The New York Sophist

Last week, debaters from St. John’s University (where I teach and learn) and Adelphi University (in Long Island), had a public debate about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. As someone who started both debate programs (with help at both places) it was a surreal and happy moment for me, watching this debate in a well-attended auditorium on the Adelphi University campus, thinking about how far debate in the New York City area has come. 

This debate, like most every good public debate, was an arbitrary side assignment affair, and I worked with our students to come up with compelling arguments for All Lives Matter. Not an easy task. All Lives Matter is difficult to defend, but part of the task of being a debater I think is to believe in the idea that perspectives in a controversy deserve an honest attempt at a good defense, like in criminal law perhaps. 

What we learned that night was the difficulty in making arguments that sound good in a classroom palatable in front of a hostile audience. It was rhetorically challenging to find space to distance our ideas from the racist implications of All Lives Matter. Those implications and expressions are there, and for the audience, constituted the entirety of the position of All Lives Matter. It was a great challenge. We got a lot out of it, including the experience of debating in front of a crowd that actively dislikes your position and communicates it through body language and other non-verbals. This is an element of rhetorical performance that never appears in the tournament environment. Sanitation, or too-clean a space, might be responsible for the development of asthma and allergies in children. What should we call rhetorical asthma?

We live-streamed the debate and I was so happy to see friends and alumni from all over the country tune into the debate. It was great fun to moderate the chat room and join in commentary with the viewers about the debate they were watching. One St. John’s Alumna, Erin Fleming, was taken aback by what she called the “debate ticks” present in the performances. I encouraged her to write something about these ticks, and she wrote a great open letter. I offer it here to you for your consideration. Tournament-oriented debating continues to increase in popularity, but not without some obvious problems. 

Thanks to Erin for writing this great piece. How to correct it? For public debates are seen as an exception to tournament debating, “normal” debating. This is out of order. Tournament debating should be seen as debate’s abnormal form, and events like this should be considered the normal place where debate is practiced. 

Today the University Press of Colorado is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary with 50% off books. (code: 50for50).  I was led there by a composition scholar and found a number of books on composition – teaching writing – that were very complex, theoretical, very rich explorations of theory and practice. 

This was exciting and I spent too much money, as usual. At the same time it’s very sad. We have nothing like this for public speaking or debate or even argumentation. We have textbooks that teach genre and form, and do it in a very direct, simplistic way.

Where are the rich discussions about teaching debate and what happens to students when they are taught to argue in class? What happens when you have in-class debate assignments? What are the subject positions of the speakers, listeners, and the teacher? Do these categories even obtain anymore? 

One of the books I ordered was the application of avant garde theory to the teaching of writing. Such a book would be unimaginable in public speaking or in a debate course. In most argumentation courses, students are assigned to write a “letter to the editor,” as if argumentation was cross listed with historical anachronism. A simple google search indicates just how basic our argumentation courses are compared with first year writing courses. 

We need more scholarly and critical engagement with the act of teaching oral composition, speech, argumentation, and debate. I wonder where these books are. I wonder why they are not being written. I wonder how and why composition professors are so motivated by their students’ work and writing, and the politics of the act of teaching, and in speech communication we are not. We try to avoid teaching public speaking. On top of that, we treat public speaking as something like jury duty – you have to show up, but you can get out of it if you have a pretty good reason. 

What would it take to get scholars interested in public speaking and debate the same way that composition scholars are interested in composition? 

Step one is to significantly diminish the tournament as the centerpiece of the college debate experience.

Step two is the development of speech and debate across the curriculum style programs, staffed mostly by debate students, with writing center elements. 

But before any of this, it will take a nearly impossible act to get things started, which is turning the attention of speech communication scholars to the public speaking course, or the basic course, or the debate team as a viable, rich and interesting site for scholarly inquiry.

