Progymnasmata

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.

American Debate Sediment 1: Student Judging

2011-10-12T23:06:00.003-04:00

There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix.

Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a sediment on top of American debating; a sediment left there by decades of debate practice influenced by a positivist view of language within a legalistic, punitive system of rules.

The sediment is thick. The metaphor here is not dusting, but more nautical archaeology. Nautical archaeology of ancient Greece or something. It's a lot of sticky mud. And pulling it off too quickly threatens the treasure below. There is a high risk the patient will reject the new organ of WUDC style debate that is being slowly transplanted across the country.

This is the first of a few posts about these concerns. They are in no particular order.

Student Judges

Debate's history in the United States has always been a faculty directed program. There was a brief period of time in the history of Colonial Colleges that debate teams were student run, at the dawn of tournament debating. The rise of the Speech Communication department along with the G.I. bill ended that, but it still remains as a relic only at the most elite of American Universities (the most persuasive theory being that elites who attend elite schools do not need any directed or professional speech instruction; people will simply believe them based on class, wealth, power, or simply networking with friends of dad solves the need to be persuasive. Also the name on the degree doesn't hurt).

This sediment has led to some very comfortable rules. Judges are all graduates, done debating. They are responsible employees of the University. They are to speak as a teacher, or perhaps an expert. They judge the debate based on expert opinion on debating.

Worlds Style debate has no such system or luxury. The development of the consensus system is a judge training system built into the format. It also serves as a simulated public - a very different idea than the judge as "debating expert." There are no experts in Worlds debate; there are simulated publics, there are "reasonable persons" judging each debate. Breaking judges are selected, in theory, based on the most attentive and responsible of the judges at the tournament.

I don't know where or if the fear is a motive here. But one huge assumption is that debating is to be preferred to judging. If a student can debate, they should. Judging comes later. They could unfairly tip the ballance, they might not know enough to make a good decision - and they might not understand the rules of debating well enough to judge it. They might also be bad teachers.

The result of these fears is a comfort that is misplaced, putting one or two judges in a round as long as they know what they are doing. They are comfortable having expert single judges judge a room, which is problematic. All the arguments are directed toward a public ear, not a private expert reviewing the case. There is a shortage of judges because debate directors have to fight the feeling that putting a student in as a judge is a waste. Deliberation solves this, because deliberation forces the students to make and remake the arguments they've heard. They have to repeat them, explain them. They also have to articulate how they clashed with every other team in the round. In short, they have to develop a critical debating mind, and they do it through articulation with and to others. They also have to hear the articulation of others, and reflect on it. They must reflect and speak about the rhetoric of others. This is better debate training than any professor at the chalkboard can provide.

Couching judging as 50% of the experience of being a Worlds debater might help us overcome this. The argument must be made that the pedagogy depends on both. We must use the metaphor of the card, or the cross examination, or research, or something like that to convince those transitioning over or adding to their existing adversarial debate program that student judging is a requirement, not an option.

Everyone benefits from this. The more judges, the more something that was lost can be located in a round. The more the judging students can see how judges work, and how decisions should be made. They gain valuable exposure to a variety of argument in practice. And they learn how to explain why and how it worked for them. Students before judging explain why they were persuaded circularly (i.e. "It's good because it is true, and it's true because it is good"). After making them judge, they are much better at giving reasons why they were moved, instead of just assuming it was truth moving them around.

Many of the older coaching generation will have trouble accepting students flipping from judging to speaking between tournaments. Questions of eligibility and fairness will appear. But in Worlds, no divisions are needed, as we are not learning an expertise-based argumentation style. Natural language argumentation is available everywhere. We just express the warrants with more explicit language (not swearing, ha ha, very funny you) and more direct expose of interactivity. And that might be a good thing. Well, it's good if a reasonable person can understand it and assent to it.

Will a student be a bad teacher? The student is the only teacher available. Teacher, understood as a figure of authority, or someone holding onto a sacred and complex set of disciplinary rules, is not a good understanding. The experience is what teaches in Worlds style debating, not a particular expert judge. The experience of the debate teaches, both in the doing and the decision. Everyone learns from the interaction, and they learn something about how people are moved by words.

On Recording and Posting as Many Debates as we can

2011-10-06T22:20:00.000-04:00

In transit to the US National Open at the Claremont colleges, a tournament that expressly forbids the recording of any of the debates in any form, even with consent. There is a waver procedure you must conform with, and insurance that must be purchased before filming anything on the campus. So go the horrors of being a University so close to Hollywood.

