The New York Sophist

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.

Debate education, like debate in most democratic/capitalist countries, is set up poorly because it is set up in opposition to a way of thinking and judging. As any first year debate student can tell you, you can’t win a debate by setting up your position as “Don’t do what they want to do.”

The debate culture that most debate educators have set up through their tournament-oriented, skill-development model is one that is attractive because it is not the daily, typical way that people debate.

Photo by Artur Shamsutdinov on Unsplash

Keep in mind the majority of argumentation theorists around the world gave up this form of modeling debate after World War 2, opting instead to base prescriptive modes of debating and arguing on what people do regularly in their daily lives. Building from, not opposed, to the ways people engage disagreement, choice, and incommensurate narratives of experience are the ways that theory and practice have gone in argumentation outside of tournament-centered pedagogy. Still, this is often presented as a wish, a normative practice that stands in opposition to the natural “bad reasoning” that people tend to do.

Debate is a vital epistemic practice that is a necessary part of the human practice of thinking through words. It has to be in there. In other words, it’s a feature not a bug. We keep treating it at every turn as a bug in the software instead of an essential part of the human program of thought.

What we need from a debating culture is a debate practice that doesn’t stand in opposition as its starting point, but stands in support of good options.

Debate at its best is an exploration of what we know and how we know it. It is an art of and for exploring good choices to ensure which one is better in this context, in this moment. Debate is a practice of learning about good feelings and ideas. It’s not a practice of heightened intelligence, or a practice of finding the best evidence, or a practice of making the best decision in a choice, or a tool for proving that an option or choice or way of thought is bad. It’s none of these things.

Debate is baked in given how prevalent confirmation bias is to our modes of thinking and given how eager we are to share our ideas about what should be done the minute we figure them out. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point this out in their book The Enigma of Reason, where their research indicates that human thought, judgement, and reason is designed to occur in groups, where people can push back on what’s presented. This pushback, and this engagement of ideas in a back-and-forth communicative environment is how human knowledge is meant to be iterated and reiterated as conditions change.

Whatever models we teach and practice should be formalized expressions of what people do naturally in reason, not stand in opposition to it. Any model of debate that bolsters itself as being “better than” everyday debating is a suspicious model, most likely crafted to generate benefits other than giving us familiarity and practice with the modes of human engagement on ideas that are a part of being human.

A desirable debating culture is one where debate, as a practice we set up and do regularly on various ideas that are not necessarily associated with a big, time-sensitive decision, must be advanced based on what it provides to us and for us, not what it isn’t. Debate itself should be a good that we compare against other discourse forms because they are also good, and in this situation and context debate is well-warranted because of what it provides to our feelings, thoughts, and knowledge about an issue.

“We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world with this phrase. In many ways, it’s a rhetorical meytonomy – container and thing contained. This phrase speaks for the entirety of how we see and evaluate education. There’s no escape from the prevalence of writing in education, and there’s no escape from the consideration of writing as education.

Photo by William Moreland on Unsplash

In speech communication rhetoric, to say we’ve dropped the ball would be to understate how poorly we have fared in expressing such importance for public speaking, argumentation, and debate. I think perhaps it’s because most of us don’t believe public speaking, argumentation, or debate matter at all. Public speaking matters because it funds our departments. Argumentation is an elective that fills seats regularly. And debate is an esoteric after-hours sport that occasionally allows the name of the department to circulate on internal PR lists, making sure that the Communication department blips on the Dean’s radar rather regularly. That’s pretty much the extent of the vision of speech communication rhetoricians, whose attention is so thinly distributed across other fields that they can’t be bothered attending to the heart of their own.

Recently it has become a universal claim of fact that the United States, and the world, have lost the ability to engage one another civilly. Not a week goes by that you don’t see an article or a new book that claims that we have lost the once vibrant and common practice of engaging one another with civil and calm tones, evaluating evidence, and allowing reason and rationality to guide our way.

A quick glance at history, particularly American political history would immediately defeat this belief. The vast history of U.S. politics has involved muscle and weapons in the persona of street gangs that were regularly courted to perform voter intimidation and violence against groups who parties thought best out of sight, sound, and mind. But historical reality has never been very influential to human minds. Why are we not using this claim of the loss of civility as a way to boost our courses in the university, community, and country?

It’s a given that any course requires speech. Even if professors are not assigning formal presentations as class assignments or assessment (hard to imagine), the need for class discussion, participation, and verbal engagement is a given in every American higher education classroom.

