The New York Sophist

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.

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.

This seems to be a good track to start the week. Roxanne Emery is one of my very favorite singers. Kind of a dark song if you really listen to the lyrics, but most dance music has pretty sad themes now that I think of it.

This week is halfway full of meetings and other obligations, and the second half is pretty empty. Well, not exactly empty, but full of grading.

Grading is one of these things that isn’t so bad once you realize you are there to help the students gain another understanding of their words. You aren’t correcting it, or calling it bad, but showing them another way to understand their own understandings.

Grading is more evaluation and comment than anything else. There’s an ongoing grumble in higher education these days about assessment, and how assessment is not grading. Professors don’t like that because for the most part they really enjoy holding power over students, and assessment requires you to stand alongside students and look at the work together.

At least that’s what I think it requires, but there might be as many ways to assess as grade. I just use grades to get the students to do something productive, and try out new things with their writing and speaking. Assessment is much broader than “did you follow my rules?” It’s more along the lines of, “what can you do?”

Grading is very, very hard to start, but once you are in it, it’s super enjoyable. I really like reading and listening to student work. I wonder if they like reading and hearing my comments as much? Grading is such a personal thing – people tend to take the grades you give them personally – so there’s not a lot of space for a comfortable conversation about them. I wonder if that could be altered in some way.

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.

For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or wondering what that book you are going to get from an Interlibrary loan will contain, or going to meet a colleague to talk about a writing idea. These are important spaces where intellectual work goes on that remain unappreciated and unexplored (at least to my knowledge).

My career was very aptly summed up accidentally in a recent conversation I had where the phrase “big lift for small impact” was used – that’s been everything I’ve done here at my university.

Obviously this applies to the work I did for the debate program here – no need to post about that again – but also for nearly anything else that I write or post or create. It’s a lot of time and effort. But there is one aspect of it where this might not make sense, and that’s teaching.

The common view of teaching at the university is “Professors teach as part of their job.” Using a traditional rhetorical means of invention, I inverted that to see what could be said: “Teachers profess as a part of their job.” This didn’t seem accurate.

Teaching is professing, it is in the heart of rhetoric, because not only are you saying “this is important, you must learn these things,” you are simultaneously creating that reality for the students: “This is important, here’s how you know it is important, because of these feelings and thoughts.”

This is lost on most professors who believe that their external markers of expertise are enough to generate this desire to know and desire to learn among students. At the high school level, bad teachers use authoritarian power moves to communicate importance as well as mind-numbing activities that produce discipline rather than interest. 

What is the rhetorical mode of professing? The verb means to declare or avow something. This seems like the mode of making a case, a persuasive address that proves that the subject is vital, important, or significant. Since it’s rhetorical that should be to the audience you are addressing, which nearly all professors miss. The attitude of the professor is “they are the ones who need to work hard to get it, they are the students.” This is often couched in terms of responsibility, which is always lacking among students. A quick survey of the history of rhetoric would indicate that this is a common trait of most assembled audiences too. 

When teaching, you are professing, you are making a case for your declaration or your passionate avowing of the importance of a concept, some information, or whatever you are teaching that class. And since all classes are different audiences, each one needs adaptation. 

Is there a case-based, rhetorical theory of teaching out there? The closest I’ve found is in Buddhism, particularly in Tibetan debates, but there’s a debate pedagogy tradition in the early U.S. as well. 

What about Rome? It is known that from time to time the rhetoric teachers would take on the unpopular opinion on a declamation case to show the students how it’s done, but did any take on the position of how to craft oratory in a particular way?

I guess what I’m looking for is models of how to speak when you are pushing the value of a central text to students, and you cannot do this without your take being involved. You can’t assume they are there because they are interested. So how do you convert them from people who have to attend, and hope it won’t be miserable, to people who feel lucky to be there, and who look forward to the next one?