Faculty Spotlight: Sam Nelson, Senior Lecturer, Global Labor and Work
Sam is the Director of Forensics and a Senior Lecturer at the ILR School. He also leads Cornell’s Speech and Debate Program, through which students compete in Policy debate, Worlds (British Parliamentary) debate, Spanish-language Worlds debate and Individual Speech events.
What do you teach and why do you believe it matters?
I’m very concerned with how our society is becoming more and more divided and less able to talk things out, so I’m interested in ways we can promote civil discourse and get past name calling and contempt for one another. I think one way to do that is to help people understand the value of and appreciate debate. To that end, every semester, I teach a class called Advocacy and Debate. I think everybody would like the ability to make persuasive arguments, to be able to navigate tough situations and persuade people to support a specific argument or take a particular course of action. There’s a separate section meeting associated with the class where students practice what we study, so not only do students learn the theory of debate and what makes a good argument, but they're also doing it themselves in these weekly sections. My other class is Rhetoric of the Labor Movement, where we study famous labor leaders and students learn how to analyze rhetorical strategies and their effectiveness.
What do you like most about working with students?
It's really a privilege to work with the students I interact with because they’ve had to do a lot to get to Cornell, it’s not something that you just fall into. I also think ILR students in particular are very goal oriented. They want to achieve something in their life and they’re interested in picking up skills that will help them do that, so I think they really appreciate that my classes try to teach them those skills.
What is it like advising the Speech & Debate Program? How can someone join?
It’s been great! We have one of the biggest and best programs in the country, perhaps in the world, and it’s a wonderful opportunity that not every student will have at every college. And here's the great news: there are no tryouts. We take everybody. The idea goes back to Ezra Cornell