Next weekend will be the Hart House IV, and I usually film most of the debates. Only occasionally do I have people object to it - but overall the mood about filming debates is one of fear and skepticism. Thinking about this compels me to outline as clearly as I can why we should try to record as many debates as we can, and post them to as many web sites as we can.

About a month ago I received correspondence from a teacher in India thanking me for posting debate videos. He was downloading them and using them in rural schools to teach debating, showing them off of his laptop. It's quite accidental this is happening, but that's the only way it could happen - nobody could imagine a better production and delivery system for educational videos than the Internet as a whole. The declining cost of internet and laptops, as well as the growing demand for good debating and reasoning in the world should be enough of an argument to encourage all tournaments to push the idea of recording and posting debates. This burden falls even more heavily on exclusive (meaning limited registration slots) and high-quality tournaments. This is perhaps the most materially real evidence for the internet being a democratizing, or at least, educational force in parts of the world that exhibit the most need.

But there's also a more self-serving reason. One is the value of debating, and how it is pegged to the idea that we practice a public reason - our arguments are to tailored to "reasonable persons" - and those who win do the best job of making persuasive arguments within this field (I am using Stephen Toulmin's definition of field here, as in the common experiences and knowledge of an audience. We fake this in debate, but we fake it well and for a good telos, overall). This is something that we are working toward always in debates and in decisions - trying to extol the arguments that are most reasonable and persuasive, toward the end of creating even more good argumentation. This is why we encourage our first years to watch elimination debates (and if you don't, shame on you). I call this the centrifugal force of debate, a force where we try to push the applicability of our arguments outside of the game, outside of the tournament, and make them adherent (or at least sticky) for audiences that don't narrow the meaning of the term "extension" the way we do.

However there is another force at work, the centripetal force of debate. This force is the one that strengthens the community and the networks within it by paying too much attention to the immediate audience and immediate situation. A "reasonable person" quickly becomes a "reasonable person in debate" - and then we have changes in our style. Nothing too bad at first, perhaps a few inside jokes, a joke at the expense of a debater we all know and love, or something about the well-known food at another IV we all attend - quite innocuous. The problems arise when particular structures of argument that have been named by the community, or the community leaders, as "persuasive" become expected argumentation. When that expected argument is not made, or that cloistered form of reason is not presented (I'm looking your way, arguments about rational actors or Western Liberal Democracy frameworks) then the team receives a loss. This compounds over time to produce a discourse that is moving toward the center of the game qua game, without much attention to those outside the immediate debating audience present. This is damaging to the best effects of participation in debate - it not only avoids the teaching of persuasive argument to all audiences, it gives the debaters a false sense of superiority about their ability to communicate. They conflate good argumentation with debate, and then dismiss audiences who do not buy their arguments outside (or even often times inside) of the debate community. And as we learn from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's writing in The New Rhetoric, one can only dismiss part of any audience as incapable of being persuaded or one gives up the ontological hope of persuasion entirely.

Videoing and posting rounds is a curative (perhaps a corrective in my more conservative moments) because it reminds us that other people could be watching. Debaters get nervous about where that film might end up - and not all communities might find our humor or logic amusing or even relevant. Some might find it downright offensive. This is an argument for filming because it keeps us thinking about the limits of the reasonable person standard as a check on insular debating practices. The unblinking eye of the camera is the audience member who might not be amused at your offbeat humor, or your tricky logical refutation. It is a reminder that we are not all-encompassing in our ability to evaluate the "good" argument, and that one day we will have to face audiences that do not think we are clever straight away. In short, it will temper the centripetal forces in favor of the centrifugal ones.

We don't want a full centrifugal takeover either. We don't need a talking fest, or the cacophony of the masses. We need a game to help us deal with that reality. It helps us hone and concentrate on what effective argumentation might look like. It cuts out the atomizing bits of public discourse that interfere - the coercion, intimidation, the financial inequity and privileged access to the podium, etc. But these still exist in some form in debate, although we do a good job of minimizing them.

Videoing puts things in perspective. Yes, a future employer might see you debate. They won't judge you on the position you hold, per se, but they will judge you on your attitude and the turns of phrase you use. They might judge you on your demeanor, or the temper of your speech. In short, they might judge you on all the things the people in a boardroom might judge you on, or the people in your community. They might be real audiences, and we might just need a bit more of there presence, albeit in technological form, in our debates.

