Progymnasmata

The NEUDC Break

2012-02-26T11:38:00.004-05:00

Here's a video of the break. There was some controversy about one of the teams breaking, but it was settled by the adjudication core and the teams involved. It appears to have been about a mis-marked ballot.

West Conn Video #1

2012-02-26T10:59:00.000-05:00

St. John's Debate Society students talk about the upcoming break.

The Lost Debate Pedagogy

2012-02-23T09:11:00.002-05:00

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From the 1906 version of An Introductory Course in Argumentation by Francis Perry. He's why he arranged the textbook the way he did:

In the first place, the student is practiced in the processes of argumentation without the added difficulty of research. No teacher of narration begins his work by demanding that a student write a historical romance requiring serious preliminary study of the period in which it is placed -- he begins, rather, with simple pieces of work exercising the student's power of imagination on material that lies within his experience. The beginner in the study of argumentation should, in like manner, be set to work to exercise his reasoning power on familiar material. This is not a loss, but a gain. Even advanced students, when allowed to write at the start on subjects upon which they must 'read up' develop little power to argue; they too often count their work done when they have gathered from a book and summarized the arguments of another. The student required to argue on material already at his command finds pleasure in turning it over, seeing it in new lights, in new relations, with new significance, and argument seems to him serviceable and pleasant work. I do not, however, advocate suiting endeavor to power, and at the close of the course the student is instructed in methods of research with the epxectation that he will be ready to encounter added difficulties. (5-6)

This seems like sound pedagogy to me for debating, and makes a hell of a lot of sense for teaching WUDC debate. However, I think I used to do this when I taught American Policy debate (I'd always start with the motion "Resolved: We should go to the movies." You can teach any policy debate theory concept in a tiny amount of time if you make people work with this).

I think this pedagogy isn't really followed much today - whenever people think of debate or the teaching of debate they think "facts first" or set up a component for finding information first then use the debate as a technology of dissemination. This might be good for teaching research skills, but as Perry rightly points out, this backgrounds debate to an instrument of teaching research, and risks ruining the whole thing.

Since it was written in 1906, the "switch-side" movement did not exist. Perry is a "convictionist" debate coach - helping students refine beliefs they come to by other means. He continues:

The subject is further simplified by leaving persuasion out of consideration until the student understands conviction. This too, is a gain; the student who begins by suiting his argument to the hearer too often comes to value sophistry above thoroughness and accuracy; like a sharp bargainer he prides himself more on a fraudulent victory than on an honest one. (6)

Contrary to Perry's conventional use of the terms "persuasion" and "sophistry," his style of teaching debate might actually be more properly "sophistic" in the sense that the debate teacher becomes a hired adviser, irrelevant of position or stance of the client. Switch-side debate, after reading Perry, struck me as more properly "Platonic" due to a heavy investment in the theory behind dialectic. Socrates often worked from assigning positions, although they were derived from statements of conviction from those participating in the dialogue. Plato assigned positions in writing each dialogue. The extant sophistic speeches, minus Encomium for Helen, were not produced this way, but used a kernel of conviction (i.e. "I didn't kill that person, I am innocent") as the start of constructing the speech they were hired to write for Athenian courts. I wonder if the convictionists are onto something here. We don't know that much about how they taught; we do know a bit about what they believed they were teaching.

I am assuming that the portrait we get of Melvin Tolson from The Great Debaters is a two dimensional caricature designed to serve the familiar plot of film rather than advance our understanding of the issue unraveled. Tolson is the convictionist's convictionist in the film - but surely he was more strategic in his teaching than what the film depicted. Can we consider Tolson's methods sophistic? Not properly, no - he is much more like Socrates in the film. But that is most likely a device for our entertainment benefit. Tolson might be the first modern debate coach in the sense that he thought he was teaching students the "right way to think" about politics, ethics, and the world or debate as "truth finding" - something we see far too much of in contemporary coaching methods in the US. I don't think convictionists would agree that this is the right way to teach debate either. I think their position, if Perry is a good example, is a bit more nuanced than that. As I have it from these short passages, it seems like it is "Find out what the student believes and is interested in. Explore the structure of it. Have them speak about it. Have them consider effective ways of presenting it. Then go research it further."

I wonder what other pedagogical insights we have lost from the dominance of the switch-side theory. Is there value in perusing a project to recover the convictionist teaching methods?

The Threat of Debating

2012-02-20T22:29:00.002-05:00

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This picture is a rare treat from Zemanta, the software I use that helps me make these posts look (supposedly) more professional. But in the end usually the images and links suggested are not appropriate, or I just don't like them.

But this one is quite good. Here we see the perfect image of the debating subject.

He's confidence, convicted, almost enraged. Overcertain of himself and his position. He's literally standing on literature. And in his hand is the one page of preparation he's done for this debate. We encounter him at a point where the preparation is no longer needed, it's crumpled in his hand - passion, reason, the truth, certainty - have taken over. His opponent is doomed to defeat.

Debate is a threatening apparition.

But this model is not real, nor is it ever really what transpires in the best debating. It's a model that is attractive to a lot of people because it displays the things that are most attractive to us: Holding power, domination, forcing our will upon others, in short - getting what we want.

But what is it that we want? Debate is threatening, but if directed in another way, the threat is turned toward who wants.

Here is a koan from the zen tradition. Well not really a koan but I think it could work well as one. I think it provides a better model of the debating subject than our friend up there.

The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He'll never give up.
If he'd let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.

I like this poem a lot. Just like the man in the image, the monkey is reaching for the reflection of the moon on the surface of the water. Like the debater, he reaches for something that is just an effect of forces beyond his comprehension.

Dissapearing in the pool - the substance that makes the reflection of the moon possible - is a better alternative. Why? This is no more a literal disappearance than the moon is a literal moon. To replace one with the other would accomplish nothing. Hakuin is trying to get us to think about the relationship we have to desire and to the material world around us. Most of the things we want are either not really there, or we can't attain them the way that we think we can.

Grasping at the image without awareness of how that image is coming to you is what we do all the time. I am guilty of it, and so are you. The trick is to be aware of it - and Hakuin's solution is for us to realize that we are all immersed in it already - just let go, stop trying to grasp things, and attend to immersion.

This poem has a lot of application to teaching debate. The point of debating for the student should (and does whether you want it to or not) clash with the point of debating for the teacher. The student wants to win and grabs for the image of victory. The teacher knows (or should know) that any attempt to grab it will fail. The debate teacher knows that the whole universe glitters like the moon in the water once the student grasps the water and not the image the water supports.