Yet public speaking frames itself as some odd historical reenactment of the 19th century model of city hall, the Chautauqua circuit, or some fantasy of civic engagement where anyone could stand up in front of 20 people in a room and speak about anything they like without interruption. It’s an homage to historical fiction about the United States in the tune of Normal Rockwell at best, and at worst it could not be better designed to ensure our students do not and can not participate in meaningful contemporary politics.

The Argumentation & Debate course suffers from several problems, first being the conflation of two distinctly different rhetorical forms. We would never teach a course called Zoology & Botany or Poetry & Novels. There would be some distinctions that would take up most of the class time if we did. Not so here. More to come on the importance of dividing these two forms from one another.

Debate – confined to the late-night session in the basement classroom of the communication building – is just as important as writing for all university students. We are all teachers of debate in the sense that we are all preparing our students how to present conviction to uncertain others, and how to evaluate the speech of a convinced person in relation to the speech of someone convinced in some other, exclusive way.

Professor Lionel Crocker’s many books on these arts from the 1940s

Debate is not an afterthought to consideration and research and neither is writing. Both are ways to explore meaning and certainty. Debate often will leave you less convinced of your initial position even if the listener is more convinced of it. Debate also calls to account notions of fact, dissolving them into evidence, and further dissolving them in to support. This softer read on proof is essential for critically thinking your way through political, social, business, and scientific problems.

Debate, like writing, isn’t final, but in the realm of expression. When you argue you express a commitment, but it’s not a permanent identity. You are expressing what you feel and think at that moment, given the context and situation around you. Debate involves risk but no catastrophic loss. If you are proven to have a bad idea, perhaps it was your advocacy that allowed exploration of a seemingly good idea to the point of reconsideration. Without an advocate for a position that might not be great, we cannot fully explore ideas on their own terms, and always accept them with the blind spot of our initial approach. Debate forces us to defend the obvious with well-formed words. When we teach writing we are always asking for more explanations and more detail from the writer. We don’t want to see what’s true; we want to see how it gets there and how it is made.

Writing is the most common form of evaluation in higher education today, and students are doing more writing than ever with their devices. They are negotiating the space between expression on the page or screen and who they imagine that they are. Debate does the same thing, but with the voice and immediately with others. Teaching students how to debate an issue is not teaching them how to fight, get loud, or shake their head at their opponent. It’s teaching them that taking a stand is an essential part of being human and ironically, losing a point doesn’t lose the self, it helps create it. Debate is risky because it is creative. It’s constitutive of self in surprising ways. It helps us figure out how to know what’s out there. Just like writing, it’s a practice that helps us understand our mind’s relation to self, the world, and what we think is worth sharing.

But everywhere I go
I see it all, I see it all
‘Cause everywhere I go I can’t even hide my love
I see it all, I see it all
But everywhere I go
I see it all I see it all

Everywhere I go by ALPHA 9

It’s been a couple of years since I put my debate program down like the dog it was. I was very happy to be rid of it, and a lot of that happiness came out in long lists of what was wrong with it – primarily, that I had been deceiving myself that I was teaching rhetoric. Doing it the way I was doing it was nearly purely anti-rhetorical, primarily because there’s just no way around that audience question (or lack of one period).

These long lists of what was wrong have disturbed many friends, readers, colleagues, and the like. I still maintain that I have no bigger regret in my life than the way I operated that program and what it turned out to be.

But just this past week I’ve been feeling some gratitude about the program and some of the things that I did and was permitted to do because of what I prioritized and did. I think it’s just because this was the strangest Thanksgiving I’ve had. Being alone in my apartment here is odd on holidays, primarily because I have never done it in my whole 14 years of living here.

For several years I spent Thanksgiving in Ormoz, Slovenia teaching debate with some of the most wonderful teachers I’ve been allowed to work with so far in my career. I would not have any of those memories if it were not for my hope and/or faith that this debate program would work.

I have been thinking about NCA a bit and how negative I can get about the tropes around it (people talking at the bar about going to write their paper), but if I’m honest I always leave NCA feeling somewhat inspired to work a bit harder next time or to do more research, read more, or think differently about things.

Gratitude is something that isn’t the opposite of anything, it’s bound up in everything. This is how I am experiencing it now and perhaps how I’ve always experienced it (perhaps). Even if things are pretty bad or pretty cloudy, those experiences are ones that later on you reflect on and see that you got something out of it.

These two experiences are ones that, until this year, I didn’t really associate with the Thanksgiving holiday, but they are very much connected to it for me. I didn’t feel alone or sad or frustrated at all. I was just very grateful for my past experiences, my luck, and also grateful for the holiday alone to reflect on how fortunate I was to celebrate this holiday in some pretty unique ways over the years.

