Democracy, Debates, December
On a good day....
Students need to learn and practice the ability to disagree respectfully. Democracy requires disagreement, disagreement requires debate, and debate requires practice.
I’ve been teaching for decades and one of the strange things that has happened as I have become something of an educational radical (see this book and this) is that I am less and less attached to the so-called content of my courses. Almost none of my students will become anthropologists.
So what am I doing, trying to teach this field? Is it one of the “useless” liberal arts?
I think not.
In general we know that undergraduate education provides several benefits, including increasing or maintaining social capital, signaling students’ ability to complete difficult tasks, providing some kind of general introduction to some threshold concepts, and in some cases certifying job training, which might be vocational training, as is appropriate for a first job.
But I am committed to a bigger picture.
As I have become more critical of conventional education, I have become more committed to the project of education in general. For me this means that I have an opportunity, and an obligation, to do something amazing with the young people with whom I spend hours every semester.
What is that? If they are not going to become anthropologists, and they will certainly forget the technical terminology of, for instance, linguistic anthropology, what should the outcome be?
I have reached a number of conclusions, including one that feels particularly urgent right now, in December 2025, in fact on the first day of December 2025: students need to learn and practice the ability to disagree respectfully.
For thirty-five years or so I have been teaching a course on linguistic anthropology, and if you don’t know what that is, fear not. Even some of my departmental colleagues with whom I have been teaching at my current institution for twenty-five years, don’t know what it is. But one thing we know in linguistic anthropology is that interaction is in and of itself a form of action. And in my class for the last decade or so we have ended the semester not with term papers or with exams but with debates.
The students themselves choose the topics for debate through a vote on suggested topics that they themselves have generated. Once we have four topics, so that we can have eight teams, they choose their teams. Some of the topics do not seem particularly pressing to me, but they do to the students, and that is enough for me.
The important thing is that they have to prepare both sides of the debate. One year one student said that they were concerned that they were arguing disingenuously and that this felt false to them. But in the intervening years I have become committed to the idea that complicated topics deserve examination rather than simplistic solutions. And by preparing both sides, they have to acknowledge that there are reasonable arguments on both sides. When they show up for the debate, we flip a coin and the teams have a moment to collect their thoughts as they get ready to engage in the debate.
This year, today, I also showed them several videos making the case that democracy requires disagreement and that disagreement requires debate, and that this requires practice. All of the videos invoked ancient Greece, the Enlightenment in Europe, the early years of the US government, and the Civil Rights era when even people aligned in their goals disagreed about tactics. They emphasized that having a worthy opponent honed people’s thinking and also that debate requires a structure of listening. It’s not a shouting match. It’s a case of grappling with complexity, defining terms, understanding presuppositions, and amassing evidence.
The more of these videos I watched, and the more I compared them to our current shouting-over-other-people or insulting-the-other version of debate, the more urgent this felt, as a way to make our democracy survive.
As I despair on a bad day about the state of our disunion and our retreat into information spheres that echo our own views, I am more and more committed to welcoming multiple perspectives. It is not the case that having everyone agree with you is a sign of strength, but rather a sign of weakness.
As I said to the students today, I know that in this class we have people with varying political and economic and religious and moral perspectives, and that’s a good thing. I have colleagues at other universities with less diversity of political views, and they feel sorry for me that I have to contend with people who disagree with me. But I actually feel that this is a benefit. My own perspective is easy to support when I surround myself with like-minded people, but that is not the world I actually wish to inhabit. So on a good day—and today feels like a good day—I embrace the opportunity to share a commitment to finding answers and solutions to difficult but perhaps not insoluble problems.
And if I can do that in my class of thirty-two undergraduates and they can emerge with a sense that they have engaged seriously with questions such as “Students growing up with access to AI will not have as high quality educations as people had to learn without AI”—a pressing topic for them, inspired by our unit on new media—then they can carry this with them even after they forget what indexicality and diglossia and linguistic relativity are.
And perhaps our little semester together might contribute, just a little bit, to the embrace of democracy not as a completed set of structures but as a participatory sport, every bit as necessary as learning that linguistic diversity is a normal part of human society, even if we, with our standard language ideology, have never thought so.
One of my tasks as a professor is to introduce new ideas, new questions, new structures, into my fellow citizens’ consciousness, and to do it with respect and affection.
And if they emerge from my classroom just a little more curious, just a little more confident as they seek information, just a little more willing to entertain alternative views, then, maybe, I’ve made a little tiny contribution to the survival of this messy American experiment of multiplicity and multi-everything.
And on a good day, it feels like education as a shared project has essential value.