Just read the Financial Times piece “What the Rise of the Debating Champion Tells us about the World”

Sadly, it’s super locked down and paywalled, and not even my university can get me a good link to it. So if you click that link be warned – that’s all you are going to get unless you pay a lot of money to read a very poorly made case against debating. The case could be made much better, but this journalist decides a phone call with their ex about the WUDC round he was in is enough to make the point that debate might not be great.  Research is supposedly something debate is meant to teach, but sadly, I think we all realize that most national debate organizations have given up that educational objective many years ago.

Also, the FT is joining in a popular dog pile of debate tournaments, debate clubs, high school or college debating – all of it – as if this one voluntary club activity could explain what’s wrong with society. Spoiler alert: It can’t. It’s not even something the majority of people in the world are exposed to, let alone have a chance to participate in. So why all the distaste? I think the answer lies in the fact that we are wary of debate’s power to change our minds without our desire to do so, and quite often without our consent. After all, we don’t enter a debate about a political issue to lose or change our mind; we are there to stamp out ignorance! And secondly, we recognize there is real power in learning how to debate well. The issue is, debate is hardly ever taught anywhere. What’s taught instead is a sport.

Here’s the case that FT should have made I think: Debate is conducted and run by enthusiasts, worldwide. There are very few debating events that are run by, designed by, judged by, and supervised by scholars or educators of speech, oratory, argumentation, or the like. Compare that to other academic competitions such as math, engineering (robotics clubs), journalism competitions, or science competitions for students. There’s a dearth of experts. There are hardly any speech, argumentation, or other kinds of teachers at these events to try to ground it. Why is this?

In the U.K. debating has always been a club sport associated with class. That is, your interest in debate, and your ability to debate, came with you to university and was tested when you joined the union and went out for debating. The entirety of the education in debating you get in one of these clubs is tips and war stories from those who have been to the big contests and can help you with the nuance, tips, and suggestions on how to win tournament debates. 

In the U.S. debate has always been part of a grand social experiment in giving a lot of public money to universities and secondary schools to have debate teams, and to have them compete. But this history too is controlled by class. The first competitive debates, or at least the first shared model of intercollegiate debating we know of came from the first debates between Harvard and Yale, and moved westward as word of them – and how interesting they are – spread. Of course, those who come from means always have the advantage of better access to better reading materials, more chance to be given space and time to speak their minds to others, and those from poverty are disciplined into silence, treated like they have nothing valuable to say, and are not given time or access to higher-quality reading and other thoughtful materials for a bucket of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with their capacity or interest in such materials.

It is worth noting that this is very broad brush, and there’s a lot of recognition that this is indeed a bad situation. In both the U.K. and the U.S., debate organizations have emerged in the past 30 years that take competitive debate and repackage it for students who are from poverty and areas where there are little to no public funds for things like schooling. I know there are more organizations than this, but what comes to mind right away in the U.S. is the Urban Debate League, and in the U.K. I think predominantly about DebateMate. Both are really good ideas for overcoming this issue with class and means being the way into debate. 

But this is too little in my view. Why is debate allowed to exist in this form at all? Why isn’t it curricularly rooted and bound to the same standards as other educational and university activity? Somewhere between a sport and a research project, debate teams exist in a weird space that can’t really be defined. If you tell someone you are on, or were on, the debate team, people will automatically respond with recognition – it means something right away to us. But if you ask people what the debate team is and what they do, you start to get a variety of weird responses the more you push on it. 

This article seems to suggest, like so many other journalistic pieces of the past year, that debate produces some of our worst politicians, some pretty egocentric people, and some real trouble. My response is that yes, absolutely it can. But it’s more likely that the way debate is structured and run – bring your own skills, show off, what can you do – attracts the sort of people who would find that kind of grind interesting and valuable. These are the people who seek attention, praise, and want to be told again and again how smart, clever, and brilliant they are. 

Now this isn’t everyone who participates in debating. And a well-structured team should work to chase these people away. I only had a few I can think of when I was running a debate team, and all of them caused serious problems if they stayed. Most seriously was the fact that they chased away people who could have really benefited, because those who don’t want to share their view all the time or say the thing that gets everyone slack jawed don’t want to hang out in a room full of these kind of people (even one is a bit too much for the more shy people out there).