The debate program wasn’t a cur, and wasn’t something to kill, but an experience that ran its course and offered much. What the quality of those offerings were depends on the attitude one has when they are approached. I still wish I hadn’t done the vast majority of the things I did in that program, but that feeling is not exclusive to feeling grateful that I had those experiences. It’s not just utilitarian – i.e. “Now I’ve learned X,” it’s also in many ways the definition of just living life.

Debate belongs in a classroom anyway, in all the classrooms, among all the students, the campus community, and so on – all the memberships present and to be formed. It’s not like I can’t generate future regrets and gratitude without the program.

Brad Smith on the University of Rochester campus, during the debate tournament held there in 2003 (My friend Ken Johnson is in the background)

Debate has been a lot of things to me, but perhaps the most (or only) valuable thing about it has been the relationships I have made with people who are also attracted to, driven by, and influence debate. Some of these people love debate and give a lot more to it than they get from it, and their contributions to debate really highlight the latent and significant educational power debate has.

Last week I learned that Brad Smith passed away. Brad was a fixture in University of Rochester debate; I believe I met him very early on in my first week of work as an assistant debate coach there in 2001. Brad’s official job was research librarian, but you wouldn’t know that. It seemed his job – or maybe his role or passion – was supporting debate at the University of Rochester. This photo was him attending the tournament that was named in his honor by previous Debate Director Sam Nelson.

Brad’s debate encounter started later in life for him. As a research librarian, he met Sam and wondered what sort of strange research this guy was doing. Unfamiliar with debating, he decided to sit in on Sam’s class and attend the team practices from time to time to see what debate was all about. He was instantly struck – inspired, or moved in some way – with a vision of the role of debate, the library, research, and education that gave him a mission and a perspective on things that he would pursue for the rest of his time there.

Brad Smith, enjoying the exciting honor of judging with me on a semifinal debate round panel at the Brad Smith Classic, c. 2003

Brad was not an argument innovator, nor was he a compelling speaker. He wasn’t a strategist of any kind. He was someone who loved researching, loved learning, and loved information. He was passionate about finding answers to questions, which is probably what he saw as best about debate – how it pushes those of us with a background in it to constantly be on the lookout for the next amazing piece of evidence. Debate can be seen as the ultimate library patron; someone who never gets tired of asking begged questions that lead to further investigations.

Brad was really nice to me. If I was in the library when he was, and I could find him we would chat – every spring he made it a point to take out the coaches who were still around after the term ended to lunch at this Ethiopian restaurant he loved. He was always interested in talking about whatever we were interested in talking about. As someone who read a lot, and was curious about a great many things, he could keep the conversation going.

At one of these lunches he told me about his childhood, growing up as a native Manhattan resident, watching them build the United Nations from his childhood apartment window. You can’t really find a better symbolic story than that for someone who would be found by debate much later, excited to contribute.

I often think about people like Brad, people who don’t have the opportunity to debate as young people, in school or college or whatever, and whether or not that’s regrettable. I think the obvious answer is that every young person should have the chance to debate, and programs should be expanded to provide these opportunities. But obvious answers should always give us pause. Maybe debate’s incredible influence, power, and goodness is not fully realized by merely expanding it in the schools, to school-aged people. As usual, we don’t really ask debate what it wants, even when debate is trying to speak to us, and getting what it wants all the time.

Brad Smith and Sam Nelson at the University of Rochester tournament in 2003.

Debate is something that humans do, it’s where humans are, and it might be too limiting to conceptualize debate as a school activity, meant for schools, and meant primarily for young people to figure out how to learn and think. It might be that we leave out an entire practice of epistemology when we conceptualize debate as a powerful and fun tool to the end of learning instead of thinking of it as learning itself.

The debate community is unfortunately limited due to the concept that members of it are simply the competitors, and most of them leave when their university or high school time expires. What about reaching out with a debate program to the other communities that compose the university, or see the university as a part of their composition?

I got to know Brad through the more open conception of a debate program that Sam practiced, and that I modeled what I did in debate after. But more importantly, Brad’s encounter with debate was one that excited him – anyone could see it when he talked about debating; when he sat in the debate class term after term. This excitement I think we all have felt about debate. The last, and continuing contribution that Brad will make to debating is to keep us thinking about who gets to feel that way and how. How are we defining participation and membership in our debate programs? What is a community?

Thanks Brad for your enthusiasm, excitement, and deep interest in debate, a model for those who respect this powerful rhetorical and educational practice that is so hard to define.