A couple of days ago, we were asked to debate the British National Team for an event held at the English Speaking Union in Manhattan. This sort of event is often called a “public debate” by those who work in or teach debate, to mark it as different than “debate” which apparently only takes place early in the morning, or late at night, or in a long death-march style schedule, on a weekend, featuring speeches in near-empty classrooms for most of it.

For the larger part of the history of American debate, and for most of British debate’s history, the question of audience was never raised. It was assumed there would be a large audience to watch the debate and often pass judgement on it. Now the idea of audience is caught up in judgement. Last year at NCA I saw a paper by a young scholar who talked about Woodward’s “judge-less debate” idea as if the debate would only feature debaters. Woodward writes that without judges debate can do quite a bit more. But judges and audience are a different thing for Woodward – he would never think of debate as a private event as we do today. This scholar thought that only judges compose the audience – the idea that an audience would assemble to watch a contest debate wasn’t on the radar. Woodward was writing in the 1920s, when debate included a notion of the public in its performance.

In this debate, I tried to eliminate the line between these two things. Holding a line between public debate and debate communicates that there is real debate and its derivative. Made for the masses, public debate can never hold up to the quality of “real debate.” Students often talk to audience members this way about debates for the public. They will say, “Well in a real debate, we would have said this or that,” or “In a real debate, we would be able to say more, as we could talk faster than we do for you.” Or as I recently saw after the public final round at Bard, debaters will explain to audiences the reasons they don’t need to be informed on an issue in order to debate it. 

This video is my attempt at blending the line. In preparation for this British Debate, we worked on questions of audience and style, questions of evidence, and how to engage the audience that is not there to judge as a part of a narrow-bandwidth competition. The results are pretty good, but need some refinement. But in contrast to my students, the British debaters appear to have already transcended this issue. Their speeches appear to me to be well situated for a public debate or a debate – they could give these speeches at a tournament and do fine. Perhaps it’s just American BP debaters who are broadening the gap, forgetting that the practice of BP debate is the practice of speaking to reasonable people.

In the world where tournaments have been eliminated, the problem one faces is lack of quantity of participants in debate. In the tournament world, the problem is quality of debate. Lots of people participate, but to what end? I’m starting to lean to a lower number, higher quality model. Debate fatigue is a real thing – you can’t get weekly audiences to show up to watch debates I bet. But it might be worth arranging a program around a 2/3 public 1/3 tournament model. The tournaments become the training ground for students to engage a lot of material quickly, confront a challenging environment, and then are less nervous or more focused when putting together a public debate. Of course, one needs large venues to hold public debates with frequency, and that’s just not possible where I work now. 

The dichotomy between public debate and debate as it is now creates a world of frustrating to hear, boilerplate speeches designed to fit into a narrow-bandwidth model of persuasion. They then leave the tournament well-equipped to dismiss natural and normal forms of debating as inferior. The political becomes the source of entertainment for them or a source of cynical pride, as they sneer at what counts as debate in the civic sphere. Bridging the gap here is critical to developing debate programs that create advocates and engaged people as well as finding good reasons for administrators to support debating on their campuses.

A couple of days ago, we were asked to debate the British National Team for an event held at the English Speaking Union in Manhattan. This sort of event is often called a “public debate” by those who work in or teach debate, to mark it as different than “debate” which apparently only takes place early in the morning, or late at night, or in a long death-march style schedule, on a weekend, featuring speeches in near-empty classrooms for most of it.

For the larger part of the history of American debate, and for most of British debate’s history, the question of audience was never raised. It was assumed there would be a large audience to watch the debate and often pass judgement on it. Now the idea of audience is caught up in judgement. Last year at NCA I saw a paper by a young scholar who talked about Woodward’s “judge-less debate” idea as if the debate would only feature debaters. Woodward writes that without judges debate can do quite a bit more. But judges and audience are a different thing for Woodward – he would never think of debate as a private event as we do today. This scholar thought that only judges compose the audience – the idea that an audience would assemble to watch a contest debate wasn’t on the radar. Woodward was writing in the 1920s, when debate included a notion of the public in its performance.

