What kind of civic discourse is being forwarded at such places when they give time, space, resources, and attention to those who already fill our rhetorical atmosphere with their words? What is the point of giving 2 hours to Ken Burns or a former U.S. Senator? They had (and continue to have) their chance to speak to vast audiences.

The center for civic engagement does not address, nor does it help, the so-called “polarizaiton crisis.” It merely banks on it. People are concerned about “polarization” and hope to participate in things where people can “honestly talk.” But people always means powerful people here. People always means those with a platform already. A published author, a documentary film maker, a former Federal elected official - this isn’t dialogue, this is pantomime. Again, we turn the stage over to those who already have it.

What about an alternative center, one that has no interest in solving “depolarization” or hosting big names for events where a TV journalist and a pop non-fiction author can agree once again that we just need to “tone it down” and “have a conversation?” What would that look like?

I suggest we need Centers for Argumentation Excellence. These centers will do several things:

1. Host open workshops for people to learn how to construct, deliver, and defend arguments.

2. Publish public-facing critiques of contemporary arguments, wherever they may appear

3. Hold debates between citizens, not experts - actual campus community members not those who already fill our minds with their work - on topics that are imminent, interesting, and controversial for the public (university and beyond).

4. Create content for Instagram, YouTube, and beyond including podcasts and videos that discuss the theory and practice of argumentation and debate.

Would such a center fix “polarization?” It would ignore polarization and provite the actual tools needed to engage others in substantive thought. It would lower the burden for civic engagement. Most Civic Engagement centers, from what I see daily on LinkedIn (and get nauseated by) reinforce the barrier to civic engagement by having a bunch of celebrities on a stage talk to us about how bad everyone is at listening, holding meaningful conversations, or whatever. It’s nuts that this is seen as valuable or even contributing to a solution here.

Polaraization is not a problem. It’s a symptom, a symptom of a culture that believes words represent reality, that they are just descriptors, that language and thought are not connected, and that people can only be changed if they have the facts. Polarization does not exist in a rhetorically focused culutre, one where we are our words, where words are meaning, and we consitute ourselves, one another, issues, and controversy out of words. We aslo dissolve differences through well-meaning argument.

In a culture that thinks emperical fact is the only way to influence, argument becomes the tool of last resort. If we believe that facts are one way to influence others, argument becomes the substance in which all disagreement can be dissolved.

Why isn’t the university on the forefront of helping culture and society turn toward debate and argument as a practice that can serve democracy? One big reason is Univeristies are not democratic, nor do they value it. Another is the people most equipped to lead on this issue are obsessed with going to weekend competitions to win little trophies, practicing at night in the basement of the communication building, invitation only.

Relegating debate and argument to being either an amusement or a fire extinguisher grabbed too late is not a great model for this discourse. Working on excellence in argumentation is the rhetorical focus we need to overcome the fantastical problem of “polarization.” Is this the plague we think it is? Or is it a symptom brought about by a poor choice of how to live?

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On this episode I talk about how a recent, kinda-dumb AI image gave me a lot to think about and how I finally have reached the conclusion that although my interests in teaching debate and the tournament debate folks were never aligned, they are actually at cross purposes.

We also talk about AI in higher education. Sarah recently worked on AI scholarship in Brazil and has excellent perspective on AI in everything from grading to assignment design. We briefly talk about the recent MIT committee findings on AI and college assignments.

Also consider supporting us with a tip!

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I’m going to post all my online lecture videos for the Fall term here but they will be paid subscriber only. You can use a free trial to take a look at one and see what you think of it before you commit to the entire series.

This is the welcome to the course video.

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This episode originally aired on July 27, 2017 and features a conversation with Dr. Cate Morrison, Debate Director at the University of Rhode Island, Aaron Dicker, Graduate student at Georgia, and John Patrick of Cal Poly.

Nearly all the links and references are broken after so many years so don’t expect any link mentioned to work!

Recycle Bin is a throwback where we comb the archives of In the Bin for the most interesting episodes from our audio wine cellar. Let us know if there’s an episode from the past you’d like to hear!

comments are welcome below or you can email us!

The first reaction I have to the Arday controversy is that I hope to live long enough to participate in a university or academic world where being a young, black professor isn’t so rare that it has to be scrutinized and authenticated by hundreds of people. This is of course something outside of Arday’s control, but definitely within the control of the people and journalists involved. But of course they say they are doing due diligence, looking into questions that are part of a process, etc. This is all natural and should be accepted by Arday and everyone else as part of the natural vetting process. This is one motion/action flip. They could have chosen to not push on it and let Cambridge review the work.

