This DU professor is using debate as a tool to fight deep political divides

One of the first lessons Darrin Hicks teaches his students as they prepare to debate is that a debate is not some kind of competition, or game to be won.

Despite the political debates-turned-sparring matches that students have become accustomed to watching, with insults often flying in both directions, Hicks instructs students to focus on constructing their best ideas. Not tearing down their opponent.

It’s the same approach great debaters have taken throughout the course of history — in Tibetan monasteries, in Islamic debate practices known as Jadal and even in ancient Greece.

“We knew that those kinds of debates could be very important because they were never about winning or losing,” Hicks, a professor of communication studies at the University of Denver, told The Colorado Sun. “They were about a collective search for truth.”

And it’s an approach that has increasingly been drowned out, even replaced, by “an incredibly intense verbal aggression” that dominates presidential debates, online comment sections, political talk shows and sports talk shows, he said.

“You win by making the other person look like an idiot,” Hicks said, adding that debate has been “perverted in public discourse” over the past 20 years.

Debate by debate, Hicks is weaving together a solution across DU so that students on the cusp of adulthood begin to practice how to defend their ideas rather than discredit their opponents. He’s also teaching them how to listen to views that don’t match their own, a skill that has been lost at a time people in different political camps can hardly hear each other out anymore. 

Hicks leads the university’s Debate Across Curriculum program, which sends him into every college on campus to coach students on how to debate in the spirit of that collective search for truth. 

Debates cover all kinds of academic subjects. Business students debate the types of environmental protection laws U.S.-based companies with an international presence should follow. Physics students debate “the observer effect,” the idea that observing a subject or situation disrupts it. Russian literature students debate philosophical themes stemming from novels they’re reading in class.

No matter the topic, students build their arguments on the same premise: debating their way to the best ideas.

“One mantra that we use that’s been very successful is, all knowledge is the product of debate,” Hicks said. “There isn’t anything that we know that didn’t come from someone debating about it at some time.”

Combating silence and deep divides

Hicks helped grow the Debate Across Curriculum program when he realized that debate could remedy a pair of thorny issues bubbling up among students and professors, including a swell in self-censorship.

About five years ago, Hicks said university leaders became alarmed when campus climate surveys pointed to 70% of students limiting how often they spoke up in class and what they were willing to share.

“They’re afraid of someone jumping down their throat,” Hicks said. “They’re afraid of negative peer judgment. They’re afraid of exposure. Someone will post something about them online, and they really hate being typecast.”

Those fears are rational, Hicks said, since “the cost of speaking could be high.”

Similarly, professors have become more hesitant to wade into controversial issues in class, uncertain about how to steer through conversations that might take a fiery turn, Hicks said.

“If there’s conflict, they go, ‘Ooh, maybe I should just step back,’” he said.

That underlying anxiety has resulted in more passive learning environments with students sitting through straight lectures rather than having classwide discussions. It’s what Hicks refers to as “this kind of mutually reinforcing spiral of silence.”

Deep polarization sweeping the country and influencing students only made the need to reintroduce debate across the university more urgent, Hicks said, as the ability for students to talk to someone who disagreed with them started to break down.

“They became very good at advocating for a position, not very good at understanding what objections there might be to their positions, what other people might think,” he said. “And certainly not very good at all in being able to work with them constructively and productively to come up with common approaches to a problem that understand and appreciate and use ideas from all across the political spectrum.”

The Debate Across Curriculum program expanded campuswide after starting on a much smaller scale. It began with Hicks and his classes, then about 15 faculty collecting evidence about how debating impacts what students learn and the ways they learn.

Hicks starts by meeting with a professor to walk through the class syllabus and get on the same page about learning objectives. Most of the time, Hicks and the professor craft one general topic to frame the debate, with three relevant issues for students to address. What follows is a day for students to research and prepare their arguments, another day for the live debates and a deliberation session where students review what they learned.

Before students dive into the nuts and bolts of their arguments, Hicks teaches them about why debate is so important. The ability to debate is “essential to being an engaged citizen,” Hicks says, and debating is the key to “what separates democracy from authoritarian governments.”

He also believes debating can transform students’ confidence so that they speak up in class and overcome their fear of backlash. 

At the same time, debating helps them hone the kinds of skills employers say are desperately needed among college graduates — conflict management and an attention span that can follow complex conversations over weeks or months.

All students participate in the debate, each with the same amount of time and the same opportunities to ask and answer questions. That strategy creates a safe environment for students to open up, said Emilio Horner, associate director of the Debate Across Curriculum program. 

“It makes it hard for one student to judge other people because they’re all going to have to contribute at some point,” Horner said.

The professors randomly assign students the specific question they will debate and decide whether they will have to argue for or against it. That helps decouple students’ identities and their core convictions at a time Hicks says many people can’t easily separate what they believe from their own sense of identity.

“In that environment, any attack or question about your position is translated into an attack or a question of you,” he said.

“A moral obligation” to care about people with opposing views

Just before the first group of students assembles at the front of the classroom to launch a series of afternoon debates inside the Daniels College of Business, their nerves hang in the air.

Hicks tries to calm the jittery class with gentle advice.

“All we care about are our ideas and getting them out there to the best of our abilities,” he says, assuring students that no one is judging them and that it’s OK if they stumble.

Students take turns debating topics related to a complicated business question: Is it ethical for U.S.-based international businesses to follow the least restrictive set of environmental protection laws?

They spend close to two hours making their cases for and against the rules businesses should follow and talking through what specific responsibilities should lie with corporations or local governments.

Every debate follows the same format: One team presents its argument. The team with a counter argument asks questions. Instructors ask questions. The opposing team presents its perspective. The first team raises questions, followed by questions from professors.

Anja Schmidt-Voils, a junior majoring in marketing, was part of a team arguing that compliance with local laws should be considered a sufficient condition for ethical corporate behavior.

Schmidt-Voils, in her second debate under the Debate Across Curriculum program, said learning to debate as a means of searching for truth has helped her understand that “it’s not about winning or losing.”

“You don’t always have to change the perspective of somebody else,” Schmidt-Voils, 19, said, “but just getting a broader perspective and getting new ways of thinking is important and a debate can still be helpful and useful, even if nobody’s stance changes.”

She said she has found herself falling quiet in classes at times to avoid controversy or a heated argument. Debating under Hicks’ program has given her more confidence to enter a debate with people who also realize it’s not about fighting, she said. That’s something she believes is missing from political debates between candidates who focus more on their political party than underlying issues that need their attention.

Schmidt-Voils’ class debates have also reminded her of the importance of being open-minded over automatically trying to persuade someone to take her side, “recognizing that there’s value in their beliefs and where they’re coming from.”

For students who struggle to reach that conclusion on their own, Hicks and Horner remind them that people are more than their beliefs and must be given the opportunity to change.

Hicks also challenges students to rise above their disagreements and frustrations to realize they have a greater responsibility, what he calls “a higher order conviction.”

That means seeing the power in communicating and choosing to live together with different beliefs — something Hicks said the country is losing.

With his students, he frames debate as a moral responsibility, a faith in the idea that conflict can be worked out. The alternative, he tells them, is “domination, eradication” — the very concepts they reject.

“You want a pluralistic society,” Hicks said, “so that requires you to say, ‘I have a moral obligation to represent them, to care about them, to acknowledge them, to work with them.’ And that’s more powerful.”