The New York Sophist

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.

The biggest issue facing the Tournament Debate Regime around the world is that they willfully exclude the educational perspective and also work to exclude educators from participating in the creation and administration of debate events.

The biggest shock during the pandemic is that debate tournaments continued, unimpeded through online means. There was no discussion and no questioning of whether or not the form of debate should alter in ways that take advantage of the online environment.

Instead, the tournament regime framed the situation as a loss, and worked out an extreme conservative solution which appears, at best, ridiculous. The speaking style of BP is inappropriate nearly anywhere in the world except an empty classroom on a weekend, but this is revealed even more plainly on Zoom.

An unavoidable principle of rhetoric is adaptation. One adapts to the context and the audience as an ethic. This ethic has at its aim to offer the perspective of the speaker in a way that allows for maximum access by those listening. But all of this is tossed by the tournament regime, whose entire goal has to be to determine who is going to win the context. There really must not be any other goal. Winning is good because it’s winning is the only operating principle that I can see from where I’m sitting.

A great way to understand this problem is through the process of how topics are chosen for tournaments. The values of novelty and shock are held above the values of reflection, reconsideration, and research.

I didn’t mean for there to be an alliteration there, but I’m happy it happened!

The people putting together debate topics and administering tournaments are competitively successful people. This is the root of their status in the debate world. They have to simultaneously be able to determine winners, create winners through coaching, and indicate they have a “special ability” in creating winning arguments. This last one is the root of topic framing problems.

The best way for a tournament regime member to prove this is to frame a ridiculous motion that 1) has never been set before and 2) involves a lot of complicated concepts that are marked as both intellectual and special.

The motives here are not educational, but professional. The motions are not designed to help others learn about argumentation and rhetoric, but help everyone realize why the motion setter has the position that they do. There’s no consideration for others and how to help others improve their understanding of how argument “works.” The attitude among the tournament regime is that education happens elsewhere (“they should know about this already” – by what standard?), that this prepares them for difficult “out rounds” (again, a reference to the motion setter’s glorious past victories and their specialized knowledge), and that we need reduction and clarity in order to declare a winner (quite literally the only thing that the tournament regime values in terms of the art of debating).

The pace and timing of the tournament also encourages this hard sports attitude to it rather than the values of education, which require time, conversation, reading, reflection, and production of texts in order to provide multiple points of assessment on whether someone is reaching understanding. All of this is dismissed in global debate; this is a test of your extant abilities and no more. And even that fails: The standards are non-existent for what those tests would be; one simply has to “be good” at debate to then have some ability to influence the content.

A more educational model of debating would not allow those who are competitively successful anywhere near the design of the event. The event should be designed around topics that are accessible, controversial, and allow for moments of reflection on the art of rhetoric, argumentation, and debate. Some of that will be lack of familiarity with various topic areas, of course. But that’s different than the tournament regime’s standard refrain: “They didn’t know about this?? Oh my God. . .”

The relationship between research, knowledge, and articulation is the value of participating in debate. This only happens through repetition, reflection, reiteration, and research (alliteration won’t leave me be today). These things are devalued in contemporary global debate because they do not serve the tournament regime’s goals: Determine winners clearly and efficiently over the course of 48 to 72 hours. It’s incredibly disappointing that the move to online debating due to the pandemic did not raise any reflective questions about the express or implicit goals of debate, the structure of the tournament as the monopoly method for participating in debate, or the innovations in speech and thought that could be included to make a more robust and interesting event.

Educators have the perspective of development, not the celebration of the developed. Debate programs struggle for support from Universities because they are obviously not related to the university project – the closest metaphor is sports. Sports programs at the university are celebrations of the “already good” people that can be recruited to play sports in the name of the university. This is the root of the tournament model, a form that is designed to quickly and efficiently determine who is best.

Compare this to the classroom or department at the university where students are taught the practice of how to determine and justify what should be best. The rubric is under inquiry at the same time as the matter for consideration. Debate, at least the rhetorical model of it, operates under the same principles. It is not truth-seeking; it is not fact-seeking – it is seeking what counts as fact and truth and understanding why those rubrics exist. To get a degree in literature, for example, is not just to understand what works of literature are best, but the genealogy of the determination as to what counts as the best in the first place. In comparison, tournament regime participants tend to believe the rules of determining who won a debate fell from the sky.

