The counterfeit presentment: an early 20th century model of intercollegiate debate as civic education.

• Author: Llano, Stephen M.
• Position: Essay

Introduction

In 1916, William Hawley Davis, a professor at Bowdoin College, criticized those who approached intercollegiate debate as a game. Treating debate as a game made it "a monstrous affair," according to Davis--a "nauseating machinery" of ritualistic speech, a "wordy quarrel between individuals restricted only by their having to speak within time limits and only one at a time" (1916, 175). According to Davis, debate-as-a-game corrupted its value as an educational space designed to teach civic engagement. For Davis, anchoring debate to civic affairs was not only essential; it opened up new avenues of civic and rhetorical pedagogy essential to the maintenance of our democratic system of government.

Davis advanced his argument across two essays in the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking (QJPS), and the controversy he was addressing is as old as competitive debating itself. How much should intercollegiate debate be like civic debate? And what forms or types of debate might best prepare students for civic life? For Davis, the answer was a model of intercollegiate debate he labeled the "counterfeit presentment"--a style of debate with "verisimilitude," replicating the uncertainty and contingent nature of public debates. As counterfeit presentment, scholastic debate was useful inasmuch as its similarity to civic debate was not called into question, but taken for granted. For Davis, the measure of contest debating should be how closely it resembled debate in the civic realm, including the methods and standards of judging. Others, most notably James O'Neill, disagreed with Davis's diagnosis of the problems with intercollegiate debate, suggesting that debate was similar to other extracurricular activities designed to allow students to practice what they learned in the classroom. For O'Neill, debate was an academic exercise that required guidance and assessment by experts in argumentation and rhetoric.

In this essay, I look back at the debate between Davis and O'Neill, and its significance in the early years of the speech discipline. At this time, debates over debate were at the center of larger debates over the mission of speech education. They involved many of the most prominent figures in the field, and they involved educational controversies that concerned not only speech teachers but prominent public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. By looking back at these early debates over debate, we gain insight into persistent issues surrounding speech and debate education and its role in educating for citizenship. By examining the precursors to today's controversies over speech and debate education, we come to understand that some of the issues involved in today's debates over the mission of educational debate are as old as debate itself--and possibly defy ultimate resolution.

Contextualizing collegiate debating

In 2010, William Keith presented the Wake Forest developmental conference on policy debate with some suggestions for enhancing the educational value and reputation of intercollegiate debate. Noting that debate had come under more scrutiny and criticism in recent years, Keith argued that the "renewal of debate will require subordinating the frame of debate as personal prowess to debate as a civic activity" (2010, 25). In addition, he argued that "tournaments need an audience and a public that goes beyond other debaters" (Keith 2010, 24), along with "politically significant standards of argument" that would allow judging by lay people and others not directly involved in debate (Keith 2010, 25). Keith's suggestions could be read as a call to return to a type of debate that we long ago moved beyond, although he warns against this interpretation, suggesting that we do not want to write a "'Whig' history" of debate (2010, 13). Still, according to Keith, we can look to history as a resource as we reflect on how debate--and its role in civic education--might be strengthened.

My purpose here is to illuminate how Davis's model of the counterfeit presentment represented an early alternative with distinct advantages over the model that ultimately dominated in intercollegiate debate--a model that I argue grew out of J. M. O'Neill's critique of Davis's work. I argue that Davis was attempting to establish the relevance of intercollegiate debate to civic life in the face of practices that he believed created a disconnect between contest debate and civic debate. Although competitive debate in 1916 differed in many ways from today's debate, both grappled with many of the same issues, including disagreements over the role of the judge.

Controversies over debate judging began as early as the late 19th century, when Princeton lost to Harvard on the question of whether parliamentary government was superior to the American system. During that debate, the judges felt it was their patriotic duty to rule against the "iniquitous propaganda" of debaters who defended the British model (Potter 1944, 106-107). In another instance, the University of Chicago won a debate against Columbia University because the judges felt that the debaters from Columbia presented too much evidence, making Chicago's task way too difficult--the team could not be reasonably expected to respond to everything. Judges in early contest debates, in other words, were making decisions based on a broad spectrum of feelings, responses, and interpretations, including their own personal opinions. Judges--God forbid!--were acting like ordinary citizens listening to a public debate.

Something had to change. The contests were not fair. Judges could decide who won a debate based on anything they heard. The beginnings of formalized rules for intercollegiate debate thus arose as the participants drafted the first guidelines for adjudication. Potter has summarized the first formal rules forjudging intercollegiate debate:

The merits of the question must not influence the decision, but the logical sequence of the argument, the strength of the rebuttal, thorough preparation and knowledge of the case, form, and general forensic manner will form the grounds upon which the judges must base their decision; matter, however, will take precedence of form if they are opposed. (1944, 107) This summary of the first rules for judging intercollegiate debate points to the moment when modern intercollegiate debate arguably began--the moment when debate first distinguished between a debate judge and an ordinary listener. The rule presumably established a fairer standard for judging. It also defined what intercollegiate debate was all about: it was not about being persuasive, but about argumentative technique. In Maurice Charland's terms, the rules constituted the judge's "subject position," defining his or her attitude "towards political, social, and economic action in the material world" (1987, 141). Of course, the audiences for debates prior to these rules were constituted in a similar fashion. They knew they were watching a debating contest. What the judging rule did was create an audience-within-the audience, specially qualified to judge and rule, while the rest of the observers were deemed fit only to observe this process. This early move split one audience from another audience--subjects who judged the techniques of persuasion or argumentation, and subjects who merely observed the debate event, including the judging process. This represented the first split of debate from the public or civic realm, leading to the gamification of debate that twenty years later Davis would criticize as a "monstrous affair."

The judge rule ran counter to the whole history of collegiate debate up to that time. Until the latter part of the 19th century, debate was a private affair, carried out by students and professors as a part of a larger curriculum. Debate was meant to teach logic and reason, with no attention to any sort of civic concerns, save those that interested the academic community. Debate, in strict Aristotelian form, was the teaching of formal reasoning across the curriculum, enabling students to learn how to properly support their claims with reasoning and evidence. It was also part of educating students to argue like academics within a community of like-minded scholars.

The scholastic and forensic disputation that had characterized collegiate debate since the 17th century began to disappear in the nineteenth century with the "extension of the curriculum, growth of the elective system, and the influx of a more heterogeneous student body" (Potter 1944, 61). Concerned that there were too few opportunities in college curricula to prepare students to "speak on their feet" (Potter 1944, 94), colleges began to offer courses in rhetoric and oratory. At the same time, students and faculty began to see opportunities to emulate the structure of intercollegiate athletic programs, which had begun to organize shortly after the Civil War. This sparked the idea of intercollegiate debate competitions.

The increasing popularity of intercollegiate debate prompted institutions such as Harvard to create new courses aligned with debate. By 1900, several courses...