As a post-script to this idea, I am using the terms centripetal and centrifugal in a similar way to Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of language. Bakhtin argues that language is always struggling against forces that want to control and constrain the meaning of it, and forces that are always expanding it and making it mean a more new, for lack of a better phrase. He argues this is part of the natural way meaning operates, and can be seen best in novels as a form. If we imagine debate as a form of literature, we don't have to work to hard to imagine these forces at work within our art. We have some people wishing to narrow and constrain, motivated by fair competitions, eristics, the need for good rules, etc. and those who want to broaden and new-ify it - sometimes going too far, or going far enough as to suggest debate become "something else." These struggles are fantastically healthy, and I find the controversy over videotaping or filming debates to be a material "bubbling up" of these larger, usually submerged, struggles.

Public Debate: Arab Spring

2011-10-02T13:37:00.000-04:00

A Debate Coaching Prime Directive

2011-09-05T22:15:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

There's another one coming up. Another of these "debates" for Republican candidates seeking the U.S. Presidency. And I know my media department at my University is going to want to put my name out as someone willing to give commentary.

I am uncertain about this, as I always am. My uncertainty is at a high point after reading the commentary given by Todd Graham, debate coach at Southern Illinois University after the last Republican debate. After reading this, I have the following proposal:

I think all professional debate coaches should adhere to a policy of non-interference when it comes to giving commentary on political debates. Very much like the prime directive from Star Trek, we end up causing much greater harm to a system even when we try to introduce elements of good technology (or in this case, techne) to those systems.

It's not Professor Graham's intent to cause harm. But looking at his commentary only made me shudder. He easily elided between the terms "debate" and "argument," set up opposing sides without a clear statement of clash, or even disagreement, and casually labeled candidates as "winning" the debate without referencing one quote from them. There would be no academic or intellectual grounds to distinguish Graham's commentary from the commentary of a CNN journalist. A trained debate expert needs to offer more than the familiar tropes of TV's hollow newsreaders.

Oh, except for the fact that he's a debate coach - a debate expert, and has access to CNN's audience because of it. Implicitly, his commentary authorizes these events as "debates." This not only authorizes the media to create and control debates as they see fit, but ignores a stellar opportunity to use the more than 50 years of debate, argumentation, and rhetorical scholarship to make an intervention into the public's appetite for better discourse.

Before I go any further with this critique, please understand I am not some positivist who is upset because something was called by the "wrong name." My argument is the reverse - I am afraid that every time we do this, when we offer our political opinions under the title of "debate coach" we worsen the state and the case for debate much more than we assist audiences in reading these rhetorical events.

When I appear in the media to comment as a debate coach, I have to continue to remind myself that I serve the idea of debate, not my personal political interests. My job is not to help out a candidate I like, but to help out reasoning, help out words, help out expression. This is what I try to do. Thinking back to my "interventions," I am afraid I must put them in scare quotes. I'm not sure if they are interventions. I am sure that my presence in these events in some way authorizes them. It authorizes them in a way that the media can't quite do.

As an expert on debate, Professor Graham, your first and primary loyalty should not be to the game of politics, but to the principles of debating. You celebrate the bickering and never breathe a word on modes of proof. I find it interesting that you decided to parse out several mini-arguments among the candidates - this is an interesting move. Unfortunately, you never indicate why or how such a decision could be made. You failed to point out that such distinctions are arbitrary and yet incredibly useful to identifying the points of clash during the debate as a whole. You failed to indicate in your commentary how good debate depends more on agreement than disagreement, and also failed to establish any sound relationship between argumentation and debate. Instead of attending to eristics, you should have attended to debate, and helped the CNN audience develop critical tools for assessing what they had witnessed. A commentary from a debate coach that is indistinguishable from a journalistic accounting is, in my view, shameful. It's also a lost opportunity to bring the field we so dearly love to a public that could benefit from some tools, some "equipment for living" that both of us have easy access to. It would be a simple matter for you to have referenced some scholarship in an accessible way that indicated the difficulty in discerning a "winner." Your excitement in discussing the domination of one candidate over another lacked even the most basic rhetorical or argumentation angle, relying instead on folksy wisdom and tropes that any high school football coach could use to talk about a Monday night football game. In short, you missed a great opportunity for the field and our art, and instead, you gave the situation right back to the media, helping them profit off of events that probably harm public discourse more than they help.

As upset as I am with Professor Graham's misstep, I am more upset in general that our work and scholarship are not immediately present before and after events like this. Why can't we share it? What are we lacking? Why can't rhetoricians be rhetorical?

