I wouldn’t exactly say I am missing debate ha ha ha

At lunch yesterday – “Do you miss debate?”

“I do every day.” I had to be honest in that moment for some reason. My typical answer, from the PR office, is “not one bit.” But perhaps the senior staff wasn’t in and an intern answered that call. 

I had to be honest. Is this my honest response? I think so.

But what is it I miss? 

The mismanaged tournaments? Arranging the travel? Worried about what could happen to students on trips (the horrors of imagination always had a death-grip on me, from twisted ankle to much, much worse)? Colleagues who had all the intellectual depth and rigor of a little league coach? Topics that were worse than irrelevant? Principles and practices that ran counter to what research tells us about reason, persuasion and rhetoric? 

Why was that the answer? I still have no idea. Writing this the day after though is helping me work it out, and here’s what I have. 

Teaching debate is teaching poesis, or making, with something that is so human – language – although perhaps not uniquely human. It’s good to keep that debate alive perhaps. But the human misuse of symbols to communicate (Burke) is a very rewarding thing to practice. And practicing it is all we do in debate programs. All we should do anyway. 

There are a vast majority of debate programs where “border patrol” is the order of the day: These arguments will always win, these won’t; This is the correct way to talk about this issue, this one is the discourse of evil people. Arguments are evaluated on the heart, not on the audience. There are no audiences in intercollegiate debate, there’s only liturgy that must be recited properly. 

I was hoping that we’d eliminate these debate programs but they seem alive and well, the tournament continues to live even though the head was removed and buried in 2020. Hydras never die, they can lose a lot of heads and be fine. 

I don’t miss any of this. My life is better without this as a part of my life. But the weekly meetings and the idea of working on creating something is what I miss. 

More particularly, I miss the idea that debate starts with a student utterance. It doesn’t start with the teacher or professor’s utterance. It’s about the students offering a “lecture” and the teacher “responding.” 

If done right it’s student driven. The students respond. If done at the highest level, there is no student, there is no professor. The classroom and university dissolve: The best level.

Never got there myself but that promise, or that possibility or hope – whatever you’d like to call it – that the words generated by students but not as students had latent power in them enough to dissolve the nearly immutable power relations of the campus to the point where we really could start with the basics, or “from scratch,” maybe the oldest form of communication. It’s also not lost on me that Scratch is the name of the devil in one of my favorite pieces of writing The Devil and Daniel Webster. 

This is what I miss: The possibility of the dissolution of all restrictive organizations of the university through doing what the (contemporary) university cannot imagine and forbids the possibility of: Student creation of meaning on their own terms. If I could recover this without the tournaments, the idiots, the foul practices, and the egos, I’d be there. The least likely place for this to bubble up again besides the cafeteria? Maybe public speaking class.