Author: Steve
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Is There Anything to say about Yesterday’s Speeches?
A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event. Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech. From my…
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I Gave an Impromptu Lecture on Debate and it wasn’t Terrible
Not advisable, but I gave this lecture as a favor to a friend last minute. It went a lot better than I hoped it would. The question I’ve been thinking about endlessly this year is: How do we recover a workable, everyday model of debate? I explore some of these ideas here. It must be…
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Wading into the Relationship between Professor and Teacher
For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or…
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The Problem with My Lecture Videos
I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes. I’m not sure…
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Explaining Pragmadialectics to Undergraduates, or Why Do I Assign Readings Like This?
Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort…
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Facebook is a terrible place
I have two things that I feel I have wasted years of my life on that I regret: The first is my time in intercollegiate debate, deluded that it was a place for teaching. It’s not. I either should not have done it at all, or done it at about 1/6th the amount of time…
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The Dissolving Federalist Papers
Still no sign of my ancient copy of The Federalist Papers but for some reason Amazon gave me a 15 dollar discount on a Kindle version of them, so I’m good to go for my super-awesome procrastination plan of reading them through instead of doing any actual work. I feel like a rhetorical defense of…
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Originalism, Interpretation, and Really Important Job Interviews
This amazing op-ed from history professor Jack Rakove is perhaps an attempt at a liberal “take down” of originalism, but winds up being a pretty good defense of an originalism that we could all support: What were the topoi and commonplaces of the debates around constitutional issues? What sort of metaphorical connections can we make…
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Originalism, Interpretation, and Really Important Job Interviews
This amazing op-ed from history professor Jack Rakove is perhaps an attempt at a liberal “take down” of originalism, but winds up being a pretty good defense of an originalism that we could all support: What were the topoi and commonplaces of the debates around constitutional issues? What sort of metaphorical connections can we make…
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What the Lincoln-Douglas Debates Teach Us about Political Debating
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates have captured the American imagination on what debate should look like, and I’m really at a loss as to why. They were for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. Most people think they were Presidential debates. Although Stephen Douglas had presidential ambitions, they were never realized. The Senators at that time were…
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