The New York Sophist

When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. 

Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered catastrophic losses in debate biodiversity (assuming you are with me in the idea of an equivalent sense of biodiversity for intellectual practices). This chart, taken from Nichols & Baccus’s 1936 volume, Modern Debating, hoped to guide the reader through the dizzying array of different events that would be called debate. For students in the early 20th century, debate could take on many forms, and these forms could all co-exist. 

Today what do we have? We seem to have a number of forms, but our entire tree is structured from the roots of the tournament. CX, LD, PF, CEDA, NDT, NPDA, NPTE, APDA, EUDC, North-Ams, BP, CUSID BP Nats, USU, WUDC.  All acronyms, save one, and all derived from types of debating done for one purpose – tournament style contests. 

Take a look at the variety on the above chart and think – if such a chart were made today, there would only be one line – the argumentation line – and on it would be all the competitive formats. The persuasive line – where debaters reached out in a competitive sense to broader audiences – has evaporated. 

The division the authors make is interesting to say the least – argumentative forms are more competitive forms: These are the types of debate that focus on competition the way we understand it today. Persuasive forms are more general: They can be competitive or not – really depends on the audience.

Perhaps the division is one of audience. Persuasive forms focus on an audience with a high concentration of members of the public. Argumentative forms focus on an audience that has little to no public. However in 1936 it is hard to imagine a debate contest that wouldn’t draw community interest. Today we don’t have to expend any effort to imagine that. 

Today’s chart would be one line. Purely argumentative. We don’t even bother teaching debate students anything from the persuasion line. In fact, recent attempts to help debate pedagogically, such as the Guide to Debate produced before WUDC Malaysia, attempt to flatten the distinction: What is argumentative is persuasive, and vice versa. Why keep the distinction when the people watching and evaluating your debates are so homogeneous that the consideration of variance in how they hear you has been eliminated with a joyful medical precision?

Most current collegiate debaters would see the loss of the persuasive line as no big loss at all. Those are side projects to the “real” work of debating. Others would say the distinction is false: Contemporary debate focuses on persuasion. I wonder. What would be needed, and what would be the value, to teach all these forms in a contemporary debate program? The monopoly of tournament contest ideology is a difficult regime to break. Returning to history might be a good way to show the impermanence and newness of the “tournament as debate” model of debate instruction that is thoughtlessly reproduced pedagogically across the world.

Nothing is heard more frequently among young debaters than phrases like, “That argument will always beat that one,” or “That argument will never win against a team that says such-and-such.” Such phrases not only indicate the prevalence of debate students talking about strategy and peer-educating one another (something desperately missing from the modern university) but also reveal the intensity of the addiction to certainty that we have in modern culture.

We desperately want certainty; we are certainty-fiends. We want the exact, right answer to the larger problems facing us. But most problems in the world do not suffer from simplicity. They suffer because we approach them with a desire to simplify, and a desire to make clear what was fuzzy. A great example of this is the love for TED Talks among faculty and students alike. TED talks are extremely comfortable – they purport to offer, in the space of 14 minutes, an incredibly interesting, robust research problem, and the solution to that problem, delivered by a well-dressed speaker with no notes, and a variety of beautiful digital visual aids. This is the opposite sense one would get examining the research and readings surrounding the issue. One might wind up un-polarized, without attraction to one side or another. Such an attitude explains the difficulties within the climate change debate – the models are imperfect; the effects are measurable. Warrants that highlight the validity or ethos of scientists can be turned against the models, and arguments for effects don’t persuade those who have deep commitments to such types of knowledge creation.

The TED Talk, most importantly, is a publicity device for more complex, deeper research occurring elsewhere. Unfortunately, most audiences on YouTube do not receive reinforcement of that idea, and the entire theatrical experience pushes the view that such knowledge comes from the internal revelation of a brilliant mind, not an uncertain worker who poured through texts and conducted endless experiments in order to get to where they are today. TED talks are therefore not intellectual work, but publicity for the results that come from intellectual work. The harder bridge to cross is the one toward public intellectualism, where one makes the normative demand toward the public not to enjoy the fruits, but to plant and tend first.

We suffer from a lack of comfort with the uncertain. We see it is a problem, not an opportunity, and certainly not something we want present in our lives. We suffer from being familiar with the uncertain, but not comfortable with it. We have tagged the uncertain with the Freudian sense of the abject, something not only to push away from us, but a rubric with which to define ourselves via its negation. 

Debate is one area in the educational arena that can move uncertainty from the familiar to the comfortable. Debate creates comfort and acceptance of the “sometimes.” It does this through the continual practice and continual failure of the best ideas and evidence to sway the best judges. In repeated contest with opponents, the debater realizes that the best is sometimes best, sometimes not. The result is an acceptance of uncertainty made possible by repeated practice.