The stakes are of course, much higher than that. The poem suggests that the image of the moon haunts the monkey until death. This is the same with victory - it will haunt the student until they die if they can't connect with the substance. Debate's only contribution to our lives it it's ability to let us see, just for a bit, the constructed and arbitrary nature of human identity. In terms of the poem, the self is also a reflection in the water that we grasp at, hoping to achieve.

The biggest challenge facing the debate director is that of the power of narrative. The subject is under direct assault by the decisions rendered in a debate. Debate threatens the coherence of the narrative of the self. And just like beings immersed in fluid who move quickly away from alien substances dropped on a slide, we move quickly away from words that could unravel our concept of self.

The student wants to add the narrative of "debater" to their story, but only considers that part a tale of victory. But nike is not arete. Debate only offers arete. It only offers the continual making and remaking of the self as an excellent being. Of course, this doesn't happen in tournaments, but tournaments are a place where we can call attention to the limited potential we have of grasping the moon in the water. Instead of trying to grab excellence as a thing, we should realize that becoming consubstantial with that thing is the only way such excellence could be apprehended.

Look at the image again. The debater; the moon on the water. Do you reach for this image? Or do you reach for what allows this image such sway over our lives? Is the image of the powerful debater attractive like the moon at night? Or does everything glow with that rhetorical potential? Do you seek wins or victory? Your reflection is right there.

The Weeekend, Reflection

2012-02-17T09:01:00.001-05:00

No tournament for me this weekend, so a bit of time to reflect on teaching and work on scholarship. As a full time faculty member, debate teaching is just one part of my job. Teaching and research are the other 2/3rds of it.

Anyway, here is a great quote about teaching that I recently found about kensho the Japanese word for the Buddhist concept of "enlightenment" or "getting it" or "realization." I think the term applies to debate teaching just as well in this quote.

"Don't misdirect your efforts. Don't chase around looking for something apart from your own selves. All you have to do is to concentrate on being thoughtless, on doing nothing whatever. No practice. No realization. Doing nothing, the state of no-mind, is the direct path of sudden realization. No practice, no realization - that is the true principle, things as they really are. The enlightened ones themselves, those who possess every attribute of Buddhahood, have called this supreme, unparalleled, right awakening."

People hear this teaching and try to follow it. Choking off their aspirations. Sweeping their minds clean of delusive thoughts. They dedicate themselves solely to doing nothing and to making their minds complete blanks, blissfully unaware that they are doing and thinking a great deal.

When a person who has not had kensho reads the Buddhist scriptures, questions his teachers and fellow monks about Buddhism, or practices religious disciplines, he is merely creating the causes of his own illusion - a sure sign that he is still confined within samsara. He tries constantly to keep himself detached in thought and deed, and all the while his thoughts and deeds are attached. He endeavors to be doing nothing all day long, and all the while he is busily doing.

But if this same person experiences kensho, everything changes. Although he is constantly thinking and acting, it is totally free and unattached. Although he is engaged in activity around the clock, that activity is, as such, non-activity. This great change is the result of his kensho. It is like water that snakes and cows drink from the same cistern, which becomes deadly venom in one and milk in the other.
~Hakuin Ekaku, c. 1700

What does this mean? I think it has a great application to what we think we are doing in debate and what we actually do in debate (just like that meme everyone is annoyed by right now).

If you think you are studying how to do civic engagement, how to persuade mass audiences, how to create motives in other human beings by studying debate with the idea of winning tournaments as the goal, you only have part of the story. You might also be creating an impassible barrier to this goal.

If you study debate without these things in mind, but you realize the samsara nature of the tournament cycle, you will be like the cow.

Cornell IV Videos

2012-02-14T17:28:00.002-05:00

Here are two videos I took while at the Cornell IV. I was running around a lot and didn't make as many as I normally do. But here are 2.

I have been experimenting with AudioBoo as well and wonder if anyone else is using it for debates. This might be a better (read: faster, more immediate, less intimidating, less threatening) mode of getting the feel of the tournament across to those who are not at the tournament.

Romancing the Novice

2012-02-09T09:13:00.000-05:00

What does it mean to be a novice? According to the US, for the most part, it means being in your first year of University level debating. That's the definition that Cornell University is going with in their first ever WUDC USA Novice National Championship tournament.

For years, back when there was just policy debate here on the East Coast (APDA and CEDA never spoke, nor acknowledged one another - might still be the case but there's some contact now) we celebrated the novice debater as a culturally significant subject position - such as the roles that "immigrant" "lawyer" "doctor" "preacher" "child" "homemaker" "father" "teacher" "firefighter" have in society and language. We did this at Towson University in Maryland with a Novice National Championship.

In policy debate, not everyone debates one another. There are separate divisions where debaters of similar skill face one another. So if you are in your first year of debating, it's considered appropriate to only debate those in their first year of debating. After you have debated 24 college debates, you move to Junior Varsity. If you debated in High School, you are put in JV right away. Open is reserved for those who are nearing the end of their University debating lives.

The Novice Nationals was a holy place - people who started debate in University were a special subject position. No high school experience, and only a short time to perfect the techne of policy debate, as well as the exponential exposure to new and exciting ideas and texts also help romanticize the position of "novice" as an incredibly desirable identity. On the East Cost of the US, many programs adopted the rhetoric that novices were the life-blood of debate in this geographic region, going so far as to announce at multiple tournaments, when the time for novice awards came - "Now awards in our most important division."

This romantic image of the novice parallels the rhetorical rise of "childhood," a 19th century upper-class phenomenon that rises and orbits around the arbitrary connection of age to knowledge. The rhetorical style of childhood, then is associated with books and their cool ability to forbid knowledge an experience from those who either can't read the symbols, or don't have the bodily discipline to engage in reading a book. Childhood becomes a repository of innocence simply because of the limits of the preferred medium of information. As we can see, it's eroding around us with the prominence of TV and the internet. Children are too worldly for us these days, and we lament the past. This is a rather rough summary, and if you want to read more about this, I suggest The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman.

Calls for distinct novice divisions and separate categories for the participation of only novices are in line with an attempt to preserve a rather arbitrary and strange category that is only an effect of a chosen form of information processing and transfer. In policy debate, such divisions are defensible on the grounds that one has to be disciplined into the formulaic way of speaking - a novice can be a great speaker and really compelling, and lose every debate due to their unfamiliarity with the conventions of the form.

This defensive practice has pedagogical reasons, but ends up creating a ready-made subject position for the novice debater that everyone simultaneously laughs at and loves. In short, a childhood within the medium.

