The New York Sophist

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!

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?

Monday night I gave a talk to Cornell Law School’s American Constitution Society about the history and development of Presidential Debates. I thought I had shared this already, but it looks like I forgot to post the thing I was originally writing about it.

It’s a good thing too – these debates are well beyond our wildest dreams for low quality examples of political discourse. It’s not that fun to be living through the end of empire after all.

I gave my talk focusing on the idea that Presidential debates are not good because they represent all of the worst ideas about debate through American history: That debate should be exceptional, that it should be balanced, and that it is something we strive for that drives our country forward. Nothing about any of those assumptions is true. For the majority of debate history in the United States, we have been extraordinarily bad at it.

Here’s the lecture; let me know what you think about it. I do wonder if the conclusion has any relevance at all now considering how bad the debate was and how bad the remaining 2 will probably be.

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.

Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.

Speech quality increases the less restrictions you give students on topics and the more instruction you give them in terms of how to develop a topic. Public speaking instructors suffer from the idea that in order to increase the quality of speeches they must police the nature of the topic, banning a number of topics that they associate with poor quality orations.

Photo by Jouwen Wang on Unsplash

This is the most common fallacy of the public speaking professor, the fallacy of causation between particular topics and bad speeches. It isn’t the topic choice that causes the poor speech, nor is it the nature of the topic. There are a few causes of this – namely three problems with topic approach that the instructor should address through teaching rhetoric instead of teaching orientation toward the “right position” on an issue or “a better topic” or even “good sources.” These things won’t address the core of the problem.

First, most of the topics that are associated with bad speeches – abortion, drug legalization, gun restrictions – are huge topics that cannot be taken on just as they are. They require a walk through the stasis in order to discover what the best point of contention is. They require examination through the general and specific topics of Aristotle and Cicero. They require acknowledgement that a young person is speaking on the topic, someone with little to no credibility. All these things are usually ignored by the instructor in favor of “get good sources.” But speech should be a lot more than a way to measure someone’s ability to evaluate research sources.

Another issue with these topics is that instructors might consider them “too real” and inappropriate for the classroom. this defense makes little sense to me. It’s one thing to criticise the university for not teaching “real world” skills or having applicability outside the gates. It’s another for instructors to deliberately restrict the content of a course to be removed from the things that people are speaking about and attempting to persuade one another about most often. Even moreso, consider that the course is meant to help people become better at such speech, and the instructor saying “There is no point in discussing these issues since persuasion is impossible.” This seems like a reason to reconsider the necessity of a speech course in totality, not an adaptation to make the course better.

Audiences are audiences. A university student audience brings with them into the classroom the assumptions, ideology, and values they have. A speech on a controversy is a wonderful way to gain class attention and connect the principles of good oratory into something they are experiencing directly and can connect to their life experiences. Of course, nobody should feel compelled to change their mind on an issue, but that’s an important consideration for oratory as well. These principles of democratic engagement are really not taught anymore. We teach young people that they are fools if they do not dissolve their opinions in the light of the facts. Instead, why not discuss how difficult it is to understand the fact, understand ideology, and negotiate the feelings and thoughts that surround any controversy they might face. Giving students a plan for future encounters with oratory might be more important than practice in making the same old designs on safe topics.

Speaking of safe, this word is probably the centerpiece of the most serious objection to particular topics, and that is the concept of the “safe space.” The trouble with safe spaces has been argued to death all over the internet, and I won’t rehearse those arguments here. The only thing I can add to this conversation is the danger of assuming there is a place that is free of persuasion and argument. Although safe-space considerations are well meaning and aimed at helping students feel comfortable and get in the mental space to engage learning, the idea that they would be immune or free from convincing speech is extremely dangerous. We are always vulnerable to it. And people who are not well-meaning at all will take advantage of those who feel that there’s a space that is persuasion or argument free.

When people want a safe space, what they want is a space that is free of aggressive, hostile, and bad argumentation or speech. This has been conflated with all persuasion and all oratory because in contemporary America, we are horrible at this. We have been taught, and continue to teach that facts are facts, they are easy to obtain, easy to understand, and that in their presence we should just change our mind without hesitation. This anti-human, monstrous position is responsible for people’s negative feelings about political conversation, their aversion to argument, and their desire to be away from oratory. The solution is to provide oratory as the fine art that it is. If speech teachers and public speaking courses are not going to do this, we have little hope to find it in other places.

Public speaking is oratory, and oratory is an art that connects humans and allows human beings to see themselves connected to one another in new ways. “Consubstantiality” is what Kenneth Burke called the art of rhetoric. This has been forgotten, or is just unknown to contemporary teachers. We tend to automatically think that speech and oratory are a violent interruption of our lives, separating us from what we know and believe, challenging us to accept new and different beliefs. This can be the case. But this other relation is where oratory is at its most artistic, creating moments where we see new connection and take on shared identity, seeing a place for future possibility.

I have a lot more to think about in terms of creating digital speech. The internet has become an art gallery of oratory, with preserved speech hanging there, waiting for us to stop for a bit as we walk or surf by. More on that later as I think about these wonderful orations that the students are producing this term.