Does it work? Sometimes. The concept is self-effacing. The concept is also not universal – there are many parts of life where we need certainty. Bridge building comes to mind, as does landing a commercial aircraft. But the path toward that certainty should not be globalized to all aspects of human affairs. Hans Georg-Gadamer wondered about this in the opening pages of Truth and Method when he asks why the humanities always rush to grab the standards of science or social science to justify the work they are doing. Instead of rushing toward the craving for certainty, why not build up a defense of the sometimes? Such a defense would not only be useful, it would be true, and it would create an attitude toward education and politics that is as fascinated with problem-posing as it is with solution-offering. There are no shortage of examples where a rush to be “all-in” on a solution created more problems in the end.

Debate education creates comfort and even desire to be mired in the material, to be submerged in the various views, and to hover there until a good position on the issue comes into being. For beginning debaters, they fit this process into the familiar discourse of “always” and “never” – the grammar of the certain. For those who have been debating a while, that grammar has changed – a shrug, a “yea, maybe,” or our  favorite – “Yea sometimes that might work.” Such a level of comfort comes out, I think, in the ridiculous levels of confidence that debaters sometimes present in the seminar room, for they know that they are not offering something certain, but a reading or a view that is as certain as its coming response. For those without that comfort level, the articulation of a position can be considered the articulation of the self. 

Perhaps we can think of debate pedagogy as pedagogy in line with the creation of the liberal ironist, that political fantasy subject of Richard Rorty. There’s no clear pathway to this subjectivity, nor is there a clear consensus on whether or not we would want the political world to consist of nothing but liberal ironists. They do have a good function though in getting more and better ideas out there about the ideas already present. That is, if one can get past the intimidation factor. 

In our culture, a politician saying, “I don’t know” on a key issue would be the end of his career. Likewise, when academics are interviewed and offer a string of “I don’t knows” and “That depends on many factors,” such performances reify the cultural trope that professors can’t do anything, are uncertain, and are not fit to provide leadership on addressing difficult issues. We need educational techne such as debate at all levels of education in order to provide more comfort with the slow, critical appraisal of issues instead of the TED Talk encapsulation of how to grapple with our most vital issues. Opening the hood and poking around at the engine is as important as having a smooth ride.

Nothing is heard more frequently among young debaters than phrases like, “That argument will always beat that one,” or “That argument will never win against a team that says such-and-such.” Such phrases not only indicate the prevalence of debate students talking about strategy and peer-educating one another (something desperately missing from the modern university) but also reveal the intensity of the addiction to certainty that we have in modern culture.

We desperately want certainty; we are certainty-fiends. We want the exact, right answer to the larger problems facing us. But most problems in the world do not suffer from simplicity. They suffer because we approach them with a desire to simplify, and a desire to make clear what was fuzzy. A great example of this is the love for TED Talks among faculty and students alike. TED talks are extremely comfortable – they purport to offer, in the space of 14 minutes, an incredibly interesting, robust research problem, and the solution to that problem, delivered by a well-dressed speaker with no notes, and a variety of beautiful digital visual aids. This is the opposite sense one would get examining the research and readings surrounding the issue. One might wind up un-polarized, without attraction to one side or another. Such an attitude explains the difficulties within the climate change debate – the models are imperfect; the effects are measurable. Warrants that highlight the validity or ethos of scientists can be turned against the models, and arguments for effects don’t persuade those who have deep commitments to such types of knowledge creation.

The TED Talk, most importantly, is a publicity device for more complex, deeper research occurring elsewhere. Unfortunately, most audiences on YouTube do not receive reinforcement of that idea, and the entire theatrical experience pushes the view that such knowledge comes from the internal revelation of a brilliant mind, not an uncertain worker who poured through texts and conducted endless experiments in order to get to where they are today. TED talks are therefore not intellectual work, but publicity for the results that come from intellectual work. The harder bridge to cross is the one toward public intellectualism, where one makes the normative demand toward the public not to enjoy the fruits, but to plant and tend first.

We suffer from a lack of comfort with the uncertain. We see it is a problem, not an opportunity, and certainly not something we want present in our lives. We suffer from being familiar with the uncertain, but not comfortable with it. We have tagged the uncertain with the Freudian sense of the abject, something not only to push away from us, but a rubric with which to define ourselves via its negation. 