In this debate, I tried to eliminate the line between these two things. Holding a line between public debate and debate communicates that there is real debate and its derivative. Made for the masses, public debate can never hold up to the quality of “real debate.” Students often talk to audience members this way about debates for the public. They will say, “Well in a real debate, we would have said this or that,” or “In a real debate, we would be able to say more, as we could talk faster than we do for you.” Or as I recently saw after the public final round at Bard, debaters will explain to audiences the reasons they don’t need to be informed on an issue in order to debate it. 

This video is my attempt at blending the line. In preparation for this British Debate, we worked on questions of audience and style, questions of evidence, and how to engage the audience that is not there to judge as a part of a narrow-bandwidth competition. The results are pretty good, but need some refinement. But in contrast to my students, the British debaters appear to have already transcended this issue. Their speeches appear to me to be well situated for a public debate or a debate – they could give these speeches at a tournament and do fine. Perhaps it’s just American BP debaters who are broadening the gap, forgetting that the practice of BP debate is the practice of speaking to reasonable people.

In the world where tournaments have been eliminated, the problem one faces is lack of quantity of participants in debate. In the tournament world, the problem is quality of debate. Lots of people participate, but to what end? I’m starting to lean to a lower number, higher quality model. Debate fatigue is a real thing – you can’t get weekly audiences to show up to watch debates I bet. But it might be worth arranging a program around a 2/3 public 1/3 tournament model. The tournaments become the training ground for students to engage a lot of material quickly, confront a challenging environment, and then are less nervous or more focused when putting together a public debate. Of course, one needs large venues to hold public debates with frequency, and that’s just not possible where I work now. 

The dichotomy between public debate and debate as it is now creates a world of frustrating to hear, boilerplate speeches designed to fit into a narrow-bandwidth model of persuasion. They then leave the tournament well-equipped to dismiss natural and normal forms of debating as inferior. The political becomes the source of entertainment for them or a source of cynical pride, as they sneer at what counts as debate in the civic sphere. Bridging the gap here is critical to developing debate programs that create advocates and engaged people as well as finding good reasons for administrators to support debating on their campuses.

Walking across the Cornell Campus talking with a colleague of mine about teaching, our conversation turned to the question on the minds of all faculty these days – how do we get students to read more, and to read better, than they do. 

I started to think that perhaps university students today are overwhelmed by reading assignments. The Productive Bias, as I call it, is an ideology that makes professors feel like they aren’t teaching unless there is a quantity of work being done that appears to be massive. This substitutes itself for quality teaching quite frequently. Long papers, endless reading assignments, and pop-up homework and tests are some of the things that create panicked students and therefore are indicators of good teaching and a quality class.

There’s little time for reflection or thought. Dan Melzer’s study indicates that the least common writing assignment given to students is for reflection, consideration, or inquiry. My students tell me they wish they had time to sit around and participate in a book group. Maybe the answer is that we are assigning too much reading, and not because it is reading, but because it looks like good work.

My colleague and I started talking about our favorite classes. She said one of the best courses she ever took only consisted of four books that were read and discussed throughout the term. That, plus a few writing assignments, was the course – a course that stayed with her years later. 

Could I do this? Plan a course with only four books? I was thinking about my Argumentation course and came up with the following. 

1. Rhetorical Argumentation by Chris Tindale

2. Arguing and Thinking by 

3. Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin

4. The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca

It’s much more than four books with Chaim and Lucie in there, but technically I have done it. I think this would be great, and we wouldn’t read every bit of course. 

What about our senior seminar here at St. John’s? I’ve taught it (when I’m allowed to teach something other than public speaking) about epistemology and method. The books I would assign for that seminar would be:

1. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

3. Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

4. Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier

This is a tough one, as I usually like to assign the Colson Whitehead novel The Intuitionist at the end as it’s an investigation of epistemology on the political level plus is performs an alternate epistemology by being a narrative itself. 

Ok so now do your class in four books – post it in the comments.