The New York Sophist

It’s raining, but four years ago it was sunny when I watched my mom breathe for the last time. Now I’m sitting here looking at reciepts  for pizza and taxis and filling out forms that prove that, yes, these were university expenses. And I think my job is so important and valuable.

She wasn’t gone long before I hopped on a plane to attend a debate tournament, because they matter so much. I remember nothing of that event. Every tournament since that one has been less and less meaningful. Now they simply sit in my mind and rot.

These 9 dollar an hour cubicle functionary tasks are the wounds we of course bear for the task of doing “oh so much” for education. This is a narrative I have constructed as universal, but it’s shared by only one person – me. I share it with my ideal self. He’s a disgusting figure, someone who thinks he’s so amazing for spending so much time working with students outside of the official confines of the classroom. He’s proud of the sacrifices he makes; he feels entitled to things. He’s full of shit. This husk is what I’ve made in order to justify where I sit in the world, a place far away from the much more enjoyable life I used to have where I would do things that needed no justification to myself as valuable. 

I used to read and write for my own enjoyment. Now those tasks are pushed to the secondary, and tertiary lines due to serving the university. I’ve convinced myself that the uttered phrase, “thank you for all you do for the university” is some sort of currency, moral or otherwise. What a joke. If anyone is profiting off of what I’ve been doing, I’ll never know. I try to meet with students, the noise from the cleaning staff is too loud for us to have a conversation. At least someone is having fun in the world. 

My mother’s hospital room was an endless parade of visitors. Young and old, they praised her as a teacher. She had done it for thirty years. We were never alone, not until those last few minutes. They could have been hours. I was not attentive to the time. Not one of them said, “thank you for all you did for the school.” Because they knew it was insulting. Insulting comments are best kept from dire and emotional moments. Better to deliver them in insulting circumstances – such as when you have done a lot of unpaid work and consider yourself lucky to sit in a dirty, tiny cubicle next to the garbage.

I remember spending whole days reading in the library. Now I spend whole days doing paperwork. Now I prepare the wrong readings for class. Now I fantasize about how I’m improving things at my university.

It’s a sick joke. I wrote it. I delivered it. Nobody laughs.

What a fool I’ve been.

“Thank you for all you do for the University” will be no comfort when my last sunrise moves to meet me. It’s coming. The beams are reaching toward me. I’ve done nothing. I have nothing to show for all of my supposedly noble hard work. I’ve improved nothing around me. Everything is smudged with my fingerprints. Things are in different places than they were. there’s some mud on the carpet. My legacy.

When that sun comes up what will I say? I didn’t go over budget? Everyone safely got on the plane? So and So had a great time speaking really fast to three other people in an empty classroom somewhere on the planet?

All I will be able to say is – what have I done with my life?

It’s all I can say today as I keep going back from my rainy apartment to that sunny Houston hospital.

I’m wasting my life. I’ve wasted my life. 

It repeats as I reconcile the hotel taxes from the last trip with the online records. What noble work I do in the service of higher education.

I’m doing the tab for GW this weekend, and I regret it already. Tabbing makes me feel terrible on every level: I feel like I’m wasting my time, I feel like I am ignoring my students, but worst of all, when I look to the way judges are ranked and assigned in competitions, I feel that BP debate tournaments really do not belong in the realm of university or collegiate activity. There is no other metric than familiarity with which judges are ranked and assigned. 

If there is a metric, judges are assigned by the metric of tournament success, which is defined by the CA Class as wins and awards. There is no other way to understand success at these competitions. If someone is unfamiliar but has won a number of competitions, that person is placed in a position of power in the competition. If they have not won, but are familiar, the same. But what about those who do not win and are unfamiliar to the CAs? 

The CA Class has no method for dealing with this. I wonder how many amazing people turn up to judge competitions for different reasons, but serve as wings and are never taken seriously by their chairs. I hope it’s a small number. But it really shouldn’t be any number. There are ways that this bias could be dealt with. 

Feedback forms are not the answer as they are always read through confirmation bias. The forms are built in with numerous levers to pull to jettison their validity. They are not treated that seriously anyway by anyone, except really angry teams that were certain they were right and their judge wasn’t. 

