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.

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!

If I have one thing that I want to establish over the course of next year is the elimination of the phrase “public debate.”

I used this term a lot without understanding the full implications of the insidious nature of this phrase. It’s used by those who are deeply involved in the world of tournament-contest debating in order to make what they do legitimate.

You will never hear those who support tournament debate call their work “tournament debate” – they use the term “debate” for it, referring to things made for general audiences as “public debate.” This is no accident.

What this does is make debate that is created for audiences about publicly interesting topics appear to be the diminished, non-real, trivial form of debating. “Real” debating is for elites; it is for those who know what true debate looks like. It takes years of hard work to master. It’s an exclusive realm for debate experts. Not only do they know the right arguments, they know the right topics too.

This is in direct contradiction to the art of rhetoric, which is always about audiences. The measure of a good argument is whether the audience buys it. It’s a thwarting of “real” debate to totally remove audience from the picture and then claim that you are studying how to make good speeches to move minds on an issue.

The centering of the bizarre practice of tournaments-as-debate has been accepted without critique by most rhetoric and communication scholars. To resist the centering of a very limited and very anti-rhetorical practice of debate, I believe we should stop saying “public debate.” The reason why is that debate necessitates a public in the form of the audience, which serves as a synecdoche for the public.

Instead of saying “public debate,” let’s indicate that this is “real” debate by calling it “debate.” That is, any debate for an audience on an issue that most debate coaches and tournament champions would consider boring, too simple, unfair, or “played out” is what debate is, and where it lives best (bios). And yes, debate can be characterized as a living thing. More on that in a future post.

For the tournament-centric model of debate, we should push that from the center by calling it “contest debate” or “sport debate.” I don’t think there will be much objection from the tournament-centric participants as they already envision themselves as participating in something they already envision as a metaphor of American intercollegiate football. The approach says it all.

Perhaps this is a triviality or a strange bone to pick. I believe in the power of words, the power of naming. For too long we in the debate world have used the phrase “public debate” without understanding it’s full and sinister implication of removing debate from the discourse forms that everyone should be able to engage in productively. By making it something elite, something that requires the ample time and resources of privilege to master, we have done a disservice to rhetoric, to communication. Perhaps a renaming is all we need to start a revolution in conceptualizing debate where it should be: Something base, something everyday, and something that anyone and everyone should be able to practice in their daily lives. Contest debate doesn’t offer that. We don’t casually hold pick-up debates like we do with basketball and football, even though there’s an NFL and an NBA? Why? There’s a lot less insecurity there, and a recognition that practicing the art, no matter the skill level, or the reason, is valuable. Tournament debate professionals have missed that insight by dismissing debate’s place, it’s heart – the art of rhetoric.

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.