I should have kicked them out more forcefully, but as a teacher i was stuck in a dilemma: These people need the humility that debate brings and I felt like I could teach them this if I gave them those experiences. It was very Obi Wan, well meaning, and rooted in a kind of optimism that I no longer have. I believed that they need it just as much as others need the confidence that debate brings to them through participating. In trying to run a program that was designed to serve rhetorical education, I made the wrong choice by being too big tent. If I had it to do over again, I would ban anyone with competitive high school experience from participating on the university team. The program should be for those who need it, not for those who need validation and congratulations from it. Like most things at the university, preference should be given to those who need to learn, not those who want to display learning.

The problem is not with debate teams or clubs per se, but how they are administered. In the UK, these are run primarily by undergraduates in the unions who are teaching and creating debate practices that are geared toward what they believe good debate to be. In the U.S. debate coaches – named without any sense of irony – are hired to conduct the team and coach it to victory.  There’s little, if any involvement of faculty of any kind in these debates, which I believe are a necessary part to the practice of debate. The trouble is one of diversity:  It’s very easy to come up with an argument you and your enthusiast friends like; something very different to come up with an argument for a subject matter expert, a taxi driver, or a preschool teacher. And often all three constitute the audience for public policy, social concern, or other issue worthy of debate. But the model flips this typical concern: Debate enthusiasts and coaches often choose topics that fit their idea of good debating, ignoring the more boring, or mundane issues that the public has decided are worthy of debate. What do the public know? They didn’t make it to quarterfinals last weekend. The idea that someone could know what arguments are worth having or not based on a weekend competition is very strange, but this is how debate organizations decide who should set most of the topics and who should judge them. The focus is on the purity of debate as the group conceives it, not the practice of debate as society does. I get it; it’s hard to keep track of what counts as good debate in society as the standards and value are continuously being re-written.

People who are interested in the work of reaching the broader audience of people out there who are interested in the topic and want to think about it usually head for the writing program, which is devoid of these kind of competitive, semifinal victory, fist pumping trappings. The writing program, and the writing center in the United States, is a much better model for connecting the joy, power, and promise of student interaction with rhetorical training around theories of audience, evidence, style, and timing. This is the idea of the audience of all reasonable people, or the “universal audience” as Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca theorized it. They believed good argumentation is always aimed at an audience, in hopes to move that audience, and so the speaker can conceptualize the audience of reasonable people and speak toward them, as long as they pay close attention to the discourse surrounding this audience. In debate, the fidelity is to the community conception of good argument – whatever the participants in the competition feel or believe solid argumentation to be.

It’s not that debate made reprehensible political figures or opportunists, it’s that debate clubs and debate-as-sport attracts aggressive people who have no qualms about letting you know how right they are and how wrong you are. What is needed is less enthusiasts for sport in charge and more educators and faculty directing debate. The cost to society is grim. Think about all the people who could have participated in debate and used those tools to reshape the national conversation who, because of an experience like this, no longer see themselves as someone who belongs in a debate of any kind. Debate is too important to turn over to the enthusiasts, well meaning as they might be. What’s needed is educational grounding in oratory, rhetoric, and argumentation scholarship to guide what debate practice becomes. 

The solution is to strip away the sport model, and send the weekend tournament enthusiasts away. Follow a writing center model, and get students producing oratory for general audiences that is meant to move thought and hearts among them. Have their peers comment and critique. Publish this work. It’s very telling that intercollegiate debate, most of the time, forbids the video and audio recording of debates because they do not want their speeches public. Only the highest level debates – such as the World Championships – are filmed from time to time. The idea that what is being debated and said would have appeal for a general audience is baffling. In fact, many debaters will tell you that it’s dangerous to publish your work as people might hear what you say and form a bad opinion about you. And to think I thought all of this was the study of rhetoric, right down the middle.  How silly of me! Any model of teaching communication, oratory, or public address is bankrupt without some approach or method of publication. That can be a lot of things, and is worth thinking and talking about, but most debate organizations are not interested.

I can of course go on and on about this, but I’ll conclude with the idea that debate should be an experience that encourages thought, feeling, and development. I’m not sure in what areas these things should happen – it might be in a lot of them – but I would ground any debate practice in the ideas and theories of oratory and argumentation. Rhetoric, much maligned and oft misunderstood, often intentionally, is the field that would serve as a good first anchor for those practices. Rhetoric, simply put, is the study of audience and what moves them.  When we turn debate over to the enthusiasts, we get what excited and moved these former participants, not a study of what moves and excites various audiences we encounter. This is what needs to be practiced and studied, and perhaps the more unsavory elements of debating – the horrible politician types we loathe – will find some other club to join. There’s no doubt they will still be horrible and probably still in politics. Maybe a debate more oriented toward the audience and not the speaker could influence them in positive ways?