Author: Steve
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The Artificial Divide in Teaching
The university experience can be frustrating for those seeking intellectual engagement with peers and scholars. Most of the reason for this frustration can be laid at the feet of overwrought administration, ballooning credit requirements, and the separation of scholars from teachers in the hiring of adjuncts to teach the entry level (and most important) courses.…
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Three Simple Things that would have made the Fox News GOP Debate more Debate-y
I write this fully aware that the media model of debate – the “joint press conference” as debate scholars have called it, is here to stay. And it’s doubly worse because most people who watched the Fox News GOP debate (either one of them) got something out of them about the candidates that helped them…
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Plaything of Domination
There are a lot of smart people whose only conception of debating is that it is a game played by the controlling class – by those that C. Wright Mills might call the “power elite,” those who don’t have to worry, or struggle, or fend for things in their lives. By those who engage in a…
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Debate Summer Institutes
For the past three years, I have come to Houston at the end of July to teach and learn at the Houston Urban Debate League summer institute. I was invited to help introduce non-American derived debating to the students and teachers here, and I accepted. I rank that decision as one of the best I’ve…
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University as Intervention Institution
Just finishing up the amazing book, Organizing Enlightenment and it has surpassed my expectations which were pretty high. The book chronicles the history of the formation of the research university in Europe, and the reasons behind it. The short version is that the Ph.D. oriented research university that we all know and some of us love more…
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Simple Public Speaking Assignments
From Irvin Peckham’s excellent blog, Personal Writing in the Classroom, Here are the rules for good writing assignments: Always give writing assignments that 1. you will enjoy reading;2. students will enjoy writing;3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written4. you will enjoy writing. If any one of these conditions were not…
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Great Extinctions
When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered…
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Sometimes, always
Nothing is heard more frequently among young debaters than phrases like, “That argument will always beat that one,” or “That argument will never win against a team that says such-and-such.” Such phrases not only indicate the prevalence of debate students talking about strategy and peer-educating one another (something desperately missing from the modern university) but…
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Real Writing and Fake Writing
Currently I am engaged in the tenure process, a year long examination of your life to see if you are fit to hold a faculty job in perpetuity. Spoiler alert: nobody is worthy of this. Everyone is forced into the process. And graduate school teaches you that if you don’t get a job that involves…
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Opening Closing; Closing Opening
After the announcement that at USU Nationals this year rounds 7 and 8 would be closed adjudication, I received several short, snarky messages via social media about the ridiculousness of closed rounds, as if it would be clear to anyone that closed rounds are wrong. As someone who has pretty constantly argued for open…
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