These are big questions. Perhaps the best way out is to stay out. What good can I do? Can I say my commentary would be much different than Graham's? I don't relish in the political gamesmanship like he does, that much is certain. But could I offer something in the same amount of words that would spark audiences to wonder about the quality of the entire event instead of just their candidate?

Any entry into the media will be on their terms. They want to be the purveyors of these events, hence why they bribed the Congress to take control of it from the League of Women Voters in the 1980s. We are always on their shifting terrain when we participate, and they can shift it however they wish.

Until we develop a better strategy for injecting our collective scholarship into Presidential debate commentary, I propose we stay out of it. If I comment on the next debate, it will be carefully articulated to ensure that more of a connection can be built between the public and the debate and argumentation scholarship that I believe could open all of our minds, as it has mine.

Or maybe I'm naiive, and a Prime Directive of non-interference by those skilled in the techne of debate is the way to fix it. After all, these events are so unlike debates, it would be like having a cardiac surgeon give commentary on the latest version of the board game "Operation" to be released. Staying out might not help our public discourse, but it sure won't add fuel to the flaming barge of political debate. Best to stand on the shore and watch it sail away.

Storefront Debate

2011-08-29T11:17:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Watched a documentary about the life of Bruce Lee last week, it still haunts me. Not for any of the clear reasons it should - a man mysteriously dies at the height of his life's work without foul play - but for one little section.

When Bruce Lee moved, wherever he went, he always opened up a school somewhere to teach others his particular style of martial arts. The school was always in a storefront, somewhere we might call a strip mall today, and it was unlabeled and unnoticeable unless you were seeking it.

Lee would teach a few hand-picked students, and the only way to get into the training was if you were recommended by a current student. This way he kept his school small so he could spend ample time with each student and be assured they were understanding the art correctly (read: by his philosophy of what it should be, do, and accomplish).

This struck me as an amazing parallel to the Ancient Athenian Sophists, teachers of debate, argument, and rhetoric but also hired guns who would write your speech for you if you paid. They took students on a purely for profit basis - well, that's what we teach anyway - but the documentary made me think of them and their methods. They were always teaching rhetoric and argumentation, and probably had good reasons outside the paycheck for doing so.

For me, I would love a halfway point between the two. There's a lot to be said for being outside of the University setting, about as much as can be said for being in it. The advantages and disadvantages to it are a pretty equal stasis point, in my mind. But the more compelling part is the storefront. Imagine debate schools like storefront martial arts studios where people pay to learn the art of verbal self defense. Imagine an internal ranking system - something like a cross between the martial arts belt system, and the Toastmaster's ranking system. Imagine students referring other serious students for debate training. And the tournaments would be something very different, very strange to our eyes.

Is there a demand among people to learn how to defend themselves from words? Words are quite sharp; sharper than many think. Even the most ardent handgun enthusiasts think requiring safety courses before purchase is the right thing to do. At least with guns, you either survive or you don't - with words you just slowly rend, day in and out, for an interminable amount of time (assuming something said really hit you like an assassin would). With the violence of words, it's unclear whether you survived, or you didn't. You're different, and you're here. Maybe.

I think I was born in the wrong era - at least that's what someone said to me when I proposed my storefront debate idea. Maybe so; I do consider myself a Sophist, however you wish to define it. I teach it to pretty much anyone who comes along, and it's not just profit driven. But why is it only in the University? Why only in the schools? Perhaps debate masters and practitioners should reflect on why outside of Japan, it's only a small number of people who have access to martial arts courses in the University setting. Maybe they figured out something we haven't realized yet.

How Do You Do That?

2011-08-25T19:45:00.000-04:00

Summer goes slow around here, but what goes slow runs deep.

2 AM. I'm waiting on a bus to take me from the humid sidewalk to my nice, cool apartment.

"Hey, Steve? Is that you?"

I recognize him, but not in the suit he's wearing. He's recently graduated and explains to me he's headed home after a day of work and a nice night of fun. He debated at 2 meetings, and attended many more, giving comments and asking questions of the speakers after the debate.

Now he works in the financial industry. He hands me a free copy of the Wall Street Journal. "I know these guys, I talk to them. It's important to try to stay on top of this stuff." He's not an analyst or anything like that, someone who works in the media around the finance field. He likes his job, but is looking for advancement.

"How often do you read?" he asks. We are on the bus now. At this time of day, the WSJ headlines can't help but take on the stink of leftovers. What has been important.

"Everyday. I love it. I read a lot" I say

"How do you do that?"

If you laughed, don't worry I did too at first. But it's a better question than it first appears to be. For reading, and reading every day, and reading well is a very complicated skill worth practicing.