This form is so powerful that since the inception of WUDC/BP here on the East coast, calls for novice divisions and larger numbers of breaking teams have been defended with the same sort of arguments one would make for children learning adult games. "they'll quit!" "they need that special outround experience!" and other such claims are heard.

I suggest treating debate students like the adults they are and treating debate like the examination of your mind that it should be. Preparing students for the inevitability of loss and gain in the world, the certainty that they are not as smart as they think they are, and the disappointing prospect of doing one's best with one's words and still being rejected are incredibly valuable and essential things. Debate is a powerful pedagogical tool because it highlights, sometimes starkly, how incredibly helpless you are; how you are at the mercy of words and minds beyond your feeble agency to control.

We'll see how the separate novice division goes at Cornell this weekend. I'm afraid for the students participating. The rhetoric of childhood has infected my novices already as they are excited for the chance to face people who are unskilled. Musashi, wherever he is, is shaking his head. Perhaps it will turn out well, but I am not hopeful. Grafting the practices of one rhetoric game on top of another needs to be done more critically. But I go to Cornell in the spirit of experimentation.

Old School

2012-02-06T07:05:00.001-05:00

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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.

The Last Adelphi Report #4

2012-02-05T16:34:00.000-05:00

Forgot to publish this one yesterday! It highlights ROBOT debating.

Adelphi Brown & Gold Debates Video update #3

2012-02-04T13:21:00.002-05:00

Round 3: This House would prefer a world without national sports teams.

LIVE it's Adelphi Round 2

2012-02-04T11:01:00.001-05:00

Round 1: This House believes that politicians should be forced to publicly defend significant campaign contributions.

Round 2: This House believes that feminism has succeeded.

More debates to come. Here is some between round action.

Related articles

Live from Adelphi Brown & Gold Debates

2012-02-04T09:06:00.000-05:00

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All day I will be trying my best to upload live videos from the Brown & Gold Debates at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY!

Teaching Keeps You Honest

2012-01-29T13:46:00.001-05:00

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This week I am teaching my Worlds debate class, and the group I have is pretty impressive. All quite sharp, all very interested, and all excited to learn the art of debate. I started as I usually do by showing the WUDC Koc Worlds Final round - a round that many still praise as one of the best, if not the best WUDC final of all time. After we watched about half of it, the students were ready to ask questions or make comments.

"Why do they bounce around so weird when they talk?"

"Why do they go so fast? I can't remember anything they said."

"Why don't they just choose the most important point and stick with it?"

"Why do they speak so artificially?"

I was struck with a nice moment of dissonance - here's the best we have to offer from the culture of competitive debate, and an intelligent, if green, audience is having trouble understanding why it is valuable. There number one concern was if they were going to have to speak like that.

"No," I said, "But you will be expected to speak persuasively. So if you are in front of different audiences, you must be prepared to adapt your words to fit the occasion, otherwise it's like you haven't said anything at all." They were pretty quiet. "Like how you feel about this video," I added. They started to resonate.

I was reminded of the continuing insular practices of monastic orders. Their idea of good worship, or best worship is really just a performance of a believed rhetorical "purity" - when unordained see it, they correctly identify it as irrelevant, weird, and confusing. If you are in the order though, if you have faith, then you start to see it as not only proper, but "the best."

Debate as seen from non-Western monastic practices is just upaya - skillful means that help one realize how to reach others with the truth. I think this is a good spice to add to our discussions of WUDC rounds that are "the best" or "really good." We must always keep in mind that we are not reaching the audiences we imagine we are, and the more we speak to one another and appeal to one another, the less of a remainder there is. Without something left that doesn't cleanly divide out in the discourse, there's little for outsiders to grasp on to.

Having to teach debate to the non-initiated is also an important element of practice. It's required in martial arts to teach at some point in your studies. We should require it too. At the very least, it will keep you honest about what you are accomplishing, doing, permitting, and promoting in the world. And although cold, it's good to get hit with a bath from time to time.

Stretching the Debate Club Model: Student Lectures

2011-11-30T01:45:00.000-05:00

Always looking for or at ways to stretch the rather 2 dimensional debate club model of practicing, going to tournaments, and practicing some more. One of my goals is to push the envelope of the "skills and drills" defense of having a debate club. There has to be more to it than improving your chances of winning tournaments.

Without any suggestion from me, tonight we had our first lecture/teaching session at our general meeting conducted by students for other students. I think it went pretty well.

The only question I have on my mind at the moment is the same one I ask in the video: How does this connect to tournament debating? Is the connection apparent, does it matter, and if not, why and how could such a connection be made?

I hope we have a regular series of such talks as a regular part of our debate practice. The term "practice" is always on my mind in its many variations of meaning. I like to think that I teach debate practice, instead of just watching debate practice. Alternatively, I also like to think that this club is my debate practice, in a similar manner to dental practice or legal practice. But all of this is for another essay.

Here is the video of tonight's first student lecture, enjoy! The lecture is titled: "Ethics and Persuasion: Gorgias in the age of Science." This is something that this student came up with and just made it happen. I had nothing to do with it, except to film it and ask too many questions at the end of it.

Information Slips

2011-11-17T10:34:00.001-05:00

I wasn't at Cambridge this past weekend, but from Twitter I could see there were a lot of information slides. Why are information slides becoming so prevalent? What function do they serve? I am afraid to say that information slides do not serve us well. They usually function to take attention and focus away from the valence of debate in all of its cloudy, beautiful inconsistency and give us a false sense of comfort and stability about some of the most exciting and controversial aspects to the art.

Check out this recent example of an information slide from the Huber Debates at the University of Vermont:

This info slide was from a motion that simply said "THW only issue transfer payments to people who vote." A good motion, but why leave in a phrase that doesn't mean much to the community? At this particular American tournament, why not change the term "transfer payment" into something more amenable to the audience of participants?

The question, and the start of this post, must seem pretty banal and pretty semantic. Of course the information slide is needed to explain to people a term in the motion that they may not understand. But the reason why an information slide was chosen over the idea to change speaks to how information slides are working us over, in dark McLuhan ways. I go so far as to claim that we end up serving the Information Slide rather than the slide serving the quality of our debates.