Secondly, Jason Arday was a very troubled person. It’s pretty clear he invented a lot of stories about his life and his scholarship seems almost totally lifted. This happens all the time in academia as many have noted in social media and in the general media. But the media, particularly the right-wing media, made this a case against “Jason Arday,” a fictionalized character that is more extreme than anything Arday might have invented about himself.

Arday suffered in his life, no doubt. What is at question is how much of that suffering happened to him, and how much of it was invented by his anguish from other suffering he endured. To say it a different way, someone who was nonverbal until 11 and illiterate at 18 would have experienced great trauma. That trauma might have meant that a defensive mechanism is to invent a self who was “otherwise.” This “other” could serve as a way to survive the mental anguish, and many things could happen to this other that wouldn’t be horrible, they might be heroic.

Even if we say 100% of what Arday wrote about himself and wrote in his scholarship is totally made up, it’s nothing compared to the sinister “Jason Arday” invented by the right-wing in the British media, who see “Arday” as a sinister criminal schemer who only came up with all of this in order to steal something. What did he take? A professorship from a white man? Money? It’s unclear. We all know that the real crime of “Arday” is to take a position he didn’t deserve, knowing full-well he deserved it because DEI allows criminals like him to scheme and plot and take these things.

The view of the media is the trope of “someone got something they didn’t deserve by lying,” which definitely gets people to click and tune into videos and increase ad revenue. But this constructs a “natural” story of “Arday,” the behavior of the opportunist criminal who could be no other way. He chose to take advantage of DEI because of his nature. Of course, we all know that a professorship is not something worth stealing or taking for free - it’s tough! It’s a lot of work! It’s thankless! But that’s not what they mean: They mean he took a title, cultural capital, a role that he did not deserve and since he knows he did this (he did lie after all) he is condemned.

If I am right about the traumatic life Arday lived, you can already see the damage this story does without the personal attacks I’m sure he got from every right winger who could look up his email address. If I am right about Arday’s traumatic construction of the “other Arday” who is a heroic survivor, this attack shows there really isn’t any other solution or way out. There is nothing heroic - let alone even valuable - about “Arday” as constructed by Arday as a survival mechanism. This would be experiencing the erradication of Arday’s only safe narrative, to see himself as this other person.

Survival justifies a lot of things, including doing something like cheating at school, which is really what plagiarism is. Yes, academics act like it’s the worst crime imaginable, but copying someone’s work isn’t the worst crime. If you are suffering from mental illness or a state of existential panic, or traumatic dissociation like Arday might, it might not even register as simple wrongdoing. I think Arday was trying to survive a very tough, very heavy life that had illness and suffering at every turn. I think he needed a lot more help than he got, and his stories from the fortcoming autobiography, the things his students said about his lectures, and his plagiarism all point to someone who is working out all this anguish on his own.

If Arday had been white and doing all this, what would the media say? “Something is really wrong with this young professor at Cambridge” would be it. There wouldn’t be calls to reform society to prevent criminals from taking advantage of DEI, there wouldn’t be calls for the entire University to examine how it hires people, etc. I doubt that if a white man of 41 claimed all these accomplishments and plagiarized it would be more than one story in the media. The anchor person would report it on tv, smirk and shake their head and move on after reporting that “Cambridge University officials are investigating whether the claims have merit.”

We still haven’t begun to learn the central lesson of rhetoric. What we say is not a thin representation of what matters. We aren’t referring to something else, something over there, something more solid. What we say is all that matters. And when we collectively decide to rip into someone’s account of how they overcame a nightmare basket of challenges, we are saying, without hesitation, that we wish they hadn’t done it. We are saying it doesn’t matter. We are saying, without pause, we wish you had not made it. Your survival, your existence, is a problem. And Arday took that message in the only way he could. And he acted on it, so it seems.

The racist underpinnings of society mean that no matter how amazing and powerful Arday’s accomplishments - even if they are 15% of what he claimed - he would have to be investigated by every journalist, every YouTuber, every blogger, everyone. It’s not “natural” to have achieved so much; it’s not “natural” to have had all these illnesses. These are the “actions” of someone who is behaving like a criminal, someone trying to trick us. That’s the attitude of the media here. We realize that all the attention on Arday as “Arday” the sinister DEI criminal is because the British and global media, as well as a lot of us, secretly despise any attempt to provide some real equity here. DEI provides that equity in ways that really do help transform education at places like Cambridge. But right wing folks - and old white journalists - all believe that someone will take advantage of that opportunity and not need it. The primary reason is because all of them would have tried it. It is not the case - from everything I’ve read - that Arday was trying to decieve anyone of anything. If there is a victim of Arday’s “trickery,” it might have only been himself, trying to provide a narrative for himself of a heroic version of his life and experiences that can give him hope, give him purpose, or give him some reason to keep going, writing, teaching, reading, etc.

