The title of this post is a note I often get. I thought I’d make my common response public.

Don’t hire a debate coach to run your debate program. Don’t hire someone who has a record of tournament success.

Instead, hire someone who is a radical teacher, someone who is a critical pedagogue. You want someone who recognizes that the classroom, and the “outside the classroom” exist in a yin-yang relationship. Hire someone who is frustrated by the college classroom not because they have to be in there teaching public speaking, but because they are frustrated by the innate design flaws of such a system of teaching.

The outstanding debate program is one that supercharges your existing communication curriculum by providing engagement with populations, communities, and people in the world through rhetoric, oratory, and speech. The students who opt in for debate programs take what they get excited about in the communication curriculum out to these communities, they roll it around, and bring it back covered in insight from the audiences (and sometimes opponents) they encounter there.

In short, a debate coach is someone who is committed to creating students successful at navigating and mastering the norms of the debate tournament – an extant group of people who want to fold others into their norms of thought and speech. These norms unfortunately serve the norms of what makes tournaments work well, not what makes rhetoric work well, and certainly not open to the idea that we are being operated by these norms, put “through the motions” of speech and argument, spun like a top by the ideological commitment to tournament debating.

What you want is someone who is committed to teaching in a way that they find the classroom incomplete – it’s too antiseptic to be meaningful for teaching. They are someone familiar with student-centered, active and creative engagement, and have a healthy respect for assessment and rubric design over grading.

The model for a good debate program is the writing center. Over the past 40 or so years, the academic conversation among writing centers and writing instructors has moved to a place of student-focused creation of texts and their interaction with communities and ideology. Debate, as it’s practiced now, is more like 1950s or 1960s composition, where modality is taught, and the correspondence to a set of rules for modality is the sign of good writing. Debate though only has one modality to teach, and that’s what the tournament calls a “good argument.” At all BP or World’s competitions, for example, the notion of fairness of a motion is always held above any other conception of the motion.

If your university is considering a debate hire, or a debate program, hire a teacher who wants to create additional opportunities for students to engage other communities with the rhetorical and communication concepts that are taught in your classes. Have them return and share with these classes what they experienced. This model keeps argument, rhetoric, speech, oratory, and communication theory alive. It’s praxis, one of the best governing principles we have for determining if our pedagogy is sound.

I wave off most people from trying to hire a tournament-forged debate coach type. It’s better to hire a generalist in research who loves to teach, and the department can empower that person with a budget and some faculty-determined goals for the debate program. The rest should come as most of the best pedagogy does, action and reflection on that action to create theory that governs another action. This will provide the entirety of the students in the department with the benefits of an engaged learning program based on external partnerships. Perhaps the writing center mixed with an ecology program? A day trip to the forest, the wetlands, or the shore seems like a good metaphor for what I’m suggesting.

The last thing political discourse needs right now is a program that encourages people to believe that they have found the “right way” to argue, “real” debate, or any other such nonsense. What is needed are experiences to remind ourselves, and our students, how incredibly difficult it is to stand before an audience and offer them reasons to alter their attitudes about something. This moment never gets old, never is easy, and most importantly, is never the same. Debate education based on rules of fairness will never prepare people for this moment, it will only serve to encourage them to dismiss it in favor of other rules-based argumentation environments, such as the law. This fetishism doesn’t help create practice in the messy and frustrating necessity of debating in a democracy, which could be conceived of as a continuous “adaptation of adapting,” or the moments where you feel that pressure that you have to account for your position on something with mere words alone, nothing else.