Concluding Comments

This paper has brought news of the Temple Issues Forum and its student arm, the TIF Debate and Discussion Club. The essay has moved between the philosophical and the practical, between the dialectics of pedagogy for civic engagement and the mundane logistics of organization The burden of this paper has been that TIF, along with its student arm, provides a model worth emulating, in whole or in part, at other colleges and universities. As Founder and Coordinator of TIF, I stand ready to assist other Higher Eds in adopting the TIF model while adapting it to their special needs.

On its website, TIF quotes that old curmudgeon, George Bernard Shaw: “The way to get at the merits of a case is not to listen to the fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against.” My reckless bias is for TIF itself, and particularly for its commitment to a certain vision of the university as a site of public controversy, where preparation for citizenship and for the life of the mind counts every bit as much as career preparation. TIF utilizes today’s talk show formats and communication technologies, but its core values are old, very old, dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Academics have a special obligation to help preserve them.