The information slide serves the motion in this example as if it were some sort of liturgy that needs interpretation from the adjudication team. The motion is set up as an "inpenetrable" text that requires "interpretation" from the adjudication team. The tournament is providing the official interpretation of the motion - telling us what this debate is going to be about. In the same move, the scope of the debate is drastically limited. "Transfer Payments" is removed from the table as a site of rhetorical invention, or argument genesis. The reason the motion was not changed is that the motion is being treated as some sort of holy text. That is, the motion cannot be altered: It is up to us to alter our behavior to properly debate (read: worship) the motion. The adjudication team serves as the high priests who offer the official interpretation to the masses, who then either take the sermon to heart and find redemption, or, well, you know the alternative.

Changing the term in the motion to "Government assistance" payments or perhaps "welfare payments" (since that's as specific a cultural use in America as Transfer Payment is in Europe, where I suspect this motion hails from) puts the debate in the hands of the debaters directly. The more of the motion that is available for the debaters to interpret, argue, and generate their own discourse about, the better.

Why is this reaction so important?

Again - and this is becoming the theme of this blog - the competitive equity or competitive fairness of Worlds Debate is only valuable in as much as it can realistically simulate the difficulties of persuasion, argument, debate, and discourse outside of the tournament environment. This is a careful ballance - think of motion setting as those tiny little humidity monitors under the museum glass. We are preserving an artificial environment for works that need public display but cannot be properly accessed without taking them out of their natural environment. The motion is a key pedagogical tool in achieving this balance. One cannot screw only with the competitive elements of tournaments and believe one to be doing good work. When you tweak the gears of the competitive equity of a tournament, you hurt the soft parts. And the soft parts are where all - that is, every single benefit we tout about debating - come from.

Information slides are Information slips - they "slide" information into the debate, tipping the scales and throwing off the simulated public environment of the debate for something more liturgical. Our rounds are transformed from something open to something closed. From the public park to the halls of the Cathedral. This moves seems like it would be noticable, transparent even. But let me provide another example from the recent Huber tournament to support this:

Here we have the info slide before the debate "THW require men in countries with high HIV rates to be circumcised."

This slide makes a broad assertion of fact with no citation and no quote from any study. No journal is mentioned. It might even be too broadly stated to cite properly (I wonder if there is such broad agreement in medical journals about much). More importantly, this sort of assertion as an educational exercise wouldn't make it past the first round in a University class. I do think there should be academic standards of some kind in University level competitions, but I don't really want to take that argument too far. The reason is that going too far into the educational theory literature also creates a bubble world of a different nature, one where the measurable easily elides and trumps the "good."

It's not that I dispute the claim, I dispute the making of these sorts of claims before debates start in the first place. The reason is simple: You take the power from the debaters and give it to the false certainty of the text. Quite literally, the pinpoints of light on the powerpoint slide become the focus of debate instead of the fluid and indeterminate minds of the debaters. What this slide does is state the nature of reality, then propose a debate. Access to argumentative topoi, such as the validity of science, the worth of research methods, the questionable nature of scientific truth claims all fall to the wayside as students appeal to the liturgical slide. A POI I heard in my debate was, "But the info slide told us this is true. How can you argue that it's not?" The Church has spoken!

The info slip turns the debate into a prisoner's delimma, where the debaters worry about the form of the incoming and outgoing arguments above and beyond what's appropriate. The info slip removes some of the most vital ground from the debate and teaches less invention and more deference to under examined ways of speaking and arguing in the world.

This is not unique to debate, or even to rhetoric in general. All teaching, matter of fact, requires some differentiation from the open world in order to make a safe instructional environment. Things have to be altered and mutilated just a bit to turn attention to what the instructor, or the class, wants to attend to for that lesson. So in a writing seminar, students sometimes write things that are a bit unrealistic so that time and attention can be spent on a particular element of the study of writing. Any course is like this. But those limits have to be carefully set.

Debate though, doesn't want to pay attention to the pedagogical half of things with info slides. Both of these slides were offered to clarify and with the intent to improve debate. But what they do is improve competitive equity, which hardly ever improves the pedagogical debating experience. What it does is remove the messier elements, or the elements that the adjudication team things are "beyond" the scope of the debaters to properly get, thus making the debate appropriately competitive. This clean up before the debaters even see the motion ruins one of the best things about debate - its inequity, its unpredictability, and the joy of the kairotic moment when opportunity arises from messy discourse. Nothing quite like not having any idea what the debate was about and reflecting on your 2 or 4 to make you really feel desperate about language's failings and how desperate we long to be in language, of language, language.

A good metaphor to the info slide controversy is the study of Casuistry, the practice of finding appropriate pennance for sin in the early Catholic church. Complicated questions of sin were resolved through an art that attempted to account for the everyday lives of people in the light of what Church doctrine deemed appropriate. A skilled Casuist could use words to assuage the suffering of people in the parish. This skill was incredibly important in making sure people kept faith in dogma. Unfortunately the training of Casuistry began to trump the application - creating strange contests where nearly impossible situations were created to test the technical skills of the casuists. These contests and their disconnection from applied religious practice was criticized to the point of elimination of the practice entirely in a formal sense.

As the use of info slides increases, we should study the history of the Casuists. We can learn from their lesson. Our contests are starting to bend this way. Check out this slide, dubbed a "situation slide" by the Huber tournament:

This is not an info slide, but it might be an early mutation of a future event that will trump Worlds debate. Reading this, and the corresponding motion "THWspoil the ballots," gives me a sense that we are in an experimental event. So much fact is declared here I wonder where the debaters come in to generate argumentation. How true is it that the party is "far right" or "racist?" What does it mean to "get caught?" How do we know the candidate is going to "win?" These are all topoi of argument that in natural language argumentation would have to be settled by the speaker(s) and disputed for a while during the course of the debate. The liturgical turn of Worlds debate via the info slide has set up something different - this is the playing field, and these statements are going to be interpreted as non-controversial by the debaters, and the debate will be built on top of it. Here the "artificial reef" of debating is replaced by the plastic castle in our debate fishbowl.

How ridiculous can it get? We see a fantastically horrifying example of the plastic castle phenomenon in a recent tournament where the info slide read:

You are the commander of an Israeli submarine in the Persian Gulf. It is the day after Israel was annihilated in a surprise Iranian nuclear attack. THW not use Israel's second strike capabilities.

This seems like a topic best suited to after-debate conversation rather than a motion. The question such a motion begs is who are we speaking to? Such a question, whether you find it interesting or not, is a question that is designed by and for an in group to focus on a particular mode of in-group communication. This sort of motion leads to role play, and psychological second guessing of people faced with events that at first glance seem more interesting or intense than other global crises, but rest assured: We have plenty of dire and desperate situations to debate about to keep us busy for years without having to make them up. Events that stem from non insular ideas make for much better debates and debate training as they ground the speaker in the acceptable, the lucid, and the culturally knowable - in short, they keep that idea of audience present.