This involves covering and re-covering “old” issues as a principle of education. This doesn’t make for exciting debate contests, but it makes for exciting conversation about argument innovation and argument that can produce moments where we aren’t sure whether something is best. That question begging moment forces a return to the conversation about the rubric, which develops it. Without the attitude toward development, such moments are dismissed as “losing” arguments, and the tournament rolls forward. After all, there’s no reward for innovation if one wants to be invited to convene and create future tournament events. It’s a conservative operation of copying what previous winners have done in order to be in the position to indicate, through obscure novel motions, that they have special insight into how debate works. This perverse system means that the more debate you are successful at, the less reflection you engage in, and the more certain you can be about things you have very little experience or exposure to – mainly critical controversies around the globe.

Without the presence of education-minded people, tournament debate will be exactly what we don’t need: A system of events that give participants a way to show off what they already know, and judge others for what they don’t know. Without a practice of reconsideration and humility, tournament debate is not educational in a way that serves the creation of participants in democratic governance.

Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would.

The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate?

I explore some of these ideas here. It must be something that I’m working on quite a bit in my unconscious mind as I was able to go for the whole time.

There’s no video – most likely due to privacy concerns for students and such, but I captured the audio.

I’m a big supporter of recording all of your courses, and making sure you record and share whatever happens in the classroom with students who are in that class. There’s really no reason to miss a lecture given the technology we have these days. Students who don’t turn up in person can just listen to the audio file later on.

Also it creates some nice metrics for yourself as a lecturer; you can go back and compare what you talked about last time to this time, etc.

Comments on the lecture are welcome!

This amazing op-ed from history professor Jack Rakove is perhaps an attempt at a liberal “take down” of originalism, but winds up being a pretty good defense of an originalism that we could all support: What were the topoi and commonplaces of the debates around constitutional issues? What sort of metaphorical connections can we make to those commonplaces and topoi today? How do those arguments interact and guide us for the creation of our own reasons in support of various laws and rights? Most importantly, can a debate – not the result of a debate – be used as compelling proof for something?

Of course none of this came out in the hearings for Judge Barrett. Mostly because the people we elect to the Senate are incredibly stupid, power hungry people who do not approach the world, let alone any issue, as a complex text that invites ongoing encounter and regular reiteration of meaning. Even if an issue feels or seems unassailable, it is good to practice the reasons why, and practice them in terms of language – articulating them orally for audiences.

Originalism was pretty well defended on the last day of the hearings, day four, where everyone else was talking and not Judge Barrett and the Senators (“What do you think of this law/decision?” “Without a case before me, I cannot think about it in a relevant way to this hearing”) I know she didn’t say that, but that’s what she meant. She has a lot of opinions, a lot – just look at how many things she’s written and how many talks she’s given, for what publications and audiences. A law professor, any professor actually, has a lot to say and will never turn down a chance to say it. But that’s not why she was there in the hearing room. That’s what we all wanted, and that’s why she was there, but that’s not why she was there. It’s complicated.

It’s a bad model, having someone interview for this job the same way you’d interview for anything else. I’d argue this interview is a lot less challenging than any other professional interview out there, particularly jobs that require you to make decisions based on hearing speeches and reading voluminous texts that are interpretations of interpretations.

Anyway the fourth day – lots of conversation about Originalism and it’s value and failings. Great stuff there from Judge Thomas Griffin, who is also a law professor, on the value of originalism for progressive thinkers. His comments seem to fold right into the editorial which suggests, at least how I’m reading it, that originalism means you need to immerse yourself in the arguments of the debates around the Constitution, not what this or that founder believed.

The trouble isn’t having an interpretation or hermeneutic, the trouble is trying to explain to people that context is important and important because it is uncertain, and calls us into account to make sense of it. It calls for an accounting, which is an accounting of us. That’s what should be going on.

I want to make a video about this but haven’t had the time or energy. I’ve just been looking around for my ancient copy of The Federalist Papers which I used to carry around with me for 2 years in High School, just in case I needed it to prove something about some political argument I was having. Anyway, that old book is probably long gone, can’t find it anywhere. I might have to get a new copy which is weird to think about and also kind of fun as it will be time to mark it all up again. Would be a lot better to mark up the old one again and see how I’ve changed. But I can’t expect to still have a paperback from the 1990s around here. Right after I put in the order, I will find it somewhere I bet.

All I’d like to do this week is sit around and listen to music and read the Federalist Papers, but it’s going to be another really busy week.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates have captured the American imagination on what debate should look like, and I’m really at a loss as to why.