There’s no incentive for judges to try out new approaches or ways of judging debate, no motive for including new information or approaches to debate at all in the present system. The only motive for those who want to judge, chair, and sit on elimination panels is to listen and learn and conform to the ways that the top judges behave. There are no opportunities for exception. Conform or be relegated to the borders of the tournament. What is most vital here is that learning how to judge is conflated with conforming to the norms of judging demonstrated by those most familiar to the group of CAs at the competition, or to those who demonstrate they can meet those norms via a trophy or three.

Most of you probably have no reason or incentive to reverse this system, but here are some ideas for reversal that could make things much more interesting

International/National Database of Rankings

This would be a source of information where judge rankings are stored from all tournaments and then averaged across the year, the season, or geography. CAs could examine these rankings and assign them accordingly to unproven and unfamiliar judges at competitions they control.  

Debate Leaders/Professors/Coaches Poll

Used as a metric, this monthly poll by those who are the leaders, CAs, coaches, professors, and teachers of debate recognized as a leader in their debate society offers the rankings per month of judges. Judges submit their names for consideration for the poll at the start of the season. This is a non-binding measure of what people think and feel who are not always in the driver’s seat on assigning rankings. 

The People’s Champion

Debaters should start something similar to rate my professor for judges. This could be another great guide to get the other side of the judge’s ranking and what the teams who had this person, or the chairs who worked with this person, thought about the judge’s ability. Another model would be the now outmoded PIck A Prof (I wonder if it is still around in some form) where data which is aggregated is offered and the user can look at it in any arrangement they wish to help their decision (grade distributions, number of assignments, pages per week, etc). All this data was scraped from the university wesbite where faculty were required to post syllabi, etc. Something similar could be done for BP tournaments. 

When I think about judging, there is no other thing it can be in my mind than an opportunity to teach. We often forget this when assigning judges, so we must keep that notion in our heads when assembling panels. You might not agree with me, but you have to concede that some part of judging involves teaching. It’s happening whether you want it to or not, and it’s happening at some level, even if you are just rehearsing the arguments of the debate.

As an opportunity to teach, we are right to examine teacher qualifications as another area to determine who should judge. I can’t imagine my university staffing positions based on awards, grade distribution, or the fact that the Dean knows them really, really well and they are really a great teacher. That’s not good enough. We should work to develop deeper metrics that are more worthy of the power and potential of BP debate, and stop relying on methods that to anyone outside of the organization look like collusion and favoritism.  

I’m doing the tab for GW this weekend, and I regret it already. Tabbing makes me feel terrible on every level: I feel like I’m wasting my time, I feel like I am ignoring my students, but worst of all, when I look to the way judges are ranked and assigned in competitions, I feel that BP debate tournaments really do not belong in the realm of university or collegiate activity. There is no other metric than familiarity with which judges are ranked and assigned. 

If there is a metric, judges are assigned by the metric of tournament success, which is defined by the CA Class as wins and awards. There is no other way to understand success at these competitions. If someone is unfamiliar but has won a number of competitions, that person is placed in a position of power in the competition. If they have not won, but are familiar, the same. But what about those who do not win and are unfamiliar to the CAs? 

The CA Class has no method for dealing with this. I wonder how many amazing people turn up to judge competitions for different reasons, but serve as wings and are never taken seriously by their chairs. I hope it’s a small number. But it really shouldn’t be any number. There are ways that this bias could be dealt with. 

Feedback forms are not the answer as they are always read through confirmation bias. The forms are built in with numerous levers to pull to jettison their validity. They are not treated that seriously anyway by anyone, except really angry teams that were certain they were right and their judge wasn’t. 

There’s no incentive for judges to try out new approaches or ways of judging debate, no motive for including new information or approaches to debate at all in the present system. The only motive for those who want to judge, chair, and sit on elimination panels is to listen and learn and conform to the ways that the top judges behave. There are no opportunities for exception. Conform or be relegated to the borders of the tournament. What is most vital here is that learning how to judge is conflated with conforming to the norms of judging demonstrated by those most familiar to the group of CAs at the competition, or to those who demonstrate they can meet those norms via a trophy or three.

