The Finale of the First On Campus Public Debate Series

Here is the video from our last of the first public debate series we held on campus this semester. It was a fully student organized, student led, and student run initiative. And it was a great success I think, except that I would have liked more people to come. But I always feel this way about any and every public debate event with which I am associated.

I like the abilities that debate training fosters in people. Student initiatives like this one are great forums for that initiative to come out. They are also good moments to practice persuasion in front of general audiences (read: non-tournament). They also force people who are strongly invested in individualism, forwarding their own ideas, finding flaws in others’ ideas, etc. to work together and find more strategic ways to interact with other intellectuals outside of a “I must demolish your ideas to make way for mine” perspective. It’s debate eroding its own creation to create new growth. Yes, public debate projects are forest fires in national parks.
A public debate series serves the students and community if it is attentive to actual controversy and brings it in a clearly adversarial format to the audience. This way, audience members can find clear and intellectual expression of feelings they may have about controversial issues. The current climate eschews such engagement in favor of diminutive models of discussion. This breeds a seething hate for political opponents instead of a strategic willingness to explore. Public debates take the edge off a bit, and can be enlightening to audiences on many levels. They can certainly steal argument structure for their own purposes, or look into an argument they believe to be persuasive after the debate ends. I wonder if they do either. How would you study this?
Perhaps we will do this again. I think it has the potential to continue indefinitely. Whoever takes charge of it next year has quite the nice foundation to build upon.

Closed Adjudication and the Ballance of Learning


Things are ramping up toward the white party tonight and the grand final round of WUDC 2010. Great tournament and great people.

Been thinking a bit about the final closed rounds. Closed adjudication is something we rarely, if ever do in the Northeast BP region of the United States. I have usually been against it, only supporting it as a cultural norm from IONA, or the global BP community tradition.

Closed adjudication seems to be a terrible overvaluing of the competitive elements of debate over the pedagogical. Its function seems to be to keep debaters puzzled and hanging on to hope while their chances to learn something from their judges quickly bleed away as the time at the tournaament diminishes into socials and other important things.

This is my standard view of closed adjudication, but here at Koc Worlds I have been presented with some of the reasons for it, and I find them convincing.

First, closed adjudication ensures that teams don’t give up and leave. Here we are in a great, exotic locale, why bother debating on if there’s no chance to clear? Many teams would simply withdraw from the tab and be running around the city. Seems a bit far fetched to me, but I think that there would be some teams who might just decide to hang out at the bar once it was statistically impossible for them to break. The tournament certainly cannot provide enough swing teams to cover all of these possibilities.

An additional concern is that some teams might be bitter about their non-breaking status and deliberately ruin the debates that they are in. This of course destroys the chances of the teams left in the rooms to break and hurts their ability to enjoy the challenge of the round.

Finally, there is the element of surprise, where they want to make sure that the teams are very excited and thrilled to know that they broke. The emotional tension and excitement should be high on break night and everyone should be screaming and jumping around.

These are the most convincing arguments I’ve heard for it, and I agree partially. I think that these reasons are important, however, they are all in the service of “sportifying” debate instead of keeping debate on the educational and critical keel that is important long term.

I know that many people don’t particularly care to get feedback from closed rounds. It’s hard when the chairs have little to no memory of the round by the time the break is released, and additionally when the moment of decision is hours old. This is of course if you can find the people judging you at the party and talk to them coherently due to the noise or other things.

These rounds are closed because they are important: They are the rounds that can decide the break and are some of the closest rounds held at any tournament. This is also a reason they should be open: They are close adjudications, and the teams involved could learn a lot from the feedback they could get about their performance in a tight room.

I don’t think closed adjudication is going away anytime soon but here are a couple of fixes that should be implimented so the educational elements are not trumped by these competitive elements.

First idea: chairs should have to provide written decisions that then could be emailed and kept by the tab. These decisions then could be downloaded on demand or emailed to the teams involved in the round. Not suggesting this as a DCA job, but more of a chair job perhaps. The decision and comments should be written out with the chairs present.

Second idea: With the cheapness of digital video, the decision should be filmed and recorded immediately after the round by a runner or some other tournament official. These can then be saved and accessed via internet after the break. This preserves the immediacy and freshness of the comments and allows teams to relax a bit and not have to chase down the judges before they forget or leave the tournament.