They were for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. Most people think they were Presidential debates. Although Stephen Douglas had presidential ambitions, they were never realized.

The Senators at that time were not determined by popular vote. The State Legislature determined the Senators, as the idea at that time was that the Senate represented State interests, and the House represented the people.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln thought a series of debates would be good self promotion, or promotion for his minority party, the Republicans. Either way Stephen Douglas’s ambitions caused him to accept the series of debates as well. Both agreed the debates would be beneficial for the people of Illinois, and for the country. They assumed they would get national attention, and they were right.

These debates, like any good debates, are a product of local circumstance, context, and controversy. It’s odd, but expected I guess that they would be transformed into a fantasy of universally good debating.

I’m against this idea that they are a universal model, but reflecting on all the discussion about them as a better alternative to the Commission on Presidential Debates got me thinking about what we can learn about good debate from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Here are a few ideas:

Debating is a performance

Although Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had no conception of broadcast media, they were keenly aware of the role of print journalism in shaping political views. The debates they offered were not just for the audience attending that particular debate, but for the journalists who would write vivid descriptions of the speeches, gestures, and delivery for their readers miles away.

Debate is not about being right or being true. It’s not about facts. It’s about communicating the reasons why you hold the position you do for the benefit of an audience. Facts and belief can only go so far. The lesson here is that the presentation might be the only thing that will allow your audience to side with you. It provides access to your position in ways that simply reading it won’t. These debaters understood that.

Moderator? What Moderator?

The Lincoln-Douglas debate series had no moderator. The two men worked out their debate schedule in a series of letters between them, both agreeing that the debates would be in the public interest. Although the Illinois Senate race would be determined in the State Legislature, they both thought these debates would help people better understand and articulate their positions on national politics, particularly the question of slavery.

Since the debates would be about singular questions offered by whichever of the two candidates would speak first, the setup was pretty clear. If someone went off the topic, the other could point this out in their response speech. The audience could also cheer, or boo, indicating to the candidate if they had overstepped the bounds of a reasonable response.

What we can learn from this is that the function of the moderator is not to assist in creating a quality debate, but to assist in the creation of an even that looks good for television. Fast paced, moving between different topics, quickly cutting from one individual back to the other, and trying to create sound bites – the mass media’s most profitable product.

The debate moderators are not helping debate, they are helping media business. They are trying to create something exciting and newsworthy. They interrupt and enforce ludicrous time limits where candidates can barely thank the moderator for the question.

Candidates should control the floor when they speak. They all have experience in courts, in legislatures, and in boardrooms. They don’t need a journalist to tell them how to do this. And we don’t need one to help keep the debate on track. All we need is a clear topic that won’t change for 90 mintues.

We Don’t Need Boutique Topics

One of the most frustrating issues I faced when teaching competitive debate was the selection of topics. In high school competition, topics are either annual or change every three months. They are selected by a committee of educators and the staff of the national organization that oversees contest debating, the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA).

At the university and college level, topics are selected by a committee that is chosen by the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and the National Debate Tournament (NDT). This committee solicits papers from the membership that argue for a topic area, cite research showing that it is valuable to debate, and suggest some resolution or topic framing ideas. The committee puts the best suggestions to a vote by members who then have a second vote on the wording.

This is all lovely and democratic in appearance, but the frustration here comes from the idea that people will be able to know what a good debate topic is. That it could be engineered in some way to be “good for debate.” The topics that are created are good for engineered, competitive debate. They help corral issues like fairness and bias in the topic, so that competitive winners of debates can be chosen. This preference ruins the ultimate value of debate: Giving us more to speak with one another about.

Debate organizations and professionals craft “boutique” topics in the same way that professional sports draw very careful white lines on a field, and make sure that the ball is inflated and sized to exacting standards. They are interested in the game being fair first, and that leads to a good game. This makes sense if you are trying to determine who is the best at an activity. For debate, they are very good at determining who is best at boutique debating. Debating outside of such landscaping and manicuring, this approach does not work. To truly learn and benefit from debate, it must be a messy combination of what people find controversial and how the debaters take up that controversy for them, not for any set of rules.

Lincoln and Douglas chose topics that were on the top of everyone’s mind, and they did so by drawing directly from the national conversation. They took these issues and broadened them. A good contemporary example of the sort of thing they did would be to take the issue of the COVID pandemic, and instead of debating it directly, in terms of government response, the question could be “Is this how a democracy should handle a pandemic?” or perhaps “The States should determine their own pandemic policy based on Federal government advice.” Something like that would be more in-line with the Lincoln-Douglas debate topics, although since they were given 30 minutes to ask the question, it’s hard for our 21st century minds to understand how that would be possible.