Debate is one area in the educational arena that can move uncertainty from the familiar to the comfortable. Debate creates comfort and acceptance of the “sometimes.” It does this through the continual practice and continual failure of the best ideas and evidence to sway the best judges. In repeated contest with opponents, the debater realizes that the best is sometimes best, sometimes not. The result is an acceptance of uncertainty made possible by repeated practice.

Does it work? Sometimes. The concept is self-effacing. The concept is also not universal – there are many parts of life where we need certainty. Bridge building comes to mind, as does landing a commercial aircraft. But the path toward that certainty should not be globalized to all aspects of human affairs. Hans Georg-Gadamer wondered about this in the opening pages of Truth and Method when he asks why the humanities always rush to grab the standards of science or social science to justify the work they are doing. Instead of rushing toward the craving for certainty, why not build up a defense of the sometimes? Such a defense would not only be useful, it would be true, and it would create an attitude toward education and politics that is as fascinated with problem-posing as it is with solution-offering. There are no shortage of examples where a rush to be “all-in” on a solution created more problems in the end.

Debate education creates comfort and even desire to be mired in the material, to be submerged in the various views, and to hover there until a good position on the issue comes into being. For beginning debaters, they fit this process into the familiar discourse of “always” and “never” – the grammar of the certain. For those who have been debating a while, that grammar has changed – a shrug, a “yea, maybe,” or our  favorite – “Yea sometimes that might work.” Such a level of comfort comes out, I think, in the ridiculous levels of confidence that debaters sometimes present in the seminar room, for they know that they are not offering something certain, but a reading or a view that is as certain as its coming response. For those without that comfort level, the articulation of a position can be considered the articulation of the self. 

Perhaps we can think of debate pedagogy as pedagogy in line with the creation of the liberal ironist, that political fantasy subject of Richard Rorty. There’s no clear pathway to this subjectivity, nor is there a clear consensus on whether or not we would want the political world to consist of nothing but liberal ironists. They do have a good function though in getting more and better ideas out there about the ideas already present. That is, if one can get past the intimidation factor. 

In our culture, a politician saying, “I don’t know” on a key issue would be the end of his career. Likewise, when academics are interviewed and offer a string of “I don’t knows” and “That depends on many factors,” such performances reify the cultural trope that professors can’t do anything, are uncertain, and are not fit to provide leadership on addressing difficult issues. We need educational techne such as debate at all levels of education in order to provide more comfort with the slow, critical appraisal of issues instead of the TED Talk encapsulation of how to grapple with our most vital issues. Opening the hood and poking around at the engine is as important as having a smooth ride.

Currently I am engaged in the tenure process, a year long examination of your life to see if you are fit to hold a faculty job in perpetuity. Spoiler alert: nobody is worthy of this. Everyone is forced into the process. And graduate school teaches you that if you don’t get a job that involves this process, you are a failure not just professionally, but as a living being. So far the only good thing to come out of this process, which pretends to be serious and formal but whose outcome is already known, is that I have been thinking about and doing a lot of academic-styled writing. Variety is valuable. 

In a world where academic presses publish numerous books that don’t have a point, let alone a readership, it’s no wonder that there are stressed faces and hushed tones around me when I mention that I’m going through the tenure process right now. Everyone knows that nobody is worthy of tenure, by design, and that everyone deserves it, by design. It’s such a rigged system it seems comical.

But it’s a familiar rigged system, one that is related to the scene where the professor gives an extremely hard exam because he wants to feel good about himself, that he is a hard teacher, that he is playing the role of the professor as seen on many bad films, that many students will fail, and he will have to curve the result. Tenure evaluation comes from this environment where everyone is graded on a curve because nobody can meet the ridiculous standard.

How do you avoid getting the good curve? That’s easy: Concentrate on teaching, talk about it a lot, spend a lot of time with students looking at texts both in and out of the classroom. Additionally, engage in a lot of “fake writing” – keep a blog. Write for the paper. Try to get an essay in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. All of these activities will telegraph your irrelevance to the tenure process. Instead, make sure to write a difficult to read essay where arguments are left out because there is no academic citation for them, and send it to an overpriced journal for publication where it will be read by 3 people (perhaps 5 if you have a co-author). 

If we changed the tenure standards that would be exposing the open secret, which is the death of the being. The economy that keeps the whole thing going is the impossibility which keeps these publication processes alive, and keeps the fake writing at the forefront.

Real writing as I’m thinking about it is writing that is aimed for a large audience. The academic standards seem irrelevant if nobody is reading the essay except your reviewers and the editor. Seems a shame that we can’t reorient the process that way. But this might be the end of tenure. 