Final Idea: A room set aside that is quiet and comfortable for those judges and debaters who want to discuss the closed rooms during the party. I doubt many would use it, but the option would be available for those who wanted to get feedback right after the break.

I think these are nice ways of preserving closed adjudication for its minor benefits of creating excitement and its major benefit of preserving interest for teams that would actively or passively ruin the debating experience for teams that still care about doing their best. The current system sits too far over on the side of sport and not enough on the side of learning.

Argumentation Books I Can’t Do Without

Chatting with a friend of mine online the other day and he asked me for my favorite argumentation\debate books. Thought I would list them here as well.

Here’s the list I came up with:

The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation by Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca

A masterwork, read it only 2 times all the way through because it is both massive and technical. Many of the examples don’t resonate with modern American readers since they are all mid 20th century European social science or literary examples. And many of them are somewhat obscure even if you think you are pretty well-read.

The plus sides of the book far outweigh. Here is a comprehensive attempt to map in totality the common topoi of contemporary argument from a purely inductive basis. No discursive stone is left unturned – philosophy, courtrooms, literature, sociology, and more are examined for the presence of the new rhetorical forms.

If the book intimidates, check out Perelman’s later book The Realm of Rhetoric for a boiled down approach to what is in the Treatise.

Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin

Essential, game-changing study for rhetoricians that study argumentation. For philosophers or others who study argument, the book is not so revolutionary. For people involved in academic debate or intercollegiate debate, the Toulmin model is almost not a model, but the right way that arguments are made.

More important of a contribution, I think, is the situatedness of argument that Tolumin suggests. The idea that argumentation is field dependent is a vital concept that places real importance on the method of argument over the truth of the argument. This allows for evaluation of argument away from tools from empirical science, or analytic philosophy.

Informal Logic by Douglas Walton

This is a nice treatment of the formal, validity-based discipline of logical reasoning in the terms of the Toulmin turn, or the turn toward the study of argument that has some resonance with the daily practice of argument. One critique that can be lodged at philosophers who study argumentation is that there’s too much theory, not enough practice in their analysis. Not a lot of discussion of the daily practices of argument and the way people reason in and out of arguments all day long. This book bridges the gap between the situatedness study of rhetoricians and the theoretical structures of the philosophers interested in argument.

Rhetorical Argumentation by Christopher Tindale

A great attempt at looking through the eyes of argumentation studies at rhetoric, and then at argumentation studies through rhetoric’s eyes. A wonderful read, very lucid, and with plenty of ideas for praxis between the two fields. The idea of argument as object in recent years, brought about by many field’s attention to argumentation, finds some needed complication in the pages of this good book.

But these are scholarly treatments of argument! What about teaching it to debaters or potential debaters?

I always havethe Art of Deception by Capaldi hanging around. Great intro to formal reasoning, critical thinking, emotional appeals, formal fallacies, and causal reasoning. Cheap and easy to read with tons of examples and exercises. A fantastic book for anyone interested in improving his or her argumentative skill.

Also perhaps Argumentation Schemes by Walton might be good for teaching, but it’s fairly technical and complex, and mostly for argument analysis. But there are some good ways in that book of breaking down arguments into structural forms or elements just to see how they work.

Pedagogy of Skillful Means

My body seems to know when I have weekends off from debate and schedules all my illnesses for those times. Yesterday and today I’ve been fighting a nasty cough and not really feeling motivated to do much of anything. I’m about to take my laundry down in a few, and I went grocery shopping yesterday, but that’s about all I can handle for now.

I’ve been working on my larger project of attempting to find a non-rational, non-propositional justification for academic debate since I can’t do much else but sit around, and I came across the wonderful concept from Zen Buddhism of “skillful means.” What I’ve been researching is the koan (kung-an) as a pedagogical method. What I’ve found so far is that it suggests a rhetoric of teaching and learning quite different from what’s in vogue right now.

