The New York Sophist

I have a debate course nearly oversubscribed starting in a week. The course is a part of the University's new committment to having social justice imbedded in the curriculum.

I'm interested to see what topics they would like to turn into motions, and off we go. I'm teaching some light policy debate theory because it really does present some nice grounding for the students to figure out how to engage one another instead of just announcing the facts. 

I'm entering the class with one question: What is social justice? Would we know it if we saw it, or is that too easy? Is it a process, a moral attitude, a policy framework - what? 

I think I'll intervene with some ideas from the de-incarceration movement as well as questions about power and the U.S. Constitution - are the rights outlined in this document a good guideline or fundamental rights? 

I hope the students find the class valuable in a University and higher education system that communicate with great clarity, daily, how little they value the transformative, creative student experience and paint a future of having the attitude of consumerism, the attitude of a commodity, and the only path to success is being a commodity that consumes other commodities. 

The biggest problem in teaching right now is students. Not the people in the classroom who have paid (or someone paid) for them to be there, but the idea or conception of student itself. The notion of “students” as distinct from “teacher” is obvious but there are deeper implications here, such as student as different than adult, worker, person, neighbor, etc.

Having a conception of “students” that is not different from nor in opposition to other modalities of being and identity is the biggest barrier to empowering higher education. Currently, the notion of “student” is shorthand for “proto-careerist” or something like that (not exactly pleased with this naming; took a bit to settle on this naming). It reminds me of being 23 in my first job as a teacher in high school chatting with another young teacher about how difficult it was to keep conversations going with women after you answer the question “what do you do?” We tried to come up with a good synonym for “teacher” – which for a lot of good reasons really turns people off as it’s identification with a type or a kind of person out there; a stereotype perhaps but with a powerful grip on the mind’s eye – so a stereotype then. We settled on “manufacturing semi-furbished replacement parts for American society.” At the time hilarious but now the standard motive as revealed in the way that universities talk about students, each other, and themselves as institutions.

Faculty aren’t much better, spending a lot of time chatting to one another about how their students cannot seem to do anything that they would like them to do. Ironically, most faculty wish themselves into irrelevance in these conversations, most notably when teachers of writing, critical thought, or reading are upset that their students cannot do the things that it seems they are in the class to learn how to do. The “students” are incapable of assumed basic abilities and tasks that somewhere someone has assumed they would be able to do when they arrive in class. Often this seems to spill over into the job of the professor-as-teacher, which these conversations reveal most professors would be happy not to do.

Faculty talk about students as a vulgar herd of frustration punctuated with little stories about some people in the class who are “the good ones,” often only because they were obedient, or had some power to determine what the professor really wanted by being able to interpret overwrought assignment instructions, often written in a style or manner that would not pass that professor’s own standards. The idea that faculty can and often do discuss the silver lining popping through the cloudy sky of teaching should give us hope, but too often these narratives are used to reinforce this idea that the vast majority of students are problems who interfere in their own education to a point where the faculty can’t do anything about it. In short: Students come predestined for failure or success.

Is there a way to think about your students, or students, or those who are the reason the University exists – hard to hear for most faculty but perhaps the truest thing you’ll read today – that is inclusive of other identities and motives rather than exclusive? We tend to think of the student as lacking capacity and ability. Could there be a way to think of the identity of student as containing capacities rather than being the marker of an empty space?

The re-conception of the classroom as a place that is not meant for correction but construction is my favorite approach: What can we build together from what we brought with us to this place? Another way would be to ask what we can do, as an assembled group, with the time and place given to us?

These questions move us away from the diminutive “student” identification and towards the shared identification of a community, where everyone has capacities and incapacitates, abilities and inabilities, and through the mix of these various things we develop something that all the members of the community can benefit from. Of course, the nature of this thing, it’s benefits and harms, and its longevity are always the subjects of deliberation and debate in healthy communities. Since they are not known capacities, not really measurable in a way that would immediately satisfy everyone (for these joys and deficits always come to us and others in mediation) so they must consistently be discussed when the exigence is identified and made known to everyone. In this way, the class is the “diorama” of larger community behavior and practice where most of what goes on is discussion about things done and things that need to be done.

Seems like learning to me.

We are told continuously through the pandemic that students are demanding an “in person” experience for their education. The university is not a remote workplace, and online education is not and never will replace the in person teaching experience.

This demand is often couched in the terms of market economics. Education is easily considered a product (I don’t even think there’s a metaphor here, at all) and students are customers there to consume a product. If they are unhappy, and they don’t enroll in courses, then there’s something wrong with the product and it should be adapted to what the customers want.

All of this makes sense if you accept that education is a product, and not the place that allows us to imagine, iterate (and reimagine and reiterate) the principles by which we would like to, should, or fail to organize human experiences in the world. What sort of product is that?

Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

What sort of product or market forces can be used to evaluate the quality of a space that allows for the practice and development of human imagination?

This question, big as it is, is never considered. It’s never brought up. The university sees itself as responsible for making the best possible product for students to pay tuition for, and their satisfaction isn’t necessary connected with this larger question – a blend of rhetoric and ethics that we might term praxis.

What are students claiming is missing? Familiarity. The demand for the in-person educational experience is not a demand for higher quality. It’s demand for a recognizable quality. Very much like how Coca Cola reverse engineers water sources to match the Atlanta water supply (for good and bad) worldwide, and how McDonald’s adds and subtracts elements from food production worldwide for consistency and customer expectation, students want the classroom, for good or bad, for purity or impurity, to resemble what their expectations are. They want to feel comfortable.