Until this horrible incident I never would dream anyone would commit suicide over plagiarism. The reason is I don’t think any cases have emerged with someone who had suffered as much as Arday had in his life. Plagiarism wasn’t the reason for this suspected suicide; it was the revelation that his whole life was “lifted from somewhere else,” a safe place where he deserved to live even given all his struggles and challenges. Like I’ve said in this essay a couple of times, I do not think 100% of his stories are true, but I also think that’s irrelevant. They were a survival mechanism. Telling someone that their survival mechanism is evil, horrible, and the act of a malicious criminal is tantamount to pulling the trigger yourself. Why must we assume that when people act in confusing, strange, or inappropriate ways that they are cognizant, deliberate, and intentional? Why is that our first reaction, when all of us have been in situation after situation where we really can’t explain, even to ourselves, why we behaved the way we did? Why we said the things we said?

Perhaps it is fear. Perhaps we all recognize that our story of self is also lifted from something, somewhere else and is by it’s very nature unstable. Stories, narratives, accounts - our tales of what we have achieved and what we survived are ephemeral even at their best. Dog-piling on Jason Arday, accusing him of being “Arday” the DEI criminal takes that nagging little voice away from us, makes us feel that our accomplishments, our story of ourselves is somehow more real, more true, more honest and isn’t just a bunch of words we spill out into the void against the mounting evidence that our lives do not matter anywhere close to a fraction of what we imagine they do.

For example, the rip current is our responsibility now. Instead of something that is nature that we can’t do anything about; something that happens to us without regard, we now have training for lifeguards and endless public messaging about recognizing the current and how to swim differently. You have to act differently than you would naturally. You have to act against yourself and toward the situation. You swim parallel to the shore not toward it.

Another example: At the beach you can get skin cancer, this is your responsibility to act differently than you normally would. You have to adapt. Also you can become dehydrated or have a heat stroke - you should act differently - these go on and on and on. The shoreline is no longer a deadly place because we understand that we should adapt our attitude toward it and behave differently when we are there, or when we are in the water. If we just give it all up to natural forces, we are at their mercy, and perhaps a sacrifice or two to the divine might be in order to make sure we are protected.

this is of course tied to scientific understanding, which is also rhetorical. Science is an approach to phenomena that assumes they can all be explained on terms that we can do something with. Again, it all comes back to us. We can read the story science offers and change our habits (less beer at the beach and more water; more sunscreen and shirts, etc) or we can change our attitude (the beach is fun and safer now than when I was a kid). Rhetoric is at the heart of all these understandings and perhaps at the heart of the possibility of understanding itself.

There are so many people out there that are frightened of the dangers of the water, so much so that they want to close the beach (or in the case of Braver Angels, ban the ocean entirely). There are also people who are like the Jaws Mayor who regardless of a situation where entering the water might be deadly are much more concerned with profitability and economics than they are anything else (This would be Jubilee and all the YouTube debate bros). Obviously it’s great fun to be in the water but you do have to do it sensibly. Even being next to the water has risks that can be mitigated.

There are many different practices here when we think about swimming at the shoreline and debate, the first being that we should be aware of our bodies and limits, how we feel and all that. It is not a virtue to be able to swim at all times, anytime, in any body of water, no matter what (Superdebate would disagree as would most tournament debate folks). It is a virtue to step back if you feel off or if there’s something not quite right with the water.

It is virtuous to respect the water and understand that swimming is a cooperative venture with it. The waves and the feeling of it are something you work with, not against. It’s not possible to expect the experience to be terrestrial or a lateral terrestrial experience. It’s something that requires a whole different bodily practice. Not to extend my metaphor to the breaking point, but I will: Being on a ship requires a big change in how we take each step and how we move through doorways and other areas. That feeling stays with us - at least with me. After a day on a fishing boat, I find the evening living room still undulating from my perspective as I move from the couch to the fridge. Very strange to understand this is not happening, per se - but it is how my perception has changed in order to account for standing on a moving surface for hours. Many tournament debaters never realize this, continuing to speak and act in these ways inappropriate for the terrain they are on. The perspective they get in the water they decide to keep and apply to all instances. This is why debate pedagogy delivered via the tournament experience is anti-rhetorical.

Many people see the sea as a threat and want to pave over it with comfortable, solid, non-moving fact. Many think nobody should swim at all. Perhaps the solution is to teach a shoreline perspective where one can and must move between these realms to live. We can’t be at sea all the time, and we cannot live on the beach without venturing into the water. Our moment is one where we do not like half-measures, we don’t find compromise to be valuable at all - it’s all or nothing, and we love simplistic, totalizing narratives. So it is tough to teach the value of the interstitial. But this is quite a nice way to think about where we might find ourselves at times in our lives. The shoreline is where we can be relaxing, we can reenergize, enjoy or develop relationships with others, or we can find ourselves washed up, all wet, or salty. Practice in saying that it is my attitude that should adjust not the place is a significant part of teaching debate and rhetoric.