Most of you probably have no reason or incentive to reverse this system, but here are some ideas for reversal that could make things much more interesting

International/National Database of Rankings

This would be a source of information where judge rankings are stored from all tournaments and then averaged across the year, the season, or geography. CAs could examine these rankings and assign them accordingly to unproven and unfamiliar judges at competitions they control.  

Debate Leaders/Professors/Coaches Poll

Used as a metric, this monthly poll by those who are the leaders, CAs, coaches, professors, and teachers of debate recognized as a leader in their debate society offers the rankings per month of judges. Judges submit their names for consideration for the poll at the start of the season. This is a non-binding measure of what people think and feel who are not always in the driver’s seat on assigning rankings. 

The People’s Champion

Debaters should start something similar to rate my professor for judges. This could be another great guide to get the other side of the judge’s ranking and what the teams who had this person, or the chairs who worked with this person, thought about the judge’s ability. Another model would be the now outmoded PIck A Prof (I wonder if it is still around in some form) where data which is aggregated is offered and the user can look at it in any arrangement they wish to help their decision (grade distributions, number of assignments, pages per week, etc). All this data was scraped from the university wesbite where faculty were required to post syllabi, etc. Something similar could be done for BP tournaments. 

When I think about judging, there is no other thing it can be in my mind than an opportunity to teach. We often forget this when assigning judges, so we must keep that notion in our heads when assembling panels. You might not agree with me, but you have to concede that some part of judging involves teaching. It’s happening whether you want it to or not, and it’s happening at some level, even if you are just rehearsing the arguments of the debate.

As an opportunity to teach, we are right to examine teacher qualifications as another area to determine who should judge. I can’t imagine my university staffing positions based on awards, grade distribution, or the fact that the Dean knows them really, really well and they are really a great teacher. That’s not good enough. We should work to develop deeper metrics that are more worthy of the power and potential of BP debate, and stop relying on methods that to anyone outside of the organization look like collusion and favoritism.  

A teacher is not someone who knows more than the student; A teacher is someone who knows differently than the student. It is a fallacy to believe that students, by definition, “don’t know.” Particularly in the teaching of the art of rhetoric this is doubly offensive/hilarious since most students have been speaking and arguing their entire languaged lives. The first teachers of rhetoric, the Sophists, recognized this and offered the chance to increase the win percentage of their students. But often this was a ruse; most Sophists were deeply committed to improving society through improving the quality of speeches among the citizens. Protagoras is one that comes to mind right away. 

This assumption takes on darker, violent tones when used as a pre-encounter assumption about groups of students who come from disadvantage. Cyclical, legal, enduring, financial oppression creates another layer of misery, that of the assumption that the teacher is coming to save them, or give them things they are unaware of. I just heard a faculty member the other day say that one of the primary problems with students is that they are unaware or ignorant of the world around them. A preference for a world is not a pathology. How are you not-ignorant? What are the moves to make to avoid ignorance? We prefer worlds that look like worlds to us; we respond when these worlds are threatened. We make allies through rhetoric to improve our defenses or to lay claim to new spheres.

Let’s just improve speeches. Let’s make everyone talk differently. Let’s improve the taste of the students for a discourse that they recognize, yet is alien to them. Debate does not discover the facts, or offer the right set of facts to the uninitiated. Debate questions the provenance of the facts; debate keeps the questions alive. 

This is what has been happening over the last couple of days. We have been to 4 reservation colleges and have debated at all of them. 

We visited The Crow reservation, Lame Deer, Fort Peck, and Rocky Boy reservations. The events went well, and attendance varied between 3 to 4 people to over 20 people at events. The idea of debate and the value of debate events is a new quantity for these institutions and I expect it to improve. 

These thoughts will be teased out over the next few days, but the most shocking thing is both the relevance and irrelevance of competitive debate formats for the teaching of argumentation, rhetoric, debating, and persuasive speaking. Simultaneously, students and faculty at each event have expressed interest in debating, a belief they could do it, and for some regret that they did not debate earlier in life when they were a student. This contradiction might be one of the sources of the value of teaching rigorous formats of debate (as opposed to teaching debating however it comes together in daily life) while excluding the tournament as the endpoint. 

