The New York Sophist

Circle-no-questions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why do I feel that coming to an event like this, ostensibly only about debating, do I find more people interested in my research and interested in my writing than I found among the professors in my field that I studied with in graduate school?

Why is it that “the choice” – that you have to either become a debate coach OR a scholar, seem so incredibly silly when I am at these events? 


Perhaps it’s because that NCA or field of rhetoric “old guard” who assume debate is for immature thinkers to gain maturity, or for students to be introduced to rhetorical or communication theory, but after that it really is for those malformed thinkers that could have been scholars, but failed/chose not too/couldn’t cut it, are not present, and would never be present at an event that centers around teenage students, high school students, or beginning undergraduates. If this is true, how do you persuade these reviewers that debate, as a practice, as a living thing, is just as valuable as the discourse of Mitt Romney for the study of rhetoric? Does pointing at how English Composition departments are ahead of us in this respect help?


Why is it so clear that there is a field-wide bias against debate in the scholarship of the field of rhetoric, mostly perpetuated by senior scholars who either practiced debate as an undergraduate, or perhaps couldn’t “cut it” as debaters, like the negativity I experienced toward debating as an undergraduate from particular scholars in my rhetoric department at that time?

Flipping the classroom is a popular idea in teaching right now. Could debate serve as a place which we can innovate, as it traditionally has in the field of rhetoric, by flipping the scholarship of the field in an analogous way? Imagine journals containing the narratives of experiential learning from debaters that are explored in the 50 minutes of your University class for connections or disruptions to theories that often take on no more reality for students than that of a spectral powerpoint slide?

How do you persuade scholars of argument that they have the best living laboratory in which to workshop ideas, test theories, and explore the limits of propositional argumentation as an idea every weekend at a campus near them?

Circle-no-questions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why do I feel that coming to an event like this, ostensibly only about debating, do I find more people interested in my research and interested in my writing than I found among the professors in my field that I studied with in graduate school?

Why is it that “the choice” – that you have to either become a debate coach OR a scholar, seem so incredibly silly when I am at these events? 


Perhaps it’s because that NCA or field of rhetoric “old guard” who assume debate is for immature thinkers to gain maturity, or for students to be introduced to rhetorical or communication theory, but after that it really is for those malformed thinkers that could have been scholars, but failed/chose not too/couldn’t cut it, are not present, and would never be present at an event that centers around teenage students, high school students, or beginning undergraduates. If this is true, how do you persuade these reviewers that debate, as a practice, as a living thing, is just as valuable as the discourse of Mitt Romney for the study of rhetoric? Does pointing at how English Composition departments are ahead of us in this respect help?


Why is it so clear that there is a field-wide bias against debate in the scholarship of the field of rhetoric, mostly perpetuated by senior scholars who either practiced debate as an undergraduate, or perhaps couldn’t “cut it” as debaters, like the negativity I experienced toward debating as an undergraduate from particular scholars in my rhetoric department at that time?

Flipping the classroom is a popular idea in teaching right now. Could debate serve as a place which we can innovate, as it traditionally has in the field of rhetoric, by flipping the scholarship of the field in an analogous way? Imagine journals containing the narratives of experiential learning from debaters that are explored in the 50 minutes of your University class for connections or disruptions to theories that often take on no more reality for students than that of a spectral powerpoint slide?

How do you persuade scholars of argument that they have the best living laboratory in which to workshop ideas, test theories, and explore the limits of propositional argumentation as an idea every weekend at a campus near them?

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now, after just having written about how I think debate videos are bad, let me explain why I think it is incredibly important to keep making them.

A couple of months ago, my external hard disk died very suddenly. I was really sad about it, because I knew I had lost some data I didn’t back up. I wasn’t exactly sure what was on that disk, but that’s what I get for not backing up regularly.

I didn’t throw it away, just kept it on a shelf and forgot about it.  The other day I plugged it in and it worked!

On this disk were a lot of debate videos. But not just rounds, videos of people between rounds, videos of conversations about debates, and other such material.  I started uploading it to the cloud right away as I wasn’t sure when this HDD would fail again.

The videos are pretty silly – lots of post round conversation, lots of practices and practice speeches, all kinds of debate rounds from various tournaments that, for whatever reason, I never got around to uploading. Looking at some of them made me realize that I’ve been here at St. John’s for longer than I concieve of it in my mind, and it made me a bit nostalgic for the early days.

However, this material is a lot more valuable than just that. These videos are our history. They are a set of practices and norms of communication. These videos are a record of those practices that we take for granted. In the future, they might be eye-opening for people interested in our communicative norms or our approach to debating.

We are lucky to be participating in global debate at a time when digital video is inexpensive and storage media are decreasing in cost. It’s time to start considering seriously the idea of a digital archive for debating.

The most frustrating thing that I have had to deal with in recent years was arriving at St. John’s University to reboot (using the term like they do in film) the debate program. The previous director retired, and left not one piece of paper or any type of information about the team anywhere.