David and I spoke in January of 2026 about the influence (perhaps undue influence) of Artificial Intelligence on the art and pedagogy of rhetoric. It was great to catch up with him after so long. David and I crossed paths at the University of Pittsburgh when we were both studying in the communication department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Our conversation goes from the symbol of the American soldier to how we teach rhetoric when AI tools are pervasive and even pushed by university administration.

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Two weeks ago a sentence entered my head and it hasn’t left.

I was a better writer in my 20s

It doesn’t seem like a reasonable or logical thought at all, but it’s not really a thought. It is some phrase or utterance that came into my head and has just been sitting there, making itself known.

I don’t even think I was writing much in my 20s, but from the time I was 19 to 21 or so, give or take, I picked up a job at the college newspaper The Battalion at Texas A&M University. I studied history and minored in communication. This is when I think I had my best and largest audience. It’s also when I think I had a more direct line toward influencing the thinking of readers.

I was an opinion writer. I had one column a week and that column would come out at some point, in harmony with the way the editors designed the paper. In these days nobody had mobile phones. There was no such thing as WiFi. In my dorm, we would unplug the phone line from the handset receiver that came with the room and plug it into the modem to dial a number to access the UNIX system. USNET is I think what it was called. Nobody could carry this email/internet experience around with them. Nobody had a need to. Email and UNIX were indirect systems of connection; the newspaper was direct.

In between class or before class or even during class, reading “the Batt” was essential to your sanity. It was connection. The opinion columns were something that generated campus controversy though. I wrote a couple that really generated some heat, but those issues are somewhat irrelevant now in 2026. They were pretty locally focused.

I didn’t really write about politics all the time. I had more than a passing interest in politics, but other columnists took up that banner a lot more than I did. I wrote about campus, about community, popular culture, and other things like that. Every weekend we’d be required to pitch about 3 to 5 ideas for a column and whatever came back to you circled in your mailbox, well that was what you’d need to write. I’d collect thoughts and research during the week and have them in a couple of notebooks or maybe a legal pad, or why not all three? Reporters used Steno books, so for a time I used one of those I bought at the College Station Wal-Mart. It didn’t really last, the notebook or the trend.

Why would I think this writing is better? I don’t think that. Why would this phrase appear at this point? Where did it come from; who uttered it?

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I don’t have a lot of answers. I’m treating this phrase as a koan, a Zen Buddhist test or quiz that is supposed to see if you have achieved understanding, which is often a synonym for enlightenment. Of course, these are not really passable exams, but they do allow you to articulate things in ways that help point you in the right direction. This is my understanding anyway, and it could be totally wrong. But this is the approach I have.

Graduate education rips you apart in a lot of ways, it’s a transformation of how you read, express yourself, and interact with others. It is a lot more intense than professional graduate education which is more about being in harmony with professional standards and assumptions. Humanities graduate school is about disharmony with pretty much everything. At every turn, you are being taught to defend your preferences against the world. This leads to a strange way of writing and reading where the focus is distance and separation from the larger population. The goal is to craft and create your own standards for your own preferences, which is a definition of scholarship. There are measures and means, but these vary greatly as well, so one must be able to defend them at all times against all who encounter your work.

Writing something more broadly is about inclusion and thought about what is already out there and what people are stewing and steaming in. This is a helpful way to think about wasted words. When I was writing for the campus paper, I had a hard limit of just under 1,000 words a week. Most of the time, editors would want it around 900 to 950. Not a lot. I remember putting the word count on the grey screen of the so-called “Toaster Mac” we’d have in the newspaper office as I typed up my thoughts from the collection of pages I’d jotted on.

No words to waste, and no assumption dismissed were really the only rhetorical invention that was available. I was in rhetoric courses at the time, but I was very far from my current state where invention and other rhetorical principles became baked into my existence. They were floating around, but I really didn’t think too much about them. I was thinking about my audience - the average Aggie student - and how I could reach them with some good writing. It was often thinking about cool phrasing that I liked and how to work that phrasing into a form that they would also like. I didn’t think about them as audience in a rhetorical theory sense. But clearly, they were my audience, and I had a conception of a universal audience cooking here.

Thinking back on it, I did think a lot about how to connect more national issues to what I imagined a college student perspective of a “national audience” would have been. I wrote in a way that I expected anyone who read it would connect with it, that they would understand the stakes involved and they would find reasons within to agree with what I wrote.

