Initial Thoughts about A Social Justice Debate Course
This time of year reminds me how far removed I am from tournament debating. My social media feeds are filled with horrifyingly saccharine posts about how success was found even though teams didn’t win “the big rounds” (shocking!), all credit is due to individual hard work, heart, dedication, or a number of other values that perhaps self-styled leftist debate “coaches” shouldn’t trade in. In the end nothing is said about precisely what was learned, or how to measure it, or even what insights were garnered about argumentation, rhetoric, discourse, evidence, or the like. All it comes down to is a few platitudes that wouldn’t differ that much from the writing of a little league or high school football coach.
My experiences in debate went on way too long, but this spring I’m a bit grateful about my debating experience, and trying to plumb it for insight into how to run a debate course – very different than the coaching world where winning isn’t interrogated but losing sure is, and there are no measures of the success and learning we all know is happening but cannot articulate.
I feel like I am always of two-to-three-minds about debate – that there’s something powerfully educationally radical there but the domination of debate activities by 1) formal educational institutions and 2) people who see no problem organizing debates around the same principles you’d find in child’s baseball or soccer games ruins or deflects interpretations of debate at its full ability. Abilities outside the tournament structure cannot be imagined easily due to the colonization of thought about debate by pro-tournament instructors. Most debate coaches are teaching debate tournament practice, not debating.
Add to this the obsession of scholars (such as myself and my colleagues) who mistakenly think that theorizing argumentation will, by default, theorize debating. These terms are used somewhat interchangeably by the public; isn’t that an indicator that scholars should look a bit deeper? An argument is not a debate. Can it be? Under what conditions? What’s the relationship between these terms? This is woefully undertheorized. What’s the most recent scholarly book on debating? Would that be 1964’s Decision by Debate?
Policy debate is a strange format among strange formats out there in the world. It’s primarily practiced in the United States and Japan. Both countries have different approaches to it. I’ve been noticing this as I transfer my videotaped recordings (!!) from when I was in Japan in 2009 to something digital to post on YouTube for the upcoming celebration of the debate exchange between these countries this November.
I’ve also been notified that my debate course has been selected as part of the Social Justice courses being offered as a part of the diversity initiative of my university. Years ago I insisted that we offer an argumentation course and a debate course. Most universities (and most debate people) see no problem with offering a course called “Argumentation & Debate.” I liken it to offering a course called “Zoology and Botany” since they are both pretty much about living things. We also wouldn’t offer a course called “Short Stories and Essays” – unless we were really doing a theory course and not a composition course.
All of this has me thinking about a question: Is policy debate a natural fit for questions of social justice? Does policy debate lean left as per the form of the debate, the rules and the discursive norms that are reinforced by those competition rules? I’m thinking about teaching this format as a way to investigate the question of social justice in various policy and legal contexts.
My initial answer is that policy debate imagines debate as dissolution. That is, debate breaks everything down from mixtures and alloys into components and then attempts to show how the flaws in the composition – from language choice to bias in research to the by-products of completion, etc mean that the approach to a question is a bad one. Policy debate treats argumentation as a chemical agent of breakdown into component parts. It could also be seen as the winner of a policy debate is whoever presents the most universal solvent, conjuring images of Thales (everything is water, judge) as well as some deep lore in the language of debate (solvenTcy?). The judge tastes the brew, or observes the process of dissolving of texts and rates the debate based on the quality of the substances chosen and the method of how they were dissolved; how many solids were left?
Dissolution when done poorly or improperly has less of the forensics lab, trying to catch the criminal and more of the Vegas magic show, where the white tiger appears in the cage after a flashy display of a purple, shiny cape. Often when we teach debate to young people or beginners we lean toward the Vegas show teaching – I can do this trick for you; now I can show you the awesome trick! As people reach the limits of potential participation in tournament debate they are more like a pre-Socratic, seeing everything dissolve into everything else and trying to account for it in some meaningful way.
This isn’t necessarily leftist. Methods like dialectical analysis (Marxist or not) are not about dissolution at all but about combinations that assume a relationship. You take two elements of society and place them together to explore the topos of similarity. Likewise, Burkean identification/division is more addition than subtraction. But then, does a debate method used to investigate social justice need to be leftist, inherently leftist?
I wonder what you think of all this. There are merits in the leaning of policy debate toward dissolution. Other debate formats might have another principle involved in them. A quick and broad-brush list might be to associate Lincoln-Douglas with contraries; World Schools with contrast; World Universities with combination; and American Parliamentary with contradiction. I need to think this out a bit more as this seems like a series of posts now not just one.
Is policy debate a good format for leftist analysis? Or is that an illusion brought about through competitive norms that reward dissolution? There’s nothing particularly politically engaging about dissolving discourse into another discourse to prove that it is ineffectual, although it’s challenging and fun. There’s certainly not a clear path to intervention past the tournament if you walk away thinking all things dissolve into water.