The New York Sophist

Debate’s structure makes structural demands on speakers. When entering a debate, one enters carrying the immense ideological weight of what you think a debate should look like. All the debates you’ve seen, all that you have thought debate is and should be, every debate you’ve hated and enjoyed – we all walk into the debate carrying these bags like a Sherpa of discourse.

This isn’t necessarily bad. In debates with friends and family, in the bar, or at work about political issues, this makes and marks the speech as a particular type. That marking of speech – your tone, speed, and intensity – communicates to interlocutors what the appropriate responses can consist of. This is why we change our tone, speed, and non-verbals when we are losing the debate or getting too frustrated and want the discourse to change. Sometimes we want to stop the conversation and indicate that through discourse.

These markers for what works and what doesn’t work are handed down to us through social practice, mired with power and the history of who, or what types of subjects, have been authorized to speak in certain ways and at certain places throughout that culture/society’s history. For example, I always ask my students what the difference is between them speaking in the front of the classroom and me speaking in the front of the classroom. We have trouble moving beyond “authorization via degree and employment” most of the time.

This is the root of the problem with the debate tournament, or as many debaters and coaches hilariously call it – “debate.” I’ve wondered how to mark my work when I’m writing and speaking about debate. Writing might be easier: I can always say there’s debate and Debate, the difference being clear. Verbally I often say debate and contest debate to show that what most debate coaches and participants/addicts mean when they talk about debate is the very narrow, very limited, very privileged, very private, and very exclusive world of the tournament debate where the public isn’t invited or even made aware it’s happening.

The demands of a tournament competition of any kind shave off practices and habits from anything that you might want to put into a tournament form. Based on how the tournament is evaluated, the strategies will change and alter toward winning. The debate tournament is the practice of eristics, or in this case the shaving off of appropriate debate moves or practices in order to win. Most judges recognize this shaving off of what would “count” in a debate outside the tournament through some metric – often a paradigm in the American tradition – and call this recognition the practice of adaptation. This is not adaptation to the audience but adaptation to the tournament, and is rewarded as such.

Debate tournaments are fine if they aren’t the only debate education available, but often they are. The only exception I can think of is Stoneman Douglas High School where all the students received their instruction through an imbedded debate curriculum. After the mass shooting it became clear that these students were well prepared to engage the public in argumentation.

I don’t think debate teaches much except how to skirt rules and policies, how to mirror an appropriate discourse when everyone is in on the game, how to sound like you care about something other than winning (eristic style), and perhaps the answer to Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal: I’m happy to play a game when I’ve seen the dice loaded because I have practice in dice loading.

Excellent debating and winning tournament rounds reifies the importance and certainty of the tournament. It doesn’t question the tournament’s existence or bring attention to what’s outside of the tournament round. Something that did that would lose every time, as it would undercut the root of the pleasure those who administrate and judge tournaments feel. It would call out their symptom. And as Lacan tells us, we will kill to preserve our symptom.

My presentation on a panel on tournament debate pedagogy at Southern States Communication Conference, April 2021

The history of American intercollegiate debate practice is mostly the tracking of metaphors. Debate instructors and debate practice has always been connected to some metaphor that communicates the value and importance of debate as an educational practice.

Since the mid 20th century, that metaphor has only been “fair competition” and further reduced to “fair tournament competition” which governs nearly every decision made in the teaching and learning of debate.

This metaphor I of course find revolting, although there is a defense of it. Tabling that, it could probably be agreed that the presence of new and better metaphors for debate instruction and practice benefits everyone who teaches and practices debate. The more and varied ways to understand what we are doing, the more and varied ways we have to innovate, try new things, and engage in visionary practices that could benefit us.

In this paper I argue that the competitive cooking show is a great metaphor for competitive debate pedagogy. I look at three shows in this short talk and discuss how and why I think they would be good metaphors. See what you think of the talk, and later on in the week (or next week) I’ll post the full paper.

I am in the process of cleaning out my apartment, which honestly I have never done, or perhaps never done well. I kept a lot of junk. Not sure why I have so much, but I think that’s what happens to you through living.

I have been digging around for some paper copies of materials I used to teach a form of debate called Irish Times Format, or “Times debating,” or “Irish debate.” In that process I found a wealth of old debate material, including one that has nothing to do with Irish debating at all, but really struck a chord. Once I realized what it was, I was transported back to that debate, 1999, somewhere in Austin, Texas.

I was judging a high school policy debate round, known in some parts of the U.S. as “Cross-Examination Debate” (a historical hold-out from the old arguments that split the NDT around 1982 and created a new organization called CEDA – the Cross Examination Debate Association). One of the members of the team walked around the semifinal room and handed out green slips of paper to everyone before the debate started, saying nothing except, “Does everyone have one?” and making sure to catch everyone who came in a bit late.