The interaction is also something that was unexpected but great. I did write some jokes into my columns and one was to hear the announcer of the football games say a line about me, which he did indulge by mailing me a cassette tape at the Batt office. I still have the sound file.

Perfect delivery there Dave. It also led to a few free beers here and there with people who really liked what I had written. I don’t think this is possible anymore as we no longer have one source for the common narrative. Now people can attend Texas A&M, or any university, and remain fully within communities they built long ago - discord, Instagram, and other applications don’t lose their grip when one arrives on campus. Those narratives continue without much interruption. New ones form of course. I hear more tales about the roommate on a VC late at night with a group of people that they know from high school more than I hear about the formation of new community. It could be different at a large state school.

Social media and audience response aside, I think writing, or approaches to rhetoric are not things we age out of, but we associate too much with the moment sometimes. The micro-aggressive mode of rhetoric taught at the highest levels of higher education in the humanities is indeed meant to shatter any assumption that there is a larger audience out there with some kind of meaningful area or gathering point for your arguments about your work; everyone is a fortress to themselves. But writing with the idea of who you want to reach might be the way to capture good rhetorical practice. There’s no good way to speak or good way to write unless you first develop a good conception of who you want to reach. This was provided nearly automatically on the campus of Texas A&M in the mid to late 1990s. For writers at A&M today the situation looks grim from my perspective - how could I have competed with the internet in your pocket? However, for them this is what they have been given and without too much micro-theorizing, they reach their audience. Or constitute it. Or both.

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Based on philosophy and rhetoric (in that order!) the format hopes to reach every country in the world in a matter of just a few years. We talk about the current World Cup of Debate and look ahead to the live semifinals and finals to be held in Padua in November.

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There’s a lot to be happy about in the release of The Odyssey in massive blockbuster film form but we should also celebrate it in massive blockbuster rhythmic oral story mode too.

This is a post to express what I hope and expect to see when I watch the film next week sometime. I’m really looking forward to it. I am no expert on the Odyssey, but I have read it a ton of times and I have taught parts of it in classical rhetoric for reasons that will become clearer when you finish the post.

What I hope to see on the screen is the Odysseus I know. Not a particular manifestation of a Greek hero, but a manifestation of ancient Greek heroism. It’s not important how any of these characters look in terms of race or class or gender for the way the story used to work. What’s important is that their actions and words indicate that they embody, that they are or they perform these particular virtues and values that ancient people thought were ideal. These ideals, although different from ours, are quite like them. They are wonderful, beautiful, necessary, and difficult, and when we try to live up to them we often fall short or even flat-out fail to become them. Odysseus is a heroic figure because despite godly challenges and instructions, he continues to try to live up to those ideas.

The one ideal that I hope to see enacted on screen is represented by Ancient Greek words that are tough to directly translate into English: metis, and polytropos. Emily Wilson has spoken at length on Substack and other places about her rendering of polytropos as “complicated,” which is really good, really humanizing and really gives us so many nice points of contact with this very removed-from-us character. I like it. Metis can mean clever, witty, smart, strategic, all kinds of things including wise. But we all know people who are wise but not smart, wise but not aware, etc. This is why wisdom and wittiness can be key elements of a very complicated personality.

The ideal I hope to see is rhetorical metis. When I read the Odyssey, I see a story that time and time again turns on speech: How to speak, when to speak, when to hold back, when to measure your words, and when to let them out. Odysseus, Menelaus, Telemachus, Penelope, all know when and how to speak even though we are told from the poet’s perspective that they want to say more or less, that they do not know how to feel about what they are learning or being told, and that they are surging with great and powerful emotions. They still find ways to speak that do not ruin what they hope to achieve nor do their utterances bring them ruin. They are very rhetorically saavy, a version of this sort of metis that makes me consider The Odyssey as something fun to play with in a public speaking class perhaps. Or maybe debate or argumentation?

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I think the story was popular because it had examples of people really nailing rhetorical challenges in ways where they couldn’t rely on wealth or power or social status to win the argument for them. The story is full of wealthy and powerful people in bad situations, yet they cannot often rely on that to protect themselves or move into positions to get what they want without long, measured, convincing speeches that do not rely on their status for meaning to be created. Instead, as it is a story of trickery and disguise throughout, the reliance is on their perceived social status for the speeches to have great meaning. When Menelaus realizes he must be speaking to Telemachus, this is understood as a mistake Telemachus made - he was speaking as a noble, well-educated guess, but his stylistic and delivery choices gave up that he must be from Ithaca, meaning he could only be Odysseus’s son. It’s this kind of attention to rhetoric that would be interesting to audiences who depend on this kind of speech deeply, so they can learn how these addresses went in ancient times (for them as well), but also get joy and pleasure out of seeing how an easy mistake could be made even by the most refined of us.

