The New York Sophist

Talking with one of my students the other night after Adelphi brought up this old public debate I helped conduct when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh.

As a case study for public argument, we were looking at David Horowitz and his crusade to make sure that every college student in the United States had a bill of rights to protect them from “liberal” professors who would grade them down for having conservative views. My friend John and I decided a public debate on this topic would be a great final project. All of the students in the courses worked in some capacity to ensure this debate happened.

The room is the English Nationality classroom which is modeled after the house of commons in the UK. Pitt has several of these rooms on campus in the Cathedral of Learning, the center building on campus, pictured here.

This was also the first (and probably only) BP/WUDC format debate to take place on that campus, at least to my knowledge. Pitt has a very old and very distinguished policy debate program housed in the communication department.

These students were enrolled in 2 sections of the Argument course, which is an introductory course on how to argue along with some argument theory from the American speech communication trajectory.

We were really happy to get the provost of the University to attend the debate and respond to the debate from the perspective of the University. It’s pretty incredible what he told us about the relationship of Pitt to the Academic Bill of Rights movement. It’s worth checking out.

What do you think? Did they do a good job? This is the first debate in front of a public audience that many of them have ever done. How live is this issue of student rights in the US or the world today?

This debate took place in April of 2007.

Talking with one of my students the other night after Adelphi brought up this old public debate I helped conduct when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh.

As a case study for public argument, we were looking at David Horowitz and his crusade to make sure that every college student in the United States had a bill of rights to protect them from “liberal” professors who would grade them down for having conservative views. My friend John and I decided a public debate on this topic would be a great final project. All of the students in the courses worked in some capacity to ensure this debate happened.

The room is the English Nationality classroom which is modeled after the house of commons in the UK. Pitt has several of these rooms on campus in the Cathedral of Learning, the center building on campus, pictured here.

This was also the first (and probably only) BP/WUDC format debate to take place on that campus, at least to my knowledge. Pitt has a very old and very distinguished policy debate program housed in the communication department.

These students were enrolled in 2 sections of the Argument course, which is an introductory course on how to argue along with some argument theory from the American speech communication trajectory.

We were really happy to get the provost of the University to attend the debate and respond to the debate from the perspective of the University. It’s pretty incredible what he told us about the relationship of Pitt to the Academic Bill of Rights movement. It’s worth checking out.

What do you think? Did they do a good job? This is the first debate in front of a public audience that many of them have ever done. How live is this issue of student rights in the US or the world today?

This debate took place in April of 2007.

This is a public debate we participated in recently in Virginia. While watching it, it made me think of a couple of interesting things about teaching debate. This debate indicates a couple of gaps that need to be patched up.

First, the debaters assume the audience is already interested and attentive to their arguments. This is a serious problem – the principle of getting audience attention and trust is key to developing credibility as well as any sort of connection for the audience as to why they care about the issue. There needs to be a realistic appraisal of the audience. Many of the people attending were students who were motivated to come via extra credit. This is accounted for by some teams, but it’s not an overarching principle in how the debaters approach the debate.

Secondly, the refutation model of debate is not conducive to natural language argumentation. We see many teams here operate under the assumption that their own arguments will not be valuable unless all the points of the other side are refuted first. Tying the value of your own argument tied directly to refutation encourages a pattern of speaking that listeners will not automatically gel with. They want to hear what you are about first, then they would like to hear how that fits into what they’ve heard from other speakers. By prioritizing refutation, we train debaters to make sure that they are behind others in the attention front during public debates.

I wonder what the extant literature has on the connection between debate pedagogy and the public debate. My searches haven’t revealed much. Seems like an under-covered and vitally important source of data justifying and helping us correct what we do.

This is a public debate we participated in recently in Virginia. While watching it, it made me think of a couple of interesting things about teaching debate. This debate indicates a couple of gaps that need to be patched up.

First, the debaters assume the audience is already interested and attentive to their arguments. This is a serious problem – the principle of getting audience attention and trust is key to developing credibility as well as any sort of connection for the audience as to why they care about the issue. There needs to be a realistic appraisal of the audience. Many of the people attending were students who were motivated to come via extra credit. This is accounted for by some teams, but it’s not an overarching principle in how the debaters approach the debate.

Secondly, the refutation model of debate is not conducive to natural language argumentation. We see many teams here operate under the assumption that their own arguments will not be valuable unless all the points of the other side are refuted first. Tying the value of your own argument tied directly to refutation encourages a pattern of speaking that listeners will not automatically gel with. They want to hear what you are about first, then they would like to hear how that fits into what they’ve heard from other speakers. By prioritizing refutation, we train debaters to make sure that they are behind others in the attention front during public debates.

I wonder what the extant literature has on the connection between debate pedagogy and the public debate. My searches haven’t revealed much. Seems like an under-covered and vitally important source of data justifying and helping us correct what we do.

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.