Here is Thich Nhat Hanh describing it, in relation to kung-ans:

The kung-an is a useful instrument in the work of awakening, just as a pick is a useful instrument in working on the ground. What is accomplished from working on the ground depends on the person doing the work and not just on the pick. The Kung-an is not an enigma to resolve; this is why we cannot exactly say that it is a theme or subject of meditation. A kung-an is only a skillful means to help a practitioner reach his or her goal. – Zen Keys, 57.

The koan, or kung-an is a tool that helps the student work independently on another problem – the problem of understanding. It is not a thesis, or main idea, or “curriculum.” It’s not a clever intro. I think it is a rhetorical “wedge” that allows the field of “to be understood” to be “mined/mind” (Going with the metaphor here). The metaphor suggests that as a tool it is only as good as the skill of the person who is wielding it. It must be crafted to the particulars of the situation of master/student, then it becomes “merely” skillful means.

So skillful means are a trick? Some sort of clever educational activity? Hanh goes a bit further with it:


To help practitioners cross the river to the shore of awakening, Zen masters hold out the staff of skillful means. But the disciple must grab hold of it. If his eyes remain shut and his mind blocked, the practitioner will miss the staff. (72)

I find this entire discussion fascinating, as it appears to line up with a clearly conservative pedagogy – the blame lies with the student if he or she can’t “grasp the staff of skillful means.” The student has to see it, realize what it is, and grab onto it. If he or she doesn’t, well then, that’s tough. Or perhaps they are not smart enough.


But “skillful means” cuts both ways. The phrase suggests that the means deployed are chosen, refined, calculated, and (most importantly) produced by the master. The master is making a judgement as to what “skillful means” to extend. It is his or her choice, and to extend the exact same means to all students is to fail one’s pedagogical ethic.

A master must know the mentality of his disciple well in order to propose a kung-an that is appropriate. Every master meets success sometimes, but also knows failure when he proposes an inappropriate kung-an. (61)

Clearly the failure is not the student’s all the time. The master must use a “skillful means” that is rhetorically appropriate – it must be recognizable as help for the student. This is the opposite interpretation we get of Zen practice from popular culture, where the master must offer puzzle within puzzle that the student (near the end of the film) recognizes as simple liberal modernism, and finds within his heart the strength to push on toward his uncontroversial quest to eliminate two-dimensional evil from the world (normally with a flying kick).

Negotiation and discrimination are also a part of the rhetoric of Zen pedagogy. If the kung-an is the instrument handed to the student for his or her own labor toward understanding, then the master must be careful not to give it too early or late, and also must make sure the student stays interested long enough to reach the moment of “skillful means.” However, “skillful means” could be extended to describe the rhetoric of the entire master/student relationship, which at first glance appears Hegelian, but I don’t think it fits. There is a different economy at play here, and I think it’s one of the elimination of any fixed points from which one could identify with the opposite term. Instead, Zen masters attempt through “skillful means” the recognition that one is always already “master” and always already “student.” The distinction between the two terms is something that can count as a “skillful means,” but it is clearly the opposite of the goal of Zen practice. This is why Hanh usually uses the adjective “mere” when describing it.

As for debate, do we use “skillful means” to extend assistance to students? Or do we toss one ladder in the water and hope they find it?

Do we take responsibility for the students’ failure to understand, or do we recognize our failure to provide “skillful means” for the topos “to be understood.”

How much time do we waste trying to explain to students “here is the finger, the finger is very important, we must always look to the finger, the finger will show you the way,” when the moon shines brightly just above our head?

Mandatory Debate Training?

Here is an article by Susan Herbst advocating for mandatory debate training as a return to the principles of the civic in the U.S.
Of course, this article oversimplifies. But the conection between participation in debate and the practice of civility seem questionable.
For the general public, I think the connection is axiomatic. Of course training in “how the other side sees the argument” is perhaps what civil discourse and the political are founded upon to the modern lay mind.

But further than all of this is the idea I forward that debate is training to a new way of life – a self-discipline and an attitude toward the world and the self that is not just revolutionary or some sort of skill development, but a self-renewing revolutionary perspective that allows one to shift and adapt no matter the moment. Something like martial arts and something a bit more rigorous than generic spirituality is what I’m after.

So I like the article, but it’s only scratching the surface, or perhaps it damns with faint praise, and limits the potential of argument and debate.