This makes the Odyssey a combination of action hero film and something like parasocial TV shows like Judge Judy or Catfish (my favorite) where we can see people trying to get out of trouble and failing to do so, or offering a surprisingly coherent and convincing argument for their side. I don’t want to belittle the Odyssey, but entertainment must reach a lot of different people to remain relevant over three thousand years. I feel the story has all these elements and more, including the rhetoric of courtly intrigue with Antonius and the suitors, as well as how Penelope’s slaves work a few angles as well.

Earlier I wrote that the identity of the characters as they appear isn’t relevant for the power of the story. That would be true for ancient people, whose imagination of the characters would follow their embodiment of the virtue and value they lived. How do you make someone look like wit, or cunning? How does someone look who is dedicated to love, loyal beyond all else? What does the king of the most war like people look like? And of course, the most talked about on social media: How do you represent the most beautiful woman in the world?

Nolan’s casting is for us; it keeps the story relevant for us as we, being global pluralists as we are in regards to art anyway, believe that there is beauty in representation, that it matters on its own, and that authenticity or historical accuracy is not only second place to that, but perhaps a totally empty value in relation. This sort of controversy - that the cast isn’t appropriate - is a very modern concern and discussion about the story, one we see every time a superhero movie is made or Star Wars, or a Star Trek show is cancelled. It’s the issue of our time. For the ancient world, such pluralism, as a value, would be very difficult to articulate in a way that would make sense to them. It’s Greeks against the world for the most part at the time the Odyssey was still in bardic theaters, and such a value would not register the way it does for us. But the fact that the Odyssey can include this value and its various articulations is a great demonstration of how this story has staying power - which might be an understatement. What is beautiful? Genetics? Or is it commitment to a principle of representation - keeping it more consistent with itself than any other principle of representing a three-thousand year old story? Truly, these are the sort of debates worth having. Let’s tell it again, another way.

Rhetoric is much more about timing and appropriateness, praise and blame, and articulating values in novel but identifiable ways than it is about slick utterances of facts or catching people off guard with a well put phrase. The Odyssey, in my view, centers on this which gives it it’s seemingly atemporal appeal. The Olympians challenge and aid Odysseus because he is indeed a complicated man, and they are very curious to see how he will deal with whatever challenge they throw his way. Gods do not need to measure their words, but mortals do. The wrong phrase at the wrong time to the wrong audience can cost you everything, in Odysseus’s time as well as ours. The Odyssey is about measure in time, measure in emotion, measure in loyalty, and most importantly to this teacher of rhetoric, measure in words.

I am so pleased to welcome my friend Randall Martinez from Savannah Country Day School in Georgia. Randall serves as Director of Debate there and has a very insightful perspective on this! So happy to be able to chat with him about AI, politics, and other challenges facing school debate!

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The role of the university - it seems - is to supply people who pay tuition with marketable skills in order to face a life of work - or a world of work - that will provide them with a pretty decent middle class lifestyle. This is the university at its most conservative, easiest-to-defend form. It is also a form, a story, that has forgotten that it is a narrative, forgotten that it is an attractive way into a process that should transform one’s relationship with the world, not prepare one to supplicate to it.

Assignments should not be practice for “working life” whatever the hell that is (I don’t know about where you are but this phrase is often repeated as a goal of our university, to prepare students for ‘working life’). There is no “real world” to prepare students for. There is the world of our creation which can be re-created, re-shaped in and on different terms. The trick is to recognize it as a construction in the first place. Assignments versus the world is a way to think about it.

Assignments should reveal the constructed nature of global, social, and societal systems so they can be repealed or bolstered. Surely, part of a university education is to understand how historical contingency, power, and discourse have constituted the world we take to be “natural.”

Superhuman/Grammarly is a way to make working life easier. It’s a hack, a glitch, whatever metaphor you’d like to use. The argument here, one that I reject, is that college should prepare students for a life of working for a living. The AI argument is not very creative nor is it compelling - students must learn AI to survive in the future workforce. AI will be a part of their lives, so we are responsible for preparing them for it.

This might have some legitimate roots. The core curriculum was designed to provide college oriented skills in reading, writing, and scientific/mathematical reasoning. But what it created was a resource of various literature and reading that can be used as a template for criticism of the status quo. AI, just like this program that my university has bought for us all, is not a template for criticism. It is a template for generating text adjacent to all that has counted as criticism that is included in the training data.

The core curriculum was designed to provide the tools to offer thoughtful critique about the discursive organization of the world. It was designed to be an equalizer for those coming into the university who may not have had the best or even an equivalent or predictable high school experience.