I suggested to my former (?) student that it was like getting better at being healthy. "Control your diet and take up some exercise." By this I suggested watching one less TV show a day, and trying to read something instead. Of course, this is tough because it's not a question of ignorance or natural ability, but a question of culture and tradition, or perhaps even ideology.

My former (that word really doesn't apply does it? How long should this relationship go on? The bus approaches my stop) student told me he never used to read, but now sees the utility of reading popular, best-selling fiction and non-fiction. The reason is career advancement. He can use his reading as an icebreaker, or a continue-er, in conversations. It also helps, he tells me, in conducting the kind of conversations he wants to have in social situations with people in his field.

Yes, yes, all this is good. Go to the gym (library). Read some different stuff, read broadly, learn to take notes this is my stop good talking to you!

As I walk home, I realize I haven't answered the question.
As I walk home, I realize this is my question too.

The _______ Society

2011-08-23T22:59:00.002-04:00

Not exactly the time for goodbyes and thank yous, but I got one today from a student unexpectedly as I sat on the campus enjoying the evening.

He thanked me for opportunities and for the experience, but mostly for something he couldn't quite articulate. Something that went like this - "Although I didn't really win a lot of trophies or help the reputation of the team much, I feel changed and better off for it." As if a lack of competitive success and positive feelings were incommensurable.

I've said it before - here in New York I think we are up to something different. But when pressed to give details, it's hard to articulate. It's something about being trapped in a word, or around a word. What does it mean to be a debating society?

What are we up to? We are up to debating, but that's a pretense. That's what gets you in the door, so to speak. I wonder if we should call it a Debating Society at all. Today I got a call from the development office of my University asking me what to name the fund that people contribute to for the debate society. "Should we call it Debate Society General Fund?" Oh development officers, your creative sexy naming is second to, well, all. But I went with it because I couldn't think of anything better.

Perhaps it should be called the languaging society. Doesn't much seem like debate's the thing we remember. We recall amazing speeches in equally amazing rounds, but the debate is really a scene. Nobody praises the stage in a good theater performance, we praise what the actor did on that stage, in that role - or the director in hers, on down the line.

Debating is what we do not what we are or what we get from our involvement. We get a chance to connect to something a bit beyond debate, as such, to something a bit more central to out human existence. We get a chance to practice our relationship to language and to each other. We get to inductively create a theory of how to persuasively and invitingly share ideas with one another from practice, trial, and re-trial.

This is a rare thing, and should be handled well. In my office we have trophies going back to the early 1950s. The University was going to throw them away, but I kept them. But they are not that useful. They don't explain themselves, or why they are around. There's no way to determine who won them, how they were won - nothing valuable remains of them except the circular: "They are trophies, so they are valuable." They are in need of cleaning, but the narrative around them, their whole existence has been lost and cannot be recovered.

Trophies are important because of the "languaging"- best term we could come up with in the dusk on campus - for what it is that we appreciate about debating. The victories and other honors are nice, but the value comes from the stories, more specifically, the telling and retelling of the stories. If we can't tell stories well, or appreciate them when told well, then we live pretty impoverished lives. Debate connects us over and over again, in very challenging ways, to the necessity of language and the incredible insufficiency of language to meet up to our rather idealized demands.

Debate teaches many things, and I think those traditional skills are good. It's good to win. But it's better to be able to 'language' - for without that, hope for understanding the importance of those skills, or the personalities involved in those victories vanishes.

If there's one thing certain about debate it is that you will lose. Why did you lose? What will it mean? These questions in many ways are more important to answer, and a bit more challenging to answer, than any motion you face.

A Break

2011-08-15T14:32:00.000-04:00

Writing, writing away, and unaware of the time. You know how it gets you, it's like Duke Ellington said - about it being close to midnight, and you really should go to bed, but there's that keyboard over there. What harm in playing around a bit? And you start to play and look up - and it's 3AM. Well, he said something like that.

Thunderstorms threatening. Until I noticed that, I was happy in my LCD universe. Now problems arise. Thunderstorms. Rain. No Umbrella. DinnerDrinks in Manhattan. Earlier in the day I helped a nice woman from Jamaica (Trinidad maybe?) figure out that her professor would not be around because it's a Catholic holiday. They only schedule those, I assure her, when the University owes me money for some debate trip or conference. She explains, "Oh, you can't be up here on a holiday! There's a big, bright world out there!" "Not any world I want any part of," I reply. She widens her eyes and steps back, saying something about the wonders of books, to which I agree with a slight nod.

