Reflecting on attending the National Conference in New Orleans

I wrote a long post about this earlier today but for some reason Substack didn’t save it. I know there was some trouble with images earlier as well so maybe the whole server was having trouble. Either way, I’ll write a different one as I am not sure my laptop up in the office has this saved either. I’m hoping it is, and if so I’ll post that one too. But here are some reflections from the National Communication Convention that was in New Orleans just before Thanksgiving.

For those of you unfamiliar, the National Communication Association is the professional organization for all those who study, teach, research, and practice the broad term “communication.” I’ve been going for years, and before this convention I felt a little odd about going. I thought maybe my time with NCA was coming to an end. Perhaps there were other or better things to do – or maybe just different; time for a change. Regardless, my feelings about going were lukewarm at best. Now that I’m back home, I’m feeling pretty good about going. Here are some reasons.

1. Being a Teacher

The NCA convention should be seen by those who teach and mentor as publication, review, and continued engagement in the work of pedagogy. We should see the convention as a site of “publication” – read in that traditional sense – where one can see one’s work in mentoring and teaching happening around them and with the former students one interacts with.

I’m thinking about this as a solution to something that bugged me that I wrote about a while ago. My old friend Tuna Snider who was a long-time debate coach, often dismissed the NCA convention as something “other than” work. I argued in this paper, presented on a panel remembering him after his death, that we should see his coda – his dedication to hosting global debating workshops anywhere in the world that would be receptive to him – as his “body of work.” He wasn’t much of a writer or publisher in the traditional sense, but the living collection of people who worked together on debating and attended these workshops could be seen that way.

After returning from New Orleans, I think that NCA can be a place like that for me where I can check up on the circulation of ideas and people, unperturbed by Socrates’s concern that an idea can wander away from you unable to explain itself. In this realm of publication, ideas and people are alive together and more ideas and more people join in on the questions and the work.

2. Begone Debate!

Many a person has accused me of “hating debate,” if anything I pay too much attention to it according to some people. I wonder what else there is to attend to? I feel like debate taught me well, very accidentally, but I had a very unique experience in my interactions with the intercollegiate competitive debate world. My lack of deep involvement as an undergraduate might explain why my ideas are seen as odd by those who were deeply invested and continue to be so as administrators and coaches in programs. Regardless, I find working on something that is pedagogical and educational, with its untapped potential of slicing across the university faster and better than a vice provost can say “interdisciplinary” to not be a waste of time, but something that invigorates my classroom teaching.

I do not think I will ever return to intercollegiate debate. Of course that comes with the large caveat that one’s relationship with debate is never “over,” per se.

I always try to attend a few debate panels, but this year these were incredibly stale. They spoke about debate across the curriculum as if it were a new, vibrant, idea. Trouble is, it’s still just an idea – as it was in 1999. They still talk about public debates as some malformation of “debate proper” and wonder why nobody comes to their events. One could argue people are not engaged by such 19th century forms of engagement anymore but I would gesture toward TED talks, Intelligence Squared, and YouTube – with a massive amount of videos in the hundreds of hours of debates between people on myriad subjects.

I thought many times of Kenneth Burke’s theory of correctives, and wondered if I was working on the poetic corrective to a religious/scientific paradigm that contemporary intercollegiate debate is stuck in. Burke’s imagery of the religious corrective as a large lumbering hippopotamus sitting in the water nearby seems apropos of where intercollegiate debate is. I think I’m done with trying to engage with it on that level, and might not attend these panels in the conferences to come. It’s a wonder I didn’t realize this when during the pandemic debate coaches used powerful technological tools like YouTube, Discord, and the like to merely replicate weekend tournaments. There’s no interest in innovation there.

I am interested in innovation using debate formats in other forums at the university, away from the hippo of the tournament. It’s time for a major corrective, but these weighted words are not going to get wings from going to another panel about how to save a debate team from a budget cut. I can also talk about better models of debate, something that nobody seems interested in because the parasitic infection of the tournament has almost completely compromised the host, debate. They cannot or will not imagine debate without tournaments. I can!

3. Plan Your Own Convention

I was positively floored at the impact, fun, and joy I had at the Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca panel I put together, particularly because it was scheduled at 8AM on a Saturday. It went better than my wildest hopes!

At first I thought the division hated the idea because of the scheduling but no – I think they put it at that time because they knew it would draw a crowd, and it did! The diversity of points of view in the audience was really something else. I pulled out my Mikme recorder and turned it on, and this is a full recording of the panel.