This might not be such a bad demand if met correctly. After all, we want our students in a good mental and physical space to be able to find pathways to engage with the material. But this comfort is more of a strategy than anything else. They want the familiar classroom because in there they have access to a familiar politics of figuring out the class – what they need to do and what is mere professor bloviation, wierdness, or eccentric demand. After all, the familiar classroom is a market – students want to buy As at the lowest possible exchange rate, where they exchange their time and energy for points.

The in person classroom is not immediate; it is highly mediated by this philosophy of a currency exchange. On top of that, it’s highly mediated by the expectations that students and faculty enter that space carrying from film, television, and popular culture. As one of humanity’s most common experiences, being in a classroom has been saddled with expectations of all kinds, which modify behavior in comfortable, understandable ways. These modifications, along with the ultimate goal of “buy low” create a difficult environment to encourage any sort of radical engagement of the mind.

When we accept the student demand for the in person course as a request for higher quality instruction, or more immediate and personal instruction, we are accepting the claim on the basis of equivocation. The begged question here is who gets to determine quality? The question of mediation is settled; you can count on one hand the human spaces that are equivalently mediated like the classroom. We have no access to a classroom, or an in person educational experience, that can avoid the weight of expectation. We must understand that students prefer the in person class because it is comfortable, familiar, and well mapped – all the routes are known, and the steps are familiar.

The necessity of education to be a rupture, a transformation, or a classically revolutionary experience requires disruption of the familiar and comfortable in ways that are not distressing, but recognizable as different. Online education has done that to faculty and to students. And for those who have tried to do something that works for this forced environment, they now are wondering if they can ever return to the traditional classroom as it was. For those who tried to replicate the in person experience, this was the most frustrating and disappointing times of their career. What this moment can be is the recognition that the demands of education, a valuable education, requires deep skepticism about the role you have, the role you think you have, and the role that is filtering everything you say and do in a classroom, whether you are a teacher or a student.

The title of this post is a note I often get. I thought I’d make my common response public.

Don’t hire a debate coach to run your debate program. Don’t hire someone who has a record of tournament success.

Instead, hire someone who is a radical teacher, someone who is a critical pedagogue. You want someone who recognizes that the classroom, and the “outside the classroom” exist in a yin-yang relationship. Hire someone who is frustrated by the college classroom not because they have to be in there teaching public speaking, but because they are frustrated by the innate design flaws of such a system of teaching.

The outstanding debate program is one that supercharges your existing communication curriculum by providing engagement with populations, communities, and people in the world through rhetoric, oratory, and speech. The students who opt in for debate programs take what they get excited about in the communication curriculum out to these communities, they roll it around, and bring it back covered in insight from the audiences (and sometimes opponents) they encounter there.

In short, a debate coach is someone who is committed to creating students successful at navigating and mastering the norms of the debate tournament – an extant group of people who want to fold others into their norms of thought and speech. These norms unfortunately serve the norms of what makes tournaments work well, not what makes rhetoric work well, and certainly not open to the idea that we are being operated by these norms, put “through the motions” of speech and argument, spun like a top by the ideological commitment to tournament debating.

What you want is someone who is committed to teaching in a way that they find the classroom incomplete – it’s too antiseptic to be meaningful for teaching. They are someone familiar with student-centered, active and creative engagement, and have a healthy respect for assessment and rubric design over grading.

The model for a good debate program is the writing center. Over the past 40 or so years, the academic conversation among writing centers and writing instructors has moved to a place of student-focused creation of texts and their interaction with communities and ideology. Debate, as it’s practiced now, is more like 1950s or 1960s composition, where modality is taught, and the correspondence to a set of rules for modality is the sign of good writing. Debate though only has one modality to teach, and that’s what the tournament calls a “good argument.” At all BP or World’s competitions, for example, the notion of fairness of a motion is always held above any other conception of the motion.

If your university is considering a debate hire, or a debate program, hire a teacher who wants to create additional opportunities for students to engage other communities with the rhetorical and communication concepts that are taught in your classes. Have them return and share with these classes what they experienced. This model keeps argument, rhetoric, speech, oratory, and communication theory alive. It’s praxis, one of the best governing principles we have for determining if our pedagogy is sound.

I wave off most people from trying to hire a tournament-forged debate coach type. It’s better to hire a generalist in research who loves to teach, and the department can empower that person with a budget and some faculty-determined goals for the debate program. The rest should come as most of the best pedagogy does, action and reflection on that action to create theory that governs another action. This will provide the entirety of the students in the department with the benefits of an engaged learning program based on external partnerships. Perhaps the writing center mixed with an ecology program? A day trip to the forest, the wetlands, or the shore seems like a good metaphor for what I’m suggesting.

The last thing political discourse needs right now is a program that encourages people to believe that they have found the “right way” to argue, “real” debate, or any other such nonsense. What is needed are experiences to remind ourselves, and our students, how incredibly difficult it is to stand before an audience and offer them reasons to alter their attitudes about something. This moment never gets old, never is easy, and most importantly, is never the same. Debate education based on rules of fairness will never prepare people for this moment, it will only serve to encourage them to dismiss it in favor of other rules-based argumentation environments, such as the law. This fetishism doesn’t help create practice in the messy and frustrating necessity of debating in a democracy, which could be conceived of as a continuous “adaptation of adapting,” or the moments where you feel that pressure that you have to account for your position on something with mere words alone, nothing else.