This was frustrating because I knew what it meant: I was going to have to re-invent the wheel. I was going to have to chase down every dead end that he probably did. Audio video technology did not exist in the easy and cheap form it does for us, but what about some notes? Handwritten acccounts or reflections? Meeting minutes? History, if it is anything, are records of practices.

But more important than that is all the lost stories about the old team. In our Debate Facility which we call the Debate Dojo, there are numerous trophies extending back to the 1950s. They sit as silent witnesses to a team dynamic that may well be lost. It might seem hard to believe, but practitioners of debate in 20 or 30 years from now might really want to know what it was like to be at your IV, or be a member of your debate club. In a couple of hundred years, who knows what might interest those people. The videos we produce and preserve seem somewhat silly to us, but future practitioners will find them incredibly valuable.

I’m trying to recover those stories by starting a program of interviewing alumni and trying to get a sense of what it was like to be on the team during different eras. I try to shoot some candid conversation shots here and there to get a sense of what’s on peoples’ minds. I also, of course, shoot as many debates as I can. Even looking at some of these older debates gives me a sense of the trajectory of style in debating here in the Northeastern U.S. It might turn out to be an interesting catalog of the changes in persuasive style over the years.

At the University of Pittsburgh, where I received my Ph.D., there is a cabinet in a small room near the debate squad room. Years ago, a coach of the William Pitt Debating Union decided to record public debates on a reel to reel tape player. I found a player and tried to archive these recordings to mp3 in order to start a digital debate history project. Unfortunately, my time was limited and I was unable to see the project through.

In my view, it’s great that those tapes exist whether many people can listen to them or not. At least someone can listen to them and get a sense of what debate was like in the 1950s. I listened to several debates between Pitt and the University of Vermont – and they were nothing like any style of debate that currently exists. More than that, these recordings are amazing evidence of the practices of a different era. Listening to them and thinking about them provide an irreplaceable way to reflect on your own practices, to see what was valued and what we value now in debating.

I think it’s vital we create digital archives similar to this analog one that sits in Pittsburgh. Here at St. John’s we have a new graduate program in public history. These graduate students will be working with new methods for digital archive and information preservation. I hope to get them interested in my project and provide a nice resource for those interested in working on the history of debate practices. We might not think it matters, and we might even feel strange about making these recordings. But in 100 years some scholar will look at them and gasp – for she will have seen something that makes our era click for her in a way that allows a greater understanding of what we are up to for these people who we will never meet (but would love to).

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now, after just having written about how I think debate videos are bad, let me explain why I think it is incredibly important to keep making them.

A couple of months ago, my external hard disk died very suddenly. I was really sad about it, because I knew I had lost some data I didn’t back up. I wasn’t exactly sure what was on that disk, but that’s what I get for not backing up regularly.

I didn’t throw it away, just kept it on a shelf and forgot about it.  The other day I plugged it in and it worked!

On this disk were a lot of debate videos. But not just rounds, videos of people between rounds, videos of conversations about debates, and other such material.  I started uploading it to the cloud right away as I wasn’t sure when this HDD would fail again.

The videos are pretty silly – lots of post round conversation, lots of practices and practice speeches, all kinds of debate rounds from various tournaments that, for whatever reason, I never got around to uploading. Looking at some of them made me realize that I’ve been here at St. John’s for longer than I concieve of it in my mind, and it made me a bit nostalgic for the early days.

However, this material is a lot more valuable than just that. These videos are our history. They are a set of practices and norms of communication. These videos are a record of those practices that we take for granted. In the future, they might be eye-opening for people interested in our communicative norms or our approach to debating.

We are lucky to be participating in global debate at a time when digital video is inexpensive and storage media are decreasing in cost. It’s time to start considering seriously the idea of a digital archive for debating.

The most frustrating thing that I have had to deal with in recent years was arriving at St. John’s University to reboot (using the term like they do in film) the debate program. The previous director retired, and left not one piece of paper or any type of information about the team anywhere.

This was frustrating because I knew what it meant: I was going to have to re-invent the wheel. I was going to have to chase down every dead end that he probably did. Audio video technology did not exist in the easy and cheap form it does for us, but what about some notes? Handwritten acccounts or reflections? Meeting minutes? History, if it is anything, are records of practices.

But more important than that is all the lost stories about the old team. In our Debate Facility which we call the Debate Dojo, there are numerous trophies extending back to the 1950s. They sit as silent witnesses to a team dynamic that may well be lost. It might seem hard to believe, but practitioners of debate in 20 or 30 years from now might really want to know what it was like to be at your IV, or be a member of your debate club. In a couple of hundred years, who knows what might interest those people. The videos we produce and preserve seem somewhat silly to us, but future practitioners will find them incredibly valuable.