Superhuman AI feels like the end of all that. It feels like something that will step in and absolutely teach students careful prompting and careful reading of AI results. This isn’t the creative work of the college classroom where the students learn to ask questions that cannot be answered, only milled around. This is a discipline where students are rewarded immediately for engineering a good prompt. The passivity and pleasure of doing it right is the best friend of the move to a dangerously conservative model of education. One that even right-wingers wouldn’t like.

Can AI help generate assignments against the world? I am operating from the theory that education reveals narratives and historical contingencies that led us to the systems we have now so they can be evaluated, argued against, rearticulated, or altered. Can AI help with this?

I am going to try it out, reluctantly of course. But I always give everything a go because what if it can help me get what I want? Musashi said it best, “To die with a weapon undrawn is dishonorable.” Might as well stick to an ethic.

Looking at teaching as a discourse gives us a few models to work with from Lacan’s excellent formulation of discourse theory. The first is the most conservative model of teaching, a discourse that might not even be teaching, but universities present themselves this way to students. What is the result of a university education?

The university presents itself as a source of not only knowledge, but knowing. And it’s knowledge that is really true - methodical, pure, and not influenced by the political. And, it wants you to be a part of it. Of course, everyone gestures to what is hidden below the surface, that there are political forces (arbitrary forces) that are leaning on the creation of knowledge, organizing it in ways that are not authentic. The result of this is the creation of a subject somewhat alienated from themselves. “I enjoyed my time at St. John’s, I learned a lot,” an alum recently told me at a bar, “But I never use my degree at all.” This is the sort of result that one gets from the university set up. One leaves a very normal person, one who wonders if one knows enough to really change things. This is by design.

This is not a transformational discourse at all and shouldn’t appear in the classroom. But I am fearful that Superhuman AI will present this sort of discursive reality - we will use it thinking it’s a source of knowledge that is “true,” that is, self-organizing without a master involved. AI sort of presents itself this way and we are left unsure how to think about ourselves in relation to it. We aren’t certain we fully understand ourselves when we encounter the knowledge of AI.

This is education for purposes of domination and control - “working life.” This is not assignments against the world. Instead, this is a way of teaching that makes assignments reveal serving the world is best.

In the classroom, the teacher, the good teacher, questions everything. Even Superhuman AI.

The rehearsal to the posed questions (everyone is pretty sure the teacher knows what they want the class to say, but what is it?). The students demonstrate mastery through various performances, oral, visual, attitudinal, and so on. The result is understanding, brought about by articulating mastery in numerous forms, trying to get the teacher to reveal what they want. But only more questions come.

We can call this the Socratic method, or annoying, or perhaps student-centered teaching, but the result is the same. Knowledge isn’t presented, it is generated through students failing again and again to articulate mastery. But the teacher, in this model, only presents uncertainty. The certainty cannot be confirmed by the equation on the left. It can only be confirmed through knowing how the presentation of mastery generates knowledge. A very rhetorical result, in my view.

This is of course not what AI does. A very early on DOS program called Eliza was meant to serve this sort of therapeutic/hysterical discourse and tricked a lot of people into thinking it was really thinking. AI isn’t that far away from Eliza in what it does now, it’s just much more persuasive, complicated, and impressive.

Try Eliza for yourself.

Even at its best, the computer isn’t designed to expand objections to one’s argument for mastery, only confirm or deny it - they are based on binary code after all. This cannot completely represent Assignments against the world but maybe can have a hand in it? Maybe if we put Superhuman AI in the position of the receiver, we’ll reveal what is missing - the inability of AI to generate knowledge based on re-articulation.

Perhaps this discourse is part of the revelation that the natural or real world is layer upon layer of articulation of different mastery, different ways of phrasing the same reality and one learns about that, how those work and work us over. But this is only one part of the proper assignment, revealing or pulling back or separating the natural, factual, and true from narrative (or recombining them perhaps). The final piece of education is the most creative.

This presentation is one of knowing without presenting any knowledge. The instructor knows but won’t say. Perhaps if we ask the question differently, a number of times, maybe you should ask it this time? But knowledge never comes. What comes is comfort in not-knowing, a reorganization of the world around different values, different stories, ones that don’t depend on revealing the knowledge someone else has, but on creating the conditions for knowledge to come. It’s incomplete, as you can see from the model as knowledge is hidden away behind the veneer of the desirable professor (or intellectual) who never quite answers any questions in a way where you are satisfied. But this is the trick. The result is not just education, as in the previous model but the ability to define the story of education. This is the revolutionary discourse, and one that perhaps isn’t as well incorporated into the core curriculum as I would hope.

This sort of learning is antithetical to a chatbot who can only answer with knowledge. The presentation of knowledge leads to the crafting of graduates who aren’t sure what they learned, but had a good time. Or the narrative is that the degree doesn’t matter. Or it never helped them, ad nauseum.