Writing, write. Time for a break, Cup of coffee and blog update. Who takes a break from writing with more writing? How is this a break? If there was a mad scientist who specialized in developing systems that generate madness, he would take one look at mine and his eyes would dilate. His breath would quicken, his lips would slightly part. And if you were close enough, you could hear faintly on his breath, "genius."

The end of the summer - a sort of desert season for me in a lot of ways - always corresponds in creepy/beautiful ways with the start. In May, I was writing a lot, probably too much to be honest, spinning my wheels, typing words simply for the pleasure of producing them, filling space. These past couple of days, the same (with the exception of a 7 episode ST: Voyager binge). It's been rainy and overcast, and cooler than it should be, like when a sweater gets wet. Same in May - I thought it might never become warmer. Friends come to visit, friends want to chill, and it was the same in May. In June and July, things were quite desertish. Not in a dead way, because only a fool believes a desert to be dead. Go read some Joseph Wood Krutch. It's fine, I'll wait. OK. He's a little weird yea? But endearing? Yea? I think so too.

Well the break is over. Time to get back to it, after all it should only be about 2, but the time really flies when you are diddling away over the keyboard.

There's Nothing Wrong With Obama

2011-08-08T08:12:00.002-04:00

Everyone seems to love this article about what might be wrong with Obama. Many people, who are quite smart, are posting and re-posting this all across Facebook.

I read it, and I think the author, a psychology professor from Emory, is also worried about this. But as a psychologist, the most obvious explanation never appears in the article.

The obvious explanation is: I'm smart and I feel duped by words. I'm smart, I am not supposed to fall prey to eloquence. I'm smart, I know how to choose good leaders, so Obama must have changed.

Sorry folks. He hasn't changed. If there's one thing Obama is, he's a perfect master of opportunity. Here's the key quote from the New York Times essay:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

This is evidence that the person who we have elected has all the great skills of a low ranking executive in a major corporation. Stay low. Stay quiet. Don't rock the boat. Keep up appearances. And when the chance comes to make yourself look good in an nonthreatening manner, do it.

The cross posting, and reposting of this essay is a classic reaction-formation. My intelligent facebook friends just can't accept that they made a bad choice and all the evidence was there. But, but, I am a critical thinker! How could I be duped by mere words?

They can't accept that they are the victims of rhetoric.

Rhetoric, which appears zero times in Westen's essay, is the culprit here. Obama is a fantastic rhetorical strategist. He knows just what to say to get elected. He also knows just what to say to his opponents and the country to be re-elected. He also knows that no matter how disappointed you are with him, you will not vote for his Republican opponent, because you like them less. He's got it figured out, and he knows that lukewarm policy, no matter how much you don't like it you will figure out how to accept it.

Obama is a master of the dark side of rhetoric, the part we don't like to talk about that much, but is still very much a part of us. Reason and rationality's attraction is that we can achieve a level of smartness that allows us to become immune to "mere" language. If we develop critical thinking, if we teach better reasoning, we will release the hold of pretty words over our minds. Reason's great victory is rhetorical: We believe very much in the story told by the tradition of logic and reason (and shame on Westen for not doing one Google search on narrative theory before writing his essay. Where's Lakoff? Johnson? White?). We believe in the rhetoric of reason and logic. We are right back where we started.

There is a more charitable read than just "Obama is a sorcerer of dark words." The more charitable read is that rhetoric is running the whole show. We are all prisoners of its power, including Obama. He was duped by his own words, we were duped by them, in short: Humans are creatures who are duped by words, only to swear by words they won't be duped again. We are stuck, but we are stuck in the environment that makes us human. More appropriately: We are stuck in the environment that makes us make us human. It gives us all the tools to persuade, to calm, to excite, to dupe, to reason, and yes, to make reaction-formations about our regrets.

Once we can figure out how to accept being at the mercy of language we will be better off politically. This is not a call for better detection equipment among people - that sad, tired, "See through deception" plea we get from fields like psychology and philosophy. What we need is pedagogy of comfort that we are adrift at sea, at the mercy of the tides and waves, but that this is our home, our natural environment.

But the simple explanation of the "evil word sorcerer" is just too tempting. One last quote to point out the obvious skilled rhetor Obama is:

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Surely Westen doesn't hold the sophomoric belief that Obama's book was "more true" than Obama's political actions? Surely Westen understands that Obama's book was written for, and bought by, people who already wanted to believe in Obama. The book was written to make money, and to communicate ideas to a group of people who were already, albeit fractionally, united behind Obama. That chapter doesn't appear now because it is not rhetorically useful - why tell a story that doesn't help you with your opponents? That story is for the sappy liberals, while the Reagan stuff is for the sappy conservatives (hint: there is no escape from sappiness, I have recently learned).