The best topics come right out of the controversies in front of us and need no engineering. They don’t have to be made; they are all around us. They are messy, but that’s a great place to form a strong position on what we should be doing or thinking. National educational debate organizations like CEDA-NDT or the NSDA are not interested in debate, they are interested in creating contests that excite students. What debate wants and needs is secondary. Lincoln and Douglas show us that the best kinds of debate allow the audience to refine their beliefs and then select a winner, not select a winner based on how well they supported a side under a boutique topic crafted by supposed debate experts.

A Mediated Approach is Better than a Media Approach

Contemporary debates are rushed due to the costs of TV and people’s low attention spans. The Commission has fought this problem for it’s entire existence. But it begs the question: Why are these debates televised?

When we look to other organizations that craft and create professional debates, they diversify: The Munk Debates have podcast debates as well as a YouTube presence. So does the TED debates, and Doha. Intelligence Squared pioneered this multi-pronged approach years ago (I happened to appear on one of those and it was quite fun, but I think the link has been lost to time). The Commission on Presidential debates seems clueless in this regard, producing only 3 televised debates every four years.

Lincoln and Douglas can teach us an alternative, and that is to hyper-mediate one event through awareness of the different audiences out there for such an event.

First, there’s the debate audience present and attending the debate itself. Second, there are the newspaper and magazine reporters there covering it. Third, there are the reporters for the party-owned and controlled newspapers, something we don’t talk about enough in American political history.

Lincoln and Douglas were very clever, and made sure to address all three levels of audience at once. This takes a lot of talent and practice, and the two men were obviously aware that how they said particular arguments might be ignored by some journalists as hyperbole, but eaten up by the party presses. Likewise, something of local color and interest for the crowd would be reported in national papers, but maybe not of such interest to the party journalists. And angry aggressive speech would be reported on in mocking tones by the opposite party journalists.

This awareness is a keen recognition of a multilayered audience situation, and that one must mediate one’s speech in order to reach all the audiences appropriately. Today we think of this as modality, as a podcast will be cut and edited differently from a TV broadcast, as will a blog or other print medium. Lincoln and Douglas show us that you can do this by speaking in ways that accommodate a number of different media to get the perspective you want for the audience you want to reach. Instead of letting the media control what the debates look like, let candidates do it by having an engaging event with one another, and allow them to speak in the ways they wish to reach the audiences they wish to reach.

Take Your Time

There are two really excellent books on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that stand out. One is by Allen Guelzo, the other by David Zarefsky. In the Zarefsky book, he highlights an interesting moment in the debates where Abraham Lincoln is oddly surprised by the question Senator Douglas asks him. He pauses, then informs the audience that he would like to check on a few facts in the town library before he gives an answer. Everyone agrees, and the debate disperses. A few hours later, Lincoln, Douglas, and the crowd re-assemble, and the debate continues, with Lincoln offering his answer.

Everyone is better off with the addition of reflective research and adaptive thinking. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, both candidates were kept on their toes by one another, trying to second guess what their responses might be and changing the questions to try to see if they could force an error. Likewise, each man had to read and keep up with the law, the public opinion, and the courts to keep the debates relevant through research accuracy.

Contrast this to the Commission on Presidential Debates blocking the candidate use of notes or other aids to memory. This leads to both participants practicing repeating stock phrases, campaign trail slogans, and the like. Since things cannot be looked up on a laptop computer or phone, we are just left with assertions from memory from both candidates. Journalists and publications serve as “fact-checkers,” but this doesn’t help improve the quality, or force, of the debate itself. It’s sort of like finding out an important ingredient was missing after you ate a meal – disappointing no matter what.

Instead, let the candidates follow Lincoln’s lead and look things up during the debate. The sign of intelligence is not perfect recall without consulting anything, but instead deferring to research to ensure one has a grounded thought. But the Commission wants a good TV show, and looking smug and not needing notes apparently is what they think we are excited to see. I just wish they would give us what we need instead.

Those are some of the lessons here, but now I’m sort of inspired to go back over my Lincoln-Douglas debate materials and see what else I can find. I might post more about this later, but for now, I really just would like us to reflect on why an obscure set of Senate debates from the 1850s seem so much better than our debates in 2020. What does this say about the direction our political discourse is headed?