I’m starting to get interested in the idea of Professors of Practice and the rise of those at the university. Some people think it’s a glorified adjunct position, but once you start to look into the history of the university, the rise of the Ph.D. and the research based line, the conflict over this in the land-grant colleges, you get a better sense of how this might be a return to the university as a place for real writing and real engagement – a part of the community instead of a community in itself. Perhaps the battle for change can be quietly waged in the introductory courses under the banner of Academic Service Learning. Scholarship can be solid and be accessible, it’s a capitalist trick by the publishing process that makes us believe otherwise. 

As for me, I’m certain I’ll get tenure. The question is what to do with it. More publicity, harder writing, harder work. Tenure is the protection for the cascading failures that such work will entail.

Tenure should not be thought of as a job for perpetuity but a very rare power that allows you to enter into difficult and dangerous worlds and attempt to stake out an existence for your ideas there. Graduate school should prepare people for this by immersing them in a variety of discordant texts. Once they have been submerged just long enough to feel uncomfortable, then they should be pulled to the surface in order to present their vision of harmony constructed from their reaction to being immersed for so long. Articulating relationships is dangerous and upsetting – and tenure protects you from the fallout. It also allows you, but this is so rarely done, to change your mind about said relationships, backtrack, and dive in again, this time producing another vision. 

How and why did we start thinking of such power as a reward?

Currently I am engaged in the tenure process, a year long examination of your life to see if you are fit to hold a faculty job in perpetuity. Spoiler alert: nobody is worthy of this. Everyone is forced into the process. And graduate school teaches you that if you don’t get a job that involves this process, you are a failure not just professionally, but as a living being. So far the only good thing to come out of this process, which pretends to be serious and formal but whose outcome is already known, is that I have been thinking about and doing a lot of academic-styled writing. Variety is valuable. 

In a world where academic presses publish numerous books that don’t have a point, let alone a readership, it’s no wonder that there are stressed faces and hushed tones around me when I mention that I’m going through the tenure process right now. Everyone knows that nobody is worthy of tenure, by design, and that everyone deserves it, by design. It’s such a rigged system it seems comical.

But it’s a familiar rigged system, one that is related to the scene where the professor gives an extremely hard exam because he wants to feel good about himself, that he is a hard teacher, that he is playing the role of the professor as seen on many bad films, that many students will fail, and he will have to curve the result. Tenure evaluation comes from this environment where everyone is graded on a curve because nobody can meet the ridiculous standard.

How do you avoid getting the good curve? That’s easy: Concentrate on teaching, talk about it a lot, spend a lot of time with students looking at texts both in and out of the classroom. Additionally, engage in a lot of “fake writing” – keep a blog. Write for the paper. Try to get an essay in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. All of these activities will telegraph your irrelevance to the tenure process. Instead, make sure to write a difficult to read essay where arguments are left out because there is no academic citation for them, and send it to an overpriced journal for publication where it will be read by 3 people (perhaps 5 if you have a co-author). 

If we changed the tenure standards that would be exposing the open secret, which is the death of the being. The economy that keeps the whole thing going is the impossibility which keeps these publication processes alive, and keeps the fake writing at the forefront.

Real writing as I’m thinking about it is writing that is aimed for a large audience. The academic standards seem irrelevant if nobody is reading the essay except your reviewers and the editor. Seems a shame that we can’t reorient the process that way. But this might be the end of tenure. 

I’m starting to get interested in the idea of Professors of Practice and the rise of those at the university. Some people think it’s a glorified adjunct position, but once you start to look into the history of the university, the rise of the Ph.D. and the research based line, the conflict over this in the land-grant colleges, you get a better sense of how this might be a return to the university as a place for real writing and real engagement – a part of the community instead of a community in itself. Perhaps the battle for change can be quietly waged in the introductory courses under the banner of Academic Service Learning. Scholarship can be solid and be accessible, it’s a capitalist trick by the publishing process that makes us believe otherwise. 

As for me, I’m certain I’ll get tenure. The question is what to do with it. More publicity, harder writing, harder work. Tenure is the protection for the cascading failures that such work will entail.

Tenure should not be thought of as a job for perpetuity but a very rare power that allows you to enter into difficult and dangerous worlds and attempt to stake out an existence for your ideas there. Graduate school should prepare people for this by immersing them in a variety of discordant texts. Once they have been submerged just long enough to feel uncomfortable, then they should be pulled to the surface in order to present their vision of harmony constructed from their reaction to being immersed for so long. Articulating relationships is dangerous and upsetting – and tenure protects you from the fallout. It also allows you, but this is so rarely done, to change your mind about said relationships, backtrack, and dive in again, this time producing another vision. 

How and why did we start thinking of such power as a reward?