facing some question or series of questions that are connected to daily life in the world. The writing must be connected to a world that the students can recognize, although the questions can be a little strange. Students then proceed through the course looking to solve the dramatic tension shown on the first day with the instructor as the “main character.” Everything bends back toward seeing if we have enough material or thought to bring to bear on the question. By the end of the term, it’s clear we have some resolution but everyone is curious about what’s going to be in the sequel (in a perfect play of this metaphor anyway). 

There are many more metaphors, I just haven’t thought them all through yet. The point of the syllabus should be to invite, welcome, and provide resources for the students entering a course, a place for exploration of an approach or a way of thinking. It shouldn’t be thought of as a contract (worst possible metaphor) nor should it be thought of as some sort of document that saves the professor frustration, time, or energy. It absolutely shouldn’t establish the course and the work of the course as commodities worth student investment of time in order to be sold later for high profit (re: grades). It should be as revolutionary as the rest of your thinking as a teacher, something designed to shake up the students, dust some assumptions away, or spark a fire that gives way to new growth after the burn of the term ends.