It was a powerful document, so powerful that it shaped our perception of what was being said in the debate. Once you are handed something, you generally read it. This conducted a sense of familiarity and urgency to us about the issues that were going to come up in that debate. The other team had no such contextualization, and also had to fight against the immediacy that the green slips continued to convey about the issue for the duration of the debate.

I still have mine. I kept it, as it was one of the most unique moments of argumentation I’ve experienced in a tournament debate.

I’ve zoomed in on it a bit so you can read the smaller print text. I think it’s from 1999, but not quite sure about that. I remember the room and the debate team that handed it to me. But other than that, this is really my only reccolection is this handout.

This moment stands out because it is the sort of rhetorical innovation in debating that should be a regular occurrence in debate education. However, debate education focuses on the edges of the rules and the denotation of proceedure in order to generate strategy. Any innovation is going to be kept to and within the margins of the rules.

Are there rules against handouts? None of us were sure, but it didn’t matter. This was done before the debate started when everyone was assembling to watch it. It was never referred to in any speech by the team that distributed it. It was not used as evidence during the debate. It was the perfect demonstration, in my mind, of how to connect the limitations of tournament debating with the nearly borderless world of debate.

How can debate coaches and rhetoric educators encourage this kind of invention? How can this become a norm, not an exception that stands out across 20 years of listening to and evaluating various debate contests?

Part of the solution is removing pedagogy from the drive to win the tournament. Reversing the relationship between strategies and the winning of the round or ballot is essential. Most of the time, arguments and strategies are developed in order to win debates. Consider developing arguments and strategies that you think are powerful, meaningful, important interventions in the world. Deploy them and reflect on the win or loss, or the comments and discussion after the debate as review of your argument. Make changes as needed to compensate for the position’s failure (or success that is less than you hoped). Repeat.

Using the debate tournament like an exam or the dreaded higher education word “assessment” is the clearest path to redeeming the weekend tournament. It won’t fully redeem what goes on there, but it’s a step toward the kind of innovation in argumentation that we’d expect to get from such a vast investment of time and other resources into tournament oriented debate practice.

I made the choice to change my debate course to something more active from something where we discuss and analyze the role of debate in society through the meta. In the past, students would discuss, write, and speak about various debates in a hope to evaluate the role and purpose of the discourse we call “debating” in society. I started off with a survey of the spread – very much like a fungus or mold – of the U.S. Presidential debate format around the globe. Part of this is the work of the Commission on Presidential Debates but another big realization of this gross growth is that politicians recognize what a beneficial format the U.S. Presidential debates are for them. They can say whatever, they can hide, they can claim they looked great through a future supercut. It doesn’t benefit any of us at all.

I moved away from this to something more active – a series of debates that students would perform. I felt that experiential learning would be the way to go in online debate. But I have never really taught debating in an asynchronous online format before. It’s all kind of radically new, and making me think differently about how I teach debate – particularly the assumptions I make about what’s available to us when we enter a debate.

The idea that there’s no space and time to practice arguments is one issue that I think I can address by being more lenient in terms of when a “final” speech will be due. I think that the idea of constant revision, or low-stakes debating, is the way to give students the time and space to become comfortable with their own voices and their own approach to practicing advocacy on various issues. The entirety of college becomes practice from this perspective, if you think about it. I believe that adopting a serious process of revision and practice is one of the most valuable things that a rhetorical education can give to people. So now I’m considering adopting it into all of my courses regardless of modality.

I’ve been teaching through video, and here are a couple of the lectures I’ve done so far on debating.

I just love the thumbnails that YouTube chooses for my videos

These two videos took a bit longer to produce than the standard in-class lecture. I think it’s something that I am still not adjusted to – the idea that I can’t base a lecture on the presence of students in the classroom. They provide a lot of material and a lot of indicators of where to go next when giving a lesson. Without that, I just have to look into the camera and hope they are following along well enough.

This is an argument for making much shorter talks and then gauging student opinion on where they are through some short assignments designed to measure what they got out of the video. The next one can adjust to that. I have my online public speaking course arranged like that and it works pretty well.

We are a couple of weeks away from the first debates, which will be audio or video files posted asynchronously, with plenty of time for the other side to respond. At the end I hope to edit them all together to seem like one debate, but we’ll see how well that works. It would be nice to have one contiguous file to listen to later and see if people could tell that the debate was not done in a traditional, aka “in person” format. I think they’ll be able to.

Teaching in asynchronous online format courses that have been traditionally predicated on being in person and next to one another is not a novelty, but something we should explore and create resources to address now. We are going to be using it a lot more in the future, more than we can imagine now.

The latest In the Bin Podcast is about refusal to debate, or how we understand times when we can’t debate for various reasons.

Have a listen!