Possibly a Multi-Part Series?

I’ve picked up a moonlighting gig (probably shouldn’t announce that but too late) teaching a course titled “Argumentation and Debate.” Perhaps the formal title is really “Argumentation & Debate” like “PB & Jelly” as most people believe these words have much less distinction than those two substances, often using them interchangeably even though they are scholars.

I’ve been thinking about this gig, and I would like to teach the class using policy debate, that weird, esoteric, tiny American mode of debate that not so strangely hasn’t really caught on anywhere in the world with the exception of Japan. I remember attending the Debate and Education (sorry I don’t remember the exact name) conference at Penn State and having a great time there – in particular hearing a paper from someone extolling the virtues of teaching policy debate in an undergraduate Argumentation N Debate class (maybe that variant will catch on if I keep using it).

This led me to ask the question, is policy debate really for the general education classroom? Or even a class on argumentation-N-debate? I wasn’t sure because I was immediately blitzed by the begged question, who is policy debate for? Then: who is intercollegiate debate for?

The patriotic, immediate answer that swells from the deepest roots of my being is EVERYONE! It’s for everyone! But that answer is propaganda; I was trained and conditioned well by my experiences. Once we take a look at policy debate practices: Who is doing it, where, and with what sorts of conditions and attitudes we get a lot of evidence that perhaps policy debate is not for “everyone,” the appearance of scare quotes meaning that many times people think they are addressing everyone but they are addressing an elite, a vanguard, that stands in for everyone pretty seamlessly – “I speak to everyone that matters to me.”

I am very curious how to protect/defend/make relevant the undergraduate four year college experience. It’s becoming less and less relevant by the month it seems with the mounting costs, little help from any sector, and the lack of any other relevant rhetoric about the experience other than “What job do you want to do for the next 30 years, O 18 year old?”

Without any other articulation, the experience of diversity and intellectual composting offered by the “core curriculum” will be axed pretty quickly. We see it in West Virgina, and now SUNY Schools are following, cutting the departments that have no clear connection to answering this question, as if it were the only question in the world worth asking. The trouble with college administrators is that it’s never the people smart enough to run the college who take those jobs – they are too busy doing the things smart intellectual people want to do: Teach and Learn (maybe Teach/Learn?), read, and write. Nobody wants to play on Excel all day and go to meetings about strategic plans and reports unless you hate reading or are a bad teacher – or you don’t like teaching. That’s who winds up in the administration. They don’t have the perspective to be able to make such decisions.

This is relevant because there might be a way to save that four-year experience if we stpo thinking about it in terms of credit hours and basic or required courses and start thinking of the university as an experience worthy of the name. You’ll get to take your courses for your major and all that, and you’ll get some sort of document that proves you can do the thing you believe you want to do, but at the same time you will engage in a practice that is foreign – nearly alien, difficult, fun, fast, and wild that uses the resources of the entire campus to sustain it. Perhaps the “core curriculum” should become the “hardcore curriculum” in this way – inquiry as competition, the agon, the struggle to determine what questions are worth fighting for, what questions should be supported and by whom, and what sorts of questions can stand up to the tests of legitimacy, believability, persuasive power, etc?

I feel like policy debate is for first year college students, particularly those who have been told or forced to go to college by well-meaning, short-sighted parents. They will return home with an ability to question, read, and analyze that will feel so cold and unfamiliar coming from their child during fall break, Thanksgiving, Easter, pick the holiday. Restructuring departments around contributing to this first-year experience will be an adjustment, but will also allow faculty in departments that are under the knife, like classics, philosophy, art history, anthropology and the like to become purveyors of the kinds of information, research, and topics that will fuel young people meeting one another and intensely interacting using and being between words and utterances.

This model is very lose but this is where the begged question is taking me tonight as I write this and think about what to do in my course in January. There’s not a lot of time – either for me and my future students or for you and all other future university students – reimagining the university experience rather quickly and rather radically seems like the only way to slow down people who only seem to know where to make the cuts because the university is arranged in a block pattern suitable for easy slices. Blending it all together into an evaluated experience of debating in a very technical and measurable way might be just the solution (or stop gap) we need now. At the minimum the question, “Why do we need to know this?” becomes begged and therefore generative, opening up the possibility for rhetorical invention as the answers can be proven, challenged, questioned, and amended.