Ben Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School follows a high school debater as he struggles to reconcile his rhetorical eloquence with his inability to express his emotions and beliefs genuinely.

Through an intricate exploration of the high school policy debate environment, psychoanalysis and the American male identity crisis, Lerner’s novel delivers an incredibly relevant and useful reflection on the state of interpersonal communication today.

 Policy debate is an opaque public speaking activity; in many ways, it is intentionally difficult for outsiders to understand and thus rewards debaters who spend time working on policy’s niche skillset.

 Here’s a quick rundown: in a policy debate round, arguments made by one side are taken as true if the other side fails to specifically address them. Judges of policy debate rounds are supposed to take these unanswered arguments as fact. As a result, a common technique policy debaters use is “spreading”: speaking as fast as possible so as to “marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule among serious debaters that a ‘dropped argument,’ no matter its quality, is conceded,” Lerner writes.

Lerner argues in The Topeka School that the “spread” is spreading, pun intended; the mindset that motivates debaters’ drive, namely our overvaluation of flair and acceptance of deception over persuasion is affecting a larger cross-section of American life than just the high school debate circuit. Dialogue in the States is being drained of its substance and filtered of its true essence until all that’s left is a series of withered, shallow word jumbles.

Take a look anywhere online where you can find videos, podcasts or any other sort of content that claims to showcase discourse: there’s this pervasive notion that somehow things other than clear communication, honesty and truth can be used to “win” arguments and disputes. Watch a video posted by Ben Shapiro, a Q&A session with Charlie Kirk, a primetime news segment with JD Vance LAW ’13, or, frankly, most of the speeches given at the podium of the Yale Political Union and notice that they spend much more of their time overwhelming listeners and “opponents” with fast speech, elaborate references, dense analogies and ultimately senseless language than they do crafting coherent lines of reasoning. 

Perhaps the worst effect is that among people who agree with these individuals — and examples of left-leaning speakers with the same characteristics are equally plentiful — these speakers are lauded as skilled rhetoricians. Meaning takes a backseat to appearance.

A fantastic example of both the debate drivel and its antithesis — real dialogue — is an episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast “What Now?” with Simon Sinek and Christiana Mbakwe-Medina. Throughout a conversation that lasts about an hour, Sinek embodies the spread in a sophistic argument about finding purpose in work and Mbakwe-Medina shows how to counteract it.

Sinek crafts a high-tech argument complete with pseudo-historical analogies and terms he coins to conclude that American capitalism only went wrong in the ’80s, when work lost its purpose. He finds that every modern employment issue would ultimately be solved if we all searched harder for worth in our work, because the “best companies work like social movements.” Throughout this convoluted sermon, Mbakwe-Medina interjects, often with single sentences, which show glaring holes in Sinek’s claims.

Mbakwe speaks honestly about work, her reasons for going to work, her relationship with her livelihood and does so incredibly clearly without prioritizing the mere appearance of what she says.

It might seem that the effects of the spread are contained in the limited scope of internet commentary. But the importance of meaning in daily life and even in our academics is diminishing in favor of less significant but more fanciful language.  

Take for instance the widespread and considerably successful use of large language models to replace much of the academic writing we do as students. In effect it is possible to go through Yale automatically stringing the most probable word vectors together without any need to consider the human meaning behind them.

This again seems like it can be swept aside; so an LLM can replace one Daily Themes assignment, whatever. But there is really a deeper meaning behind the fact that a mechanical, unconscious algorithm can replace academic dialogue in the first place. Our speech — whether informal dialogues, debates, conversations or writing — faces a very real risk of devolving into this sort of nonsensical drivel in the absence of genuine effort to communicate rather than conquer.

We are in a unique position as college students in that we have a direct role in shaping the sorts of conversations that happen in our community and outlining what effective dialogue looks like. As a result, we also risk making the mistake of accepting the spread, thus valuing the wrong aspects of speech and jeopardizing meaning in favor of presentation.

Or we can learn from Mbakwe-Medina, who speaks with no shortage of eloquence, nuance and professionalism, and in particular speaks in a way that communicates an honest and logically sound train of thought. Looking outward, we should expect authorities, whether they be political officials or internet commentators, to do more than craft a linguistically impressive paragraph and instead provide authentic arguments grounded in rationality. In doing so, we can prevent this New Haven institution from becoming just another Topeka school.

MANU BOSTEELS is a first year in Pauli Murray College. His column “A Yale Life” runs biweekly and explores takes on campus life, student experiences and ways to understand broader developments from the perspective of Yale undergraduates. He can be reached at manu.bosteels@yale.edu.