The power of tournament logics and tournocentric thinking conflating itself with persuasion is well-exposed in these events. Things that students gravitate toward as important arguments that have persuasive value seem irrelevant to audiences outside the tournament, who make legitimate demands on the quality of the debate they hear. The comments sound like the teacher of the first year public speaking or debate class who wants to encourage the students, but also must state the obvious – “specific examples help,” “define what you mean,”  “I don’t see the connection here, but you spoke well” – this really reveals both the power and the failure of tournament centric debate education to replace itself with the norms of debating and arguing in the world, as well as the irrelevance of doing research or studying deeply the situation an audience is in for a debate – arguments are true if they come from the heart, or circulate through the top rooms of an IV. Apparance, exposure, and circulation are the three terms that govern good argumentation at the tournament. There are connections here to in how arguments mediate across society of course, but tournament-centric debate purports to be the corrective or improvement or superior form of debating. Yet the ideology driving the arguments is similar. What’s missing is the lesson to adapt, change, conform to audiences you encounter – something effaced from tournament-as-argumentation pedagogy. 

The reservation colleges will benefit from more debate exposure, as will those who go to debate at these places, but much work must be done to expose and correct the norms of tournament debating that are not even norms, but read as the only way to locate the best arguments and the only road to travel when persuading an audience. In the end, such a pedagogy appears to concerned and interested publics as a “nice try by some well-spoken college kids.”

Heading to Montana tomorrow to begin a new program in partnership with another university to bring debate programs and debating culture to the colleges on Native American reservations. So-called tribal colleges are routinely forgotten in the national conversation about the University, the college, their purpose and mission, and the importance of education that is like debating, that fits into the fantasy of the active student interrogating issues on their own and preparing dynamic, inclusive, and responsive texts for the surveillance and pleasure of the professor/examiner-as-audience. The neoliberal rhetoric is even more vile, citing debate as a set of “portable skills” which can be applied to any non-descript employment situation, allowing debate to serve as part of both deskilled and temporary workforce, allowing debate to serve whatever sort of labor demand the future will make. 

I wonder exactly why and what we are doing in this new venture. I am going in my preferred way, nearly totally blind as to the conditions, history, and situation of the colleges we’ll be visiting. This way I can hear the passionate and interested articulations of the reality of the colleges from the students when I arrive. This gives me an opportunity as well to build some trust, as my acceptance of their articulated reality builds some nice bridges. I am very curious to hear the interpretation of what they have and what they see debate doing to improve their college experience.

On top of that, I wonder what I want debate education, or the development of a debate program to be. Currently I am thinking of a debate program or debate culture in Burkean terms, as a “debate attitude” which would serve as a curative to debunking, one that favors non-totalizing rejection in arguments and the end of a debate as a beginning of a larger inquiry. Maybe this is too limiting. I was asked what I hope the students teaching with me get out of it. I replied, “A life changing moment.” This is hard to define. I suppose I would say I hope that it becomes a place for intellectual reinvigoration, a place to return (quite literally a topos) in their mind and memories that can be used for innovation, testing, creative reflection, or any number of other imaginative tasks that rhetoricians and rhetors are called upon to perform as they do their intellectual wandering. I also added, “at a minimum.” I don’t feel I should be constrained by predictable outcomes here. Why should my desire to take pleasure as a teacher at a “job well done” overtake the generative possibilities of the encounters we are about to have? The limits placed by the instructor in terms of expectation come with limits that will be subtly policed through action, word, and gesture. I need to abandon any sort of “ultimate” or “maximum” outcome here in order to open the possibility for something greater than I could imagine.

The encounter will generate a lot of the productive material for teaching as well as the opportunities to do so. My plan is for there to be a lot of debates, as shared texts for our conversations. The shared experience of a debate is like having read the same books and materials to use as an anchor point.

I suppose that the entire purpose, goals, and outcomes of this project will be dependent on what we find in the encounter. More to come. My preparation for now is to try to avoid the comfortable, predictable tropes that orbit tightly around the idea “Building a debate program at a tribal college.” Treating it in terms of the familiar, the expected, the easily measurable is to limit it, to secure it in the realm-of-the-known, and to limit debate knowledge to that which serves other ideologies, namely the ideology of a career and work that is designed to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the joyful and frequent exercise of the imagination, primed with the raw material of the encounter with the text and the invitation to participate in its construction.