If a motion is really cool and really interesting and requires an info slide to debate it fairly, it might not be a good motion. It might just be a motion that we as an insular community think would make a good debate. We need to be honest and congnizent as to which audience we are talking to and want to talk to. Do we want to talk to ourselves or to the public? How do we know if we are in the fishbowl? Is our simulation so good that we've duped ourselves as to the urgency or importance of this motion to audiences?

Debate is on the road to having a bible, and the pages will be written in powerpoint. Do you want to spend each weekend in Talmudic style debate over text? Or do you want to spend your time crafting texts for mutual investigation? Tailor of discourse that is accepted as true, or fashion designer? Celebrity chef or sous chef? The metaphor can go on and on.

We do not want a liturgically oriented community where the infoslide controls our event. If we want something like that, let's experiment - provide scholarly articles for the round 4 motion upon registration or have a keynote expert speaker give a talk during dinner or lunch. Make the information relevant, realistic, and of a high quality. Most importantly, keep that connection to how debate and discourse function in public spaces. Anything you get from debate that will be valuable will not come from rigorous, artificial practices born out of a fear that the competition isn't "fair enough." Eventually we are going to find our practice an institution with nobody at the helm, serving up events nobody wants to do yet spend hours defending because they have not known anything else. Every practice we introduce has consequences - some might call it karma - so we should use extreme caution every time we introduce a new practice.

Judge Not!

2011-11-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

This past weekend at the Hobart & William Smith Colleges tournament, the round 6 bin room was assigned only one, inexperienced judge. The top rooms, however, were given panels of three, experienced judges.

My experience at Oxford last year was similar - break rooms and top rooms, closed adjudication aside, were easily identifiable as the tab rolled by - the panels of big names revealing exactly who the CA and DCAs deserved "good judging." At Oxford, perhaps the defense might be that in top rooms, debaters are less likely to listen to or accept a decision educationally if they don't have respect or admiration for the panel. This is not a good defense, by the way, for an event that proports to teach people how to argue in front of "reasonable people" instead of "specific information experts," but it trumps the HWS decision by at least having some logic to it.

The Hobart & William Smith decision is less defensible. One judge in a room is not a WUDC round, nor is it even close to being the same event. If students sign up to debate at a Worlds style tournament, the tournament director, CA, host, whoever it is has an obligation to match the rules of competition as close as they can. To do otherwise is to violate the rules under which debaters and adjudicators paid money to compete. This is flagrant violation of the rules of the competition, in a situation where those decisions were absolutely not forced.

Not sure what the tournament hosts were thinking, but my guess is they weren't. Some debate programs are focused just on the competition - and there's a defense of that to be sure. But to have good, deep competitions one needs to think to the future, farming and cultivating the future generations of debaters who will dazzle us with argumentative prowess. Non-decisions such as this one harm the future generations of our practice in innumerable ways. Even a heavy contest or heavy competition-based philosophy of debate requires a pedagogical practice of some kind to get the results that we all want - good debating. There's a reason behind stacking judges that goes beyond "that's how it's done at the best competitions in the world," or "this is how it's always done." One of the silliest fallacies of thinking that we generally laugh at when we hear - the appeal to tradition. Unfortunately, I suspect this is the sort of thinking that allowed this judgement to happen.

Assigning judges to the bin should be given at least as much thought as assigning judging to the top room. This goes for tournaments where mutual judge preference is in use as well. Perhaps it's good to get a judge you both dis-prefer, or feel lukewarm about, than to get the highest mutually ranked judge each time. At top IVs, this sort of thing just wouldn't happen. The rules of the contest - that rounds should be paneled, trump the tab rooms or adjudication team's sense of which rounds "matter" and which don't. Placing one judge in a room alone at the bottom of a tab sends a very clear message - debate is only for those who are already good. We do not care that you are here if you are new.

In Worlds debate, perhaps care in rotation should be in order. Do you really want a homogeneous break? Or do you want teams that can persuade a panel to come to consensus that has a very highly practiced judge, a mediocre judge, and one that is quite new? Do you want the best debaters, or the best persuaders? What do you want your final round to look like? A public debate on a viable controversy? Or do you want it to be a finely tuned monastic display of ritualized discourse? You cannot avoid the question of pedagogy - everything you do in a tournament and everything you assign in a tournament reveals your hand. CAs, what baggage do you want to be carrying? What will be the legacy of the decisions you make when setting panels for first year debaters?

University of Vermont Huber Debate Videos

2011-11-11T01:48:00.000-05:00

Here are a number of debate videos from the UVM Huber Debates held last weekend in Burlington, VT.

Quarterfinals:

Semifinals:

Final Round:

University of Vermont Final Round Video

2011-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

there are more videos coming, but let's start with the final round.

Motion: THB that black actors, comedians, musicians, and other public figures should not use the n-word.

Opening Government: Portland State University
Opening Opposition: St. John's University, New York
Closing Government: Cornell University
Closing Opposition: Cornell University

The performance of each team was heavily praised by the audience. What do you think? It sparked a lot of conversation afterwards from everyone who saw it.

UK Tour Workshop

2011-11-09T07:45:00.000-05:00

We hosted the British touring team this year and they presented an amazing workshop to our New York City debating family. This workshop is titled "Deep Strategy," and has a lot of great ideas for people at any level of WUDC debating. It was held at the King's College in the Empire State Building.

This workshop is full of information, and might be one of the best we've hosted here. Check it out - anything you think that they left out?

After the two hour workshop, the conversations continued into the night over drinks.

Every year the NCA's Committee on International Discussion and Debate jointly sponsors this tour with the English Speaking Union (ESU). Two British debaters are selected to travel the United States, debating and teaching at various Universities and colleges.

Here is the 2011 team discussing what they have been up to as they sit with about a month left in the tour:

Academic Debate? Let's hope not.

2011-11-03T01:50:00.000-04:00

A student said to me, "I really wish you could write me a recommendation letter, but you haven't ever been my professor." This student has been studying debate with me for several years, so I pushed on this to get the response: "It's not academic, so it doesn't count."

Debate not academic? How could this be? We'd spent hours engaging in what I believed to be fairly intense, deep investigation of countless political and social issues. We'd spent hours in the evening giving and listening to critiques of the persuasive use of the human voice, of the fragility and power of language, of the intense agony of not being able to get your very clear point across to other human beings. This is a clear trajectory of intellectual practice that started in Athens over 2,500 years ago. It was picked up and carried through Europe, and has been at the heart of the spiritual and intellectual training at the finest historical Universities from India to China to America. What is the litmus test for academic, if not this?

I tried not to be angry, for what was obvious to me is very rarely obvious to anyone else (you might notice, this comes with the human experience for free. Everyone gets it as a sort of bonus). Let's try to look at this question from the perspective of the contemporary undergraduate for a more fair answer. Academic appears to have changed color, shape, and flavor.

Academic, for these students, involves several things. First, there must be an official record of study - to go to the library and read a book on a topic you are interested in is a strange idea. I push this every semester, and every semester the students are confused. When they want to learn something, they decide to take a class - a class, I might add, they will not attend frequently, barely skim the readings, halfheartedly attend to the lectures when present, question the professor's ability based on whether or not she can command their attention through days of sleep deprivation and mobile phones, and finally end up complaining about the quality of the class, even though they started the final paper after allowing the time allotted for its preparation to whittle down to mere hours.

Secondly, academic requires some sort of abstracted, hierarchical assessment. Without a grade, or hours on a transcript, how will we know we learned? There have to be moments of bizarrely calculated and abstracted "good" for students to indicate to others. Most of the time, grades are refered to as evidence of a "brush with death" - i.e. "I can't believe I was hung over every single class and got a B." But students have conspirators here - professors who get a sick thrill out of equating physical presence - such as attendance - with points or other nodules of achievement in the course. I hear the weeping up and down my office hallway every term as faculty explain that the student fails to get a B- because they are missing 3.75 attendance points. Reading is assigned punitively; exams are our enforcement of punishment. Far too often things are so abstract from the reality our examinations are less like Bentham's panoptic system of justice and much more like Lindsay England's - celebrating the torture of a student as a metonymy for a general hatred of students in general. Abstraction can bring you torture, or it can bring you self-regulation. Directionless, yet containing everything valuable about the course - that is what counts as academic.

Finally, there must be some sort of "professionalism" associated with the academic experience. Whether that's distance, or some sort of role-play between professor and student, the impact is that less and less important moments for teaching are properly attended to. Distance is the idea that the professor is somehow "too busy" for students, and the time given to them occurs mainly in the classroom. Even then, the students are too frightened to indicate need, ask for clarification, or perhaps are fed-up with being addressed in a dismissive tone. Role-Play also factors in here; the professor pretends to be a great Sage evaluating whether or not the students are really capable of receiving the great wisdom only he or she knows. Sometimes it's a customer service model where the student is told to indicate dissatisfaction or confusion as if they were at the shopping mall. Encounters outside the classroom are devalued, as presence in the classroom is celebrated to the point where it is indistinguishable from other forms of good academic performance. Too often I hear, "Well, she attended every class" as a reason to grant a higher grade. No wonder our students don't read - they know they don't need to. The more the University interest turns toward creating job seekers over thinkers or even contemplators, the

This brings us back to debate, that strange game/auto-didactic experience that is often led by a faculty member but never controlled by one. It takes more time and energy to get the equivalent of a C in it, but students can't wait to spend their whole weekend working at it. The line between student and teacher does not, and will not exist - no matter how hard some members of the community push for its clear existence. The time in the classroom is derivative of the time outside of it, and the assessment is always already situational, immediate, and inapplicable to ontic ways of doing persuasion. Debate haunts you all the time, not just the day before the test. It appears in your daily interactions, and makes you think twice about what you said. It's always, and never, on the test. In short it rails against everything the contemporary University and undergraduate have unintentionally conspired to create.

Will my letter be solicited? I hope not. I have nothing to say inside such a system. My voice would not be recognizable as "voice." Even such work with such students over years would not be understandable as valuable by the system's criteria. Perhaps my student is more right than she knows - my work doesn't count, will never count, in measurable ways.

But is debate academic? God, I hope it never is.

Debate Videos: A Question of "Access"

2011-10-31T01:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a recent email response I gave on the subject of videotaping debates, addressed to someone who asked me to remove a debate they were in that they didn't care for their performance.

I have placed your video in privacy stasis - nobody can see it at all, and I hope you'll test that to make sure that I've secured it properly. It will stay hidden forever, unless I show it to an entry-level debate course at my University in New York - about 20 people or so a year.

I understand your concern to control your appearances online. A popular sentiment. But I'd like to point out just exactly who you are asking to control from access to your performance.

The video as of today has 572 hits since it was put up in 2009, almost all from the US and Canada. I think this represents the total audience for the video, since in the past week it has only received 8.

I think most people interested in seeing the video have seen it, as far as people looking for you or how you did. I bet most of the audience represented here would have been in the room if they could have been. Those who weren't were probably restricted by work or school commitments or maybe something else. This video allows (allowed, I think they've done it) them to see something they would have seen anyway.

More importantly, about once every couple of months I get an email from the developing world - India, Africa, someplace like that - thanking me for hosting these videos. Apparently they get the videos from internet cafes, download them, and use them in rural areas to train young debaters in how to speak well. Tournament performances like the one you gave and the access and ability to do them, we take for granted. This video, and the others like it that I host here, represent a level of pedagogical access that even 10 years ago people thought was a good element in a science fiction story.

As far as future employers finding it, which is a common concern among debaters who don't like to be taped, I highly doubt debating will achieve that much relevance to be a real threat. If they did find it, they'd probably be astounded that students do this sort of thing. Why our community chooses to fly under the radar is always a mystery to me.

So I'll keep the video out of the public eye until I hear from you again. I'm sure everyone who wanted to see it has seen it, and as for those who haven't seen it yet - the people who really do need access to these videos - I'll let you decide about them.

Best Wishes, Steve

What I left out is the argument I've previously made on this blog that the presence of a video camera helps debates become more realistic - the fear of discovery of the performance motivates more realistic argumentation. However given my arguments here, perhaps I'm not terribly convinced of that, and more convinced of the idea that privileged folks with time and access to debate should perhaps see videos as a way of contributing something to the rhetorically undeveloped world - a phrase that although disturbing, would include the U.S. I doubt it will be persuasive, but perhaps over the long term debaters will consider videotaped debates in this manner.

Middle School Debate: Addressing Public Audiences

2011-10-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

Here's a video of a middle school debate we did today on the subject of whether students should have a say in the courses that they are required to take.

Debating for public audiences (i.e. non-"debate community" audiences) is something I am finding more and more important to my pedagogy every year. I think it's because I am becoming more and more convinced that any debate format - every debate format - naturally becomes a gravity well of practices and performances that become so attractive that no utterance can escape their pull. In other words, specific style of speech used to win tournament rounds becomes indistinguishable from "good speech."

In this debate, I think one move that would help the debaters reach the audience would be to speak more in enthymemes - something that we tell new debaters to stop doing at practice number one. The other skill here would be to encourage debaters to switch from the deliberative to the epidictic mode of argument. This would be argument fit for a day of celebration, the here, the now, the immediate. Most motions and most "good debates" (as seen by the competitive community) focus on questions of policy (Aristotle would call them subjects for deliberative oratory). Deliberation deals with decisions about the future, and most of these questions are about something far removed from us and where and when we are - questions of international relations, for example. The question is how to teach using motions that highlight these two areas of need.

What practices can help debaters attend to the audience in front of them without bowing completely to an ethic of total assimilation to what the audience wants. The audience needs to see what good clash looks like, and needs alternative models of debate compared to what they normally see on TV and the like. This is where the competitive aspects of debate have developed some really good things. This is what we can export to public audiences - as long as we can keep them engaged and keep them listening.

American Debate Sediment 3: Argument "theory"

2011-10-27T23:00:00.000-04:00

For those unfamiliar with American debating formats, you might be surprised to learn that built into several formats is the ability to engage your opponent on the rules of debate itself. You can argue that the argument your opponent(s) made violates the rules of good debating, hurts either your ability to debate fairly or your ability to "get something" out of the debate, or both, and they should lose because of it. This is called "argument theory," but I like to put scare quotes around the "theory" part because I am deeply suspicious of the ability of this body of common beliefs and practices to serve as theory in any academic use of the term.

This type of debating we sometimes call meta-debate - debating about the rules of the debate - doesn't happen that often in our big political debates. Occasionally you will find it - Newt Gingrich announcing that the purpose of the Republican debate a few weeks ago was not to have Republicans attack one another but to jointly attack Obama would be one moment. Perhaps another one would be whether or not we should televise certain trials, mostly because of the effect it would have on the arguments within the courtroom (audience, even one you are ignoring, has big impacts on how you do things).

In your interpersonal arguments, there's much more meta-debate. Is it fair to bring up that time two years ago when you were particularly insensitive in this argument right now? Perhaps it is, if it's evidence of a trend. But it might not be if it's just a way to derail the deliberation you and your partner are having now. In the end, both partners are very interested in reaching some sort of agreement, or solving the issue in front of them, and accessing past arguments might not work like stare decisis. It more works as a way to communicate your anger or pain with your interlocutor.

Worlds format does not have any space for the meta-debate. There are places like this blog, or the Worlds Forum that was held in Botswana and will be held in Manila too. There are all those conversations we have in the hallways of tournaments, or in briefings about how debate should work. But these are nothing compared to having the meta during a debate, where you are also debating about the issue. Think of it as a big "even/if" argument: Even if you don't think this argument is bad for debate, we still beat it for other reasons. All of this happening at once is like the pre-trial motions, the trial, and the sentencing happening at once. It can get hairy.

Debate "theory" is the collection of norms and practices that help keep debate fair, but more often than not they are a part of the strategy a team will deploy in order to win. The "theory" is more of a collection of normative debate "ideals" that can be accessed in order to create arguments that must be responded to by the other side or they lose. This "theory" doesn't help advance the construction of arguments, but helps teams advance innovative ways to avoid argument - if you can't respond to what I have said, you will lose. Unlike the way most people use the term theory - a way of constructing and understanding the relationship between highly complex ideas or practices - debate "theory" serves as a system of complex norms that participants must learn in order to find victory. It models bureaucracy and legal systems but without the backing or the historical formations that led to the analogues. It's great training in order to learn an abstract system that is difficult to care about, but essential in order to advance your position within such an environment.

Compare debate "theory" to argumentation theory to get a sense of the difference. Debate theory is inward looking and attempts to craft arguments good for debate. Argumentation theory looks outward and is always changing itself to account for nuance and unexplained moves people make in debates. It is elastic to change based on discourse. Debate theory alters discourse to serve it; it forces adaptation in speaking style. Sometimes these changes are incredibly difficult to undo, if you have encountered long term debaters after the fact. I'm very skeptical that debate theory is a "theory" in the intellectual sense of things due to it's function. It's more like ideology, or better yet - a collection of norms and practices - like you would find in a religious order. And what works as very persuasive and symbolically salient within the order does not work too well outside the walls of the monastery.

An example of this is watching any NPDA team who is new to Worlds attempt to prop a motion. They define everything as narrowly as possible, to a very specific case almost and then claim that they only have to defend this small area of the motion. Principled arguments, or arguments about defending the larger parts of the motion are dismissed as not relevant, because they established what they would defend, and expect the opposition to follow suit.

This theory is called "parametrics" and it is not "theory" in so much as it helps us understand relationships within and around argument, but more about fairness. Policy debate, probably the oldest of the formats, uses one motion for the whole tournament season. In this environment, fairness is defended by allowing proposition teams the ability to narrow the debate to keep it interesting, and not to have to defend against every possible issue that could be supported under a motion. Parametrics helps sustain interest and challenge for a whole year's worth of debates by keeping everyone on their toes with what could count as support of the motion. Think of it as debating "case studies" across a year where the list of case studies is not provided, nor is it ever really complete in any sense.

Why does WUDC not have such a system? Looking at the parametrics example I think we can come up with an answer - it just doesn't fit what we are trying to do. I think again, we have two different models of what debate is for. In WUDC, the tradition is to develop speakers who can appeal to a broad public, whatever that might be. In American formats, the goal is to appeal to a particular expert, or even a person who is one of many experts. The analogue would be a lawyer adapting her appeal based on what she knows about this particular judge's view of different legal issues, distinct from the specific matter in the case. I think that's where WUDC and American formats split.

The desire to create things like judge paradigm lists and long discussions about the "right way" to counterprop don't really have a place in Worlds. But there are people who confuse these specific practices with "good debating" on the whole, and want them present in Worlds. All judges in Worlds have one paradigm - the reasonable person. They are to evaluate arguments based on how reasonable and relevant they are to the debate. They are not to judge a team based on how well they used the normative rules of fairness to help them out. We have no need of a complex normative system of rules to debate about (you could argue we have our norms and practices, and you'd be right - but we don't systematize them for use during debates).

Those who wish to add or include the insights of debate "theory" into worlds should question whether they desire to add it to improve Worlds or to improve their comfort with worlds. Adding the grammar of another language to make learning a new language easier will not help your fluency, just make you more comfortable and more angry when nobody understands you. Distinguishing comfort from improvement in regards to debate "theory" is a huge amount of sediment to overcome.

American Debate Sediment 2: Punitive Judging

2011-10-25T22:00:00.000-04:00

This is the second of a few pieces that I am working on to try to outline what I think are the biggest hurdles that Worlds debate development faces in the United States. It's not an exhaustive list by any means, nor is it a list that I think is completely accurate.

Judging is hard work. I really don't like it that much because it is exhausting. Doing it well all day is a real challenge for me, but when it's good it is really good. The attention and care required are always paid back in the development of the debate students in later rounds. For students it's becoming an essential part of my teaching of younger debaters to help them identify how a team creates victory out of almost nothing.

Judging is a creative and developmental enterprise for me, but some judges I've worked with see it as a punitive exercise: They try to seek out the team that has made mistakes, messed up, or violated the rules in some way. These judges function like police - they look for infractions or violations of the "law."

I remember winging on a panel 2 years ago at the Yale IV where the chair started the discussion, "The first thing we need to ask ourselves is: Did any team knife any other team?" After we decided there were no knives, the next question was, "Did any team not fulfill their role?" After about 10 minutes of this, we finally started discussing the quality of the argumentation. Another judge I was with wanted to give a team a 4 because "everyone knows" there is a "card out there" that

The manufacture of knives and the seeking out of mistakes is a very comfortable way to judge, and one that is very common in many American debating formats. The trope of "I really like the argument, but you dropped this or that response," or the dropping of another argument is enough to allow the judge to inhabit two worlds - the world of agreement and rejection at once, in a very pleasant way: "I agree with you, but the rules do not, and I must enforce the rules." In this way, the judge removes herself entirely from the rather uncomfortable and more difficult position of saying that one argument was "better" than another one.

This is not the fault of the judge, nor is it really bad. This sediment comes from a format, or a system of formats that try to replicate and/or simulate a sphere of expertise. In expert spheres, people in decision making positions do this all the time. They say, "I am with you in principle, and against you in technical merit." This happens in law, medicine, academia, and other such places. It is good training for those who wish to practice persuasion for expert fields.

We can see this also in the "tick box" judge - the judge who wants to give a team a 1 because, "They didn't do anything wrong." Sometimes this is articulated - as it has been to me a few times - because a team "did their job," or "really fulfilled their role," which puzzles me to no end. This is the other end of the "cop" judge, the one who wants to reward those who can follow the rules.

But do we give a job to the person who has the correct margins on their resume? The person who filled in the application to the letter? It seems strange to not attend to content right away. It seems alien to not want to discuss content at all in evaluating debate performances.

This is sediment that we must figure out how to remove from our Worlds experience. Why? Worlds debate, whether it planned to or not, has evolved to simulate a public sphere. The presence of a panel of judges simulates the discussion of the issues in a public before a decision is rendered. The need for arguments to sustain 8 different speeches also points to a format that doesn't believe that there will be limited voices with access to the ear of the "public" involved in the discussion. This is practice that is tuned toward helping people persuade general audiences. Both formats are desirable, but we must resist the urge to push all formats toward the form that makes us feel comfortable.

The discomfort of having to say, "I didn't buy what you were saying" or "I didn't understand what you were saying, so I dismissed it" would be unacceptable in a policy debate - the judge must be an expert, and if the judge misses an argument or doesn't understand a technical issue, shame on them. In a "natural language" format like Worlds, shame on the debater for not being clear enough or not explaining herself well enough to win.

This explanation is measured with the ideal of the "reasonable person" standard, something derived from British law and applied to this debate game. The chair and the other judges must use it to temper their own potential expertise about an issue, or about debate in general, and render a decision that makes all the participants think about reaching general, intelligent audiences. The goal that a Worlds Grand Final should be a really engaging debate on a contentious issue is all the standard one needs. "Breaking the rules" is never a compelling case for anyone - in fact, it's the opposite of establishing any position.

How do we remove this sediment? I've had little luck in trying to get both of these judges to express their views on particular arguments in the debate. They feel, I think, that to express their own view of the argument is to "intervene" in the debate - code for letting your personal view or resonance with the arguments to trump the role of enforcer of good debating standards.

Unfortunately, I lack the language at this point to explain to these judges that they have already intervened, that they will continue to do so, and that their intervention is what makes debate possible. This is based on the idea that the public, by virtue of their interest and care for the issue, must and will mutilate your argumentation. Fidelity to the proper, expert form of the argument - like scientific reasoning for example - is lost once that document wanders out into the public. Once there, people will mutilate it to make it make sense to them, or make it fit what they think.

This sediment will take a lot of time to wash away - many judges are simply incapable of making a decision without the rules being involved because of decades of training in the opposite direction. It is a big challenge, and I struggle with the proper language in which to frame it to these judges. There's something strangely pleasurable about citing the relevant theory to make a decision instead of carefully comparing the articulation of a principled argument down a bench.

Some might think that I am calling for less objectivity and therefore do not want a fair game. On the contrary, I do want less objectivity but only because throughout debate's recent history in this country, fairness has been held above realism. And a game is only worth playing if it is fair to both the players and to the game itself. In short, there needs to be some risk to teach properly, and the risk is over-padded with fairness at the moment. There should be moments where your best arguments fail because they are "best arguments."

If you aren't going to confront your limits in constructing persuasive discourse, when do you plan to do it? The judge who is not afraid to say an argument lacks quality - whatever that might be - is essential to this important moment of rhetorical development.

Tournaments are it?

2011-10-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

What else can a debate club do besides tournaments?

In the history of US debating, debate was a pipeline to academia. There was scarcely a faculty member who hadn't been a part of, or at least participated significantly in debating as an undergraduate in speech communication departments. Whether this was a choice, or forced, or what, I'm not sure. The history of that still needs some development. What I am sure of now is that this is no longer the case, and the debate club goes to tournaments model might need some shoring up in the modern speech communication department.

Here is one of my attempts at offering an alternative narrative as to what debate programs do. I had three students put papers together about or related to debate experiences where they accessed theory in order to help them account for experience at tournaments. This seems to give an intellectual edge to what some might not be convinced are intellectual endeavors. It also helps answer concerns about the emphasis on competition that a debate club brings by definition.

Other attempts include community and school outreach, which I hope to post some videos of as well. I think that the modern debate program is doomed if it doesn't offer a menu of events that differ in perceptible ways from victories at tournaments. Basing your program on competitive success is not sustainable.