I’m trying to recover those stories by starting a program of interviewing alumni and trying to get a sense of what it was like to be on the team during different eras. I try to shoot some candid conversation shots here and there to get a sense of what’s on peoples’ minds. I also, of course, shoot as many debates as I can. Even looking at some of these older debates gives me a sense of the trajectory of style in debating here in the Northeastern U.S. It might turn out to be an interesting catalog of the changes in persuasive style over the years.

At the University of Pittsburgh, where I received my Ph.D., there is a cabinet in a small room near the debate squad room. Years ago, a coach of the William Pitt Debating Union decided to record public debates on a reel to reel tape player. I found a player and tried to archive these recordings to mp3 in order to start a digital debate history project. Unfortunately, my time was limited and I was unable to see the project through.

In my view, it’s great that those tapes exist whether many people can listen to them or not. At least someone can listen to them and get a sense of what debate was like in the 1950s. I listened to several debates between Pitt and the University of Vermont – and they were nothing like any style of debate that currently exists. More than that, these recordings are amazing evidence of the practices of a different era. Listening to them and thinking about them provide an irreplaceable way to reflect on your own practices, to see what was valued and what we value now in debating.

I think it’s vital we create digital archives similar to this analog one that sits in Pittsburgh. Here at St. John’s we have a new graduate program in public history. These graduate students will be working with new methods for digital archive and information preservation. I hope to get them interested in my project and provide a nice resource for those interested in working on the history of debate practices. We might not think it matters, and we might even feel strange about making these recordings. But in 100 years some scholar will look at them and gasp – for she will have seen something that makes our era click for her in a way that allows a greater understanding of what we are up to for these people who we will never meet (but would love to).

It’s late and I should have gone home a while ago. I did plan on going straight home but it’s just too tempting to go talk and have a drink with my fantastic colleague and a brilliant graduate student (and former student of her’s).

We are talking about strategy, for the most part. How to approach difficult situations and how to act in the best sense, given a dicey situation. The University is full of such moments and such issues. And normally, I love thinking about strategy.

For most of my life one book has governed my approach to it. That book is Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. And if you have spoken to me for around ninety seconds, you know this book is very central to my way of thinking.

Musashi identifies strategy as central to the art of being a samurai. However, this is not his major point. He defines strategy as being “all things with no teacher.” Suddenly, strategy seems to be the ideal of the University. Well, the ideal of a University that used to be, and an ideal they never quite live up to. We might be too specialized for this to really be a thing we do anymore, but I like to hold out hope and be naive. You’ll get that if you talk to me for thirty seconds.

This fantastic conversation reminded me why I dig what I do. But also, through the course of it, I kept thinking about a book that is marginally related, but quite a split away from Musashi’s book: Shantideva‘s The Way of the Bodhisattva.  This book is about how to develop an enlightened sense of relation to others – and basically suggests that you connect to both your impermanence and the impermanence of others while at the same time recognizing the limitless potential of each moment of existence. Basically, realize that you are the Universe, and that you are inevitably going to end one day. How could you hold a grudge, or begrudge others if you realize that?  


I kept thinking about that book and about the approaches in that book for developing Bodhisattva consciousness – basically a kind heart. Musashi isn’t really into that, surprisingly enough. He is much more into being fluid and flexible and rolling with the moment so you can beat others in combat.  But he’s also suggesting the use of this idea for the creation of paintings, poetry, art and other works.

It was my colleague who then brought up Levinas as a response to a discussion about Camus and his question of why not suicide. Levinas, someone who I should pay more attention to, sort of showed me through her comments that these books are not as unrelated as I made them out to be in my mind.

Strategy: Have I had the wrong book this whole time? Probably not. I have had both books on my shelf for many years. After this night though, I have them much closer to one another.

To be strategic just might include struggling to understand why you consider yourself so distinct from the Universe. To deploy strategy might be to take actions that lead to better understanding of yourself no matter what happens.

This might make it impossible to lose a debate. But that is for another post.

“My enemies shall cease to be. My friends
and I myself shall one day cease to be. And
all is likewise destined for destruction.”

This quote from Shantideva is one of my favorites. If all things are related in their fundamental and inevitable end, why hold so tightly to them?

Perhaps the practice of debate helps to address this question. But remember: I am hopeful and naive. A better answer would be – Perhaps debate helps us ask this question in a better way.

Debate as a practice of realizing your fragility, your impossible existence and your inevitable demise. Debate as a struggle with the self as subject. This is a model of debate practice I can get behind.

Is it contradictory to Musashi’s teachings?

At first thought, no, not that much. Upon deeper reflection, not at all. But Musashi’s spirituality/theology is less developed than Shantideva’s – writing a long time before Musashi, and from within a religion that had not gone through the temporal, political, and cultural filters that allowed it to diffuse into Musashi’s flavor of Buddhism – Zen.

A defense of debating from non individualistic, fatalistic premises. Now that could never be a bad book from which to start teaching advocacy.