The discourse of teaching AI will never produce is this discourse, because it requires the student to become comfortable with not knowing or having access to the knowledge of the teacher. They have to abandon those stories in order to craft a new narrative, one that makes its own knowledge. And this requires a kind of confidence that AI isn’t designed to produce.

I’ll experiment with this in the fall, but I have all the confidence in the world it will do one thing well - transform students into people ready for a ‘world of work,’ not to question why we organize our short, frenetic lives around our jobs.

You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing the intellectual elite, celebrities, actors, and popular musicians sharing their opinions about this incredibly popular form of writing esoteric academic essays that are always behind incredibly expensive Taylor & Francis paywalls!

I can’t open tik tok without seeing a viral dance about Raymie McKerrow’s Critical Rhetoric essay, or that popular trend where girls ask their boyfriends, “Would you still love me if I were Richard Vatz?” The youth of the world cannot get enough rhetorical criticism. It’s everywhere!

This can all be very confusing for those who are not deeply embedded in pop culture.

In the Bin, the “blood pressure medication of global rhetoric” is on the case, assembling a fine panel to help everyone from Boomer to Zoomer understand this super popular and fun trend!

Many thanks to our panelists for this episode!

Michael Steudeman, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Penn State

Svilen Trifonov, Lecturer at the University of Georgia

Andrea Terry, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Sacramento State

Brad Serber, Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State, Adjunct Lecturer in Communication Studies at SUNY New Paltz

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This kind of public service is self-service, driving policy the way you want for your own purposes is not really public service is it? These people enrich themselves through their “service” and generate incredibly powerful connections that they use to help themselves and the people they like.

It is part of a rhetorical/political ritual to offer such praise. What else are you supposed to say when a long time elected official passes away? Perhaps instead of praising a lifetime of service, we remark on why we allow one person to hold that much power for that long.

Service implies some kind of sacrifice. I don’t see what Graham, or any Senator gives up in this role. Maybe I just don’t know enough about it, but it seems like once you get into the Senate, you get a lot of power and a lot of wealth.

The people who self-select to pursue this kind of work are definitely not selfless people. They are people who are attracted to power and attention. If we have a system where that is what counts as a lifetime of sacrifice, there are deep issues with the political system. The people who get elected cannot represent most citizens. They can only represent a fantasy of the use and collection of power for themselves and some imagined outcome.

This phrase should be retired as it is nothing but a ritualistic phrase, much like “thoughts and prayers” or other political phrases that have no corresponding meaning to what they purport to do. Of course, these phrases have deep meaning: They make us feel like things are where they should be, like a mantra we say for self comfort or something. This is a powerful phrase as it immediately locates the death of Graham not as a loss for his family or supporters but a loss for us all. We have lost a public servant, not conservative people have lost someone they thought was right about public policy. Too narrow.

This also connects to the public praise for Graham “the person” eliding with Graham “the Senator.” As other Senators and elected figures praise him, they take advantage of equivocation. Someone might be a lovely person to work with but have horrible views. Someome might be horrible to work with and have great views. In the case of Graham, the public and private understandings of him are not to be confused. The public reaction should be about Graham the politician and his position on issues, his disregard for lives, and all those things that come with the exercise of supreme power.

When other Senators and elected figures praise Graham “as a person” and call attacks celebrating his death “uncivil,” they are worried about their own legacies. They know, and do not want to be seen, as the monsters they have become by gorging on political power. They are defending themselves, or a form they recognize. It is also very strange to reserve “civility” for those who are dead and no longer able to react, atone, change their mind, or any other human thing. Civility really does seem impossible for our democracy if the only time we find it necessary is when we are talking about a dead person who saw no need to craft civility in the world that he had definitive and direct power to shape.

This reminds me of the public/private dance a lot of institutions do to protect themselves. They appear public when it suits them and private otherwise. This is the way people treat dead politicians as well: We cannot say something mean about them because that harms their private life. We cannot critique their private life because that has no connection to public policy. And so on. Kenneth Burke created the master trope of this move with the action/motion distinction, claiming we transform what we don’t want to have ethical responsibility for into “motion” or things that are “natural” or out of our ability to control or even influence. Likewise, “action” are the things we can choose to do or not do. Graham was a master of this kind of trope as are all of our elected officials, who choose to run not to serve, but to gain power so they can have more power.

We will continue to say these phrases like “dedicated public servant” or “lifetime of public service” but should also add in the begged questions such as: Is it good in a democracy to spend a lifetime in an elected role? Who or what is being served? Who or what should be served? What good is civility if it restricts criticism of a political legacy? How much of a gap between our aspirational values for a Senator’s legacy and the actual record is tolerable before we say good riddance?