Westen, noted psychologist that he is, is a sucker for the counter-transference. His "patient" is working out things for him in his own confused political sensibility. He wants to believe that the patient is who he wants him to be, not accepting him for who he is. His "treatment" of Obama is a "treatment" to fix Obama back to what Westen wants him to be. Developing a pedagogy of reason that accepts our helplessness is not the most attractive project, but necessary if we are to build a savvy, functional politics for the future.

We are all suckers though, just like Westen. In a symbolic universe made by our own hands, we can't help but be. What we lack isn't a good, clear story or a politician who "knows what he believes." What is needed is a way of accepting our symbolic prison, becoming comfortable with it, and figuring out a way to stop this senseless binary of words vs. reality.

Or perhaps I am committing a performative contradiction. Perhaps in the symbolic order we are trapped in a quantum singularity, and mistake our days old reflection at the event horizon for a rescue ship.

The NCA Alta Argumentation Conference, day 1

2011-07-29T00:29:00.002-04:00

So far, so great! This is my first time attending the NCA Alta Argumentation conference, and it's living up to what people have told me about it.

This conference is really good so far. Wish you were here. If you aren't, don't fret - I'm trying to tweet some bits of interesting information I get from each panel as often as I can. If you like, you can follow me on Twitter - the feed is just down on the right hand side of this page.

So far we have heard a very interesting keynote from Thomas Houlihan about the unfulfilled promise of argumentation studies. Tonight there was also a plenary, or showcase panel about Informal Logic, or the Canadian brand of argumentation scholarship.

The panel was the best explication of Informal Logic that I have heard. It was very well done, and very clear. Sometimes it's difficult to pick up on the nuances, but this panel did it quite well.

I have audio recordings of both, and I am planning to record most everything that I attend. Watch this space for some audio files that you should be able to play from within the page. they are quite long, but worth a listen. I will start posting those tomorrow, I think.

Debate Institute; Debate Camp

2011-07-26T10:26:00.001-04:00

There's a nice hybrid on my desk - Green Mountain Blueberry coffee in a UNT coffee mug. The combination, apparently, has driven me to the keyboard to put down some of the thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for the past 3 weeks.

In a previous debate incarnation, blueberry coffee was a powerful potion. I remember getting it from the University of Vermont campus bookstore, in that branded paper cup, with that untreated wood stirrer that resembled a misplaced part of a balsa wood airplane.

I'd go to my classroom and things would already be somewhat underway. After the midpoint of the institute, the students pretty much ran the show (or so it seemed to me). Going about reading, cutting, arranging, and discussing, there wasn't much for me to do except be there with them in the swirl. At the start of instruction there is a lot more direct stuff for me to do. Usually I taught those who had only seen or participated in 1 debate before. It was a great challenge, and I miss it, even more acutely when drinking this coffee in the late July weather.

As funding and number of debating programs across the US diminish, the University of Vermont World Debate Institute did as well. The model of the debate camp or debate institute has started to dry up. As I spent the middle weeks of July in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas, the 105 degree heat plus the lack of rain (My uncle the winemaker told me the last they had was a fraction of an inch in April as we stood in his pizza oven vineyard) the drying creek beds and low rivers were a nice metaphor for the debate institute/camp narrative.

The campus of the University of North Texas in Denton. The grass is doing quite well for 102F.

There are still a few remaining camps. I had the chance to visit one by invitation of the UNT director of debate Dr. Brian Lain. Professor Lain has one of the few remaining debate camps in the country. He sees it as an opportunity to reach out to high school students in the area and provide them a high quality summer educational program. It was good to see a vibrant high school debate institute in action again. My first major debate experience was attending the Baylor University debate workshop when I was 15 years old.

Dr. Lain is running a great debate institute on campus there. I watched a high school debate for the first time in years. It reminded me of my old incarnation, back when there were 4 types of debate one could participate in. Now there are 6 (can you name the US debate formats?). When I moved to the northeast to coach at the University of Rochester, everyone did policy debate. It was wonderful. Now everyone does Worlds Style and policy debate. And it's still wonderful, albeit different.

It would be too easy to claim the transition of the US into Worlds Style debate will mean further decline and elimination of the few debate institutes left. It's too easy because it's wrong. First, there is little to no evidence of a "transition" of any kind - what we find happening is programs are trying both. Among the interested, at least. Some directors are very format-centric and place one above the other. Some don't have the resources to run a full offering of both formats (I am a combination of the two). But if a program had a strong policy format, it would be hard pressed to argue for the removal of that format to replace it with another, since all formats have problems. Replacing one with another is reminiscent of those big American cities that tore up their electric-based public transit for buses because fuel happened to be really cheap.

The debate institute, at the high school level, is weathering the expansion of Public Forum debate pretty well. It makes me think that the University debate institute could also adapt to the growth of Worlds Style. The debate institute, one of those weird and amazing contributions to debating made by Americans has a few advantages.

I like calling it the debate institute out of a sense of irony. If done well, there's nothing very institutional about the summer debate institute. You first open the walls of the University to young people. You then put them in charge of producing a document that should serve as evidence, both for competitive debates and as evidence that they have mastered a sliver of the scholarly work available on the annual topic. The best situation is the Jacatot model a la Ranciere - both instructor and students do not know the debate topic well, and both read together, testing the quality of materials and analysis through good old fashioned question and answer.

It's held in a University, but based on praxis - experience as/plus knowledge is the organizing principle. Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a student. There is no clear hierarchy. Students meet in whatever buildings are available to research and discuss whatever subject is of that time. There is plenty of time for students to practice speaking and performing, testing their rhetorical abilities against others. This is the ideal model for the debate institute.

I contrast this with the debate camp - an institution designed to make profit and produce product. Students are often and blissfully unaware of what they are cutting and putting together. The camp sells their labor to others who cannot afford the sticker price of attendance. The faculty are clearly faculty, and remind students frequently of their superiority with smugly-told tales of the battlefield, against opponents that students would stimulate toward pity rather than any competitive drive. Critique of debates is an opportunity for the judge to indulge in sarcastic style, ensuring the students know advancement to the highest levels of the temple is impossible. Students return to their programs and repeat this performance in their own club, as high-priests ordained by a mysterious trial at a University campus that they could not hope to enter.

It's easy to fall into the capitalist model. Dr. Lain and I discussed this (and a ton of other things) during my time there. His model seems sustainable - he views the summer debate institute as an educational service to the high school students of the nearby metropolitan areas. This helped me think of Academic Service-Learning as something valuable for the first time. The funny thing is, this is not the narrative that Dr. Lain tells. He tells a story about the importance of good educational experiences for interested students. In the end, that's a good narrative for all teaching.

It seems to me that the debate institute for Worlds Style is still a bit off. There are experiments - I have heard of the institute in Amsterdam in the summer, as well as several local European ones. I had the chance to teach at the Serbian institute for a bit (I got very ill in the middle of it, but it was still enjoyable). The new debate institute in Portugal has just concluded. But where are the American ones? The Eastern Debate Institute held at the University of Vermont holds great promise in my mind. As exciting is the new workshop being held at the University of La Verne in California.

I would love to hear from you if you have attended any of these institutes.

The Approach of Euros

2011-07-12T10:28:00.000-04:00

Belgrade Euros: An insider’s view – Nederlandse Debatbond

Excellent piece by Manos on the bid for Belgrade Euros. As the current Euros tournament approaches quickly, it's already time to think about next year. A really well written piece about the work that Belgrade has done in the past few years. It's quite motivating! I wish them the best of luck in the bid process. They deserve to host this tournament.

Although I've never been, but with the increase of technology (streaming video, twitter feeds, etc) I think the experience will get to be pretty close to being there. I plan to follow whatever streaming rounds are offered as closely as I can.

Of course I could just go check it out myself. Problem is that the summer is really dead for American debating. Except for the annual debate summer institute, or "debate camp." Getting a crew ready for Euros would be near impossible for me - but other American debate directors might have better luck (or better stamina in the heat!).

Today I'm on my way to check one of the last surviving ones out at the University of North Texas.

South African Nationals

2011-07-11T16:51:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaThe South African Debate Nationals are in full swing. Here are the motions so far, all from Twitter.

Round 1: This House Supports Wal-Mart's Expansion into Africa.

Round 2: This House would create a regulated market for rhino horn.

Round 3: This House regrets the partition of Sudan.

Round 4: This House would expropriate land without compensation.

Round 5: This House would not allow parents whose children have been taken into protective care to raise any more children.

Round 6: This House believes that the AU should support NATO's stance on Lybia.

I'll try to stay on top of it, but your best bet is to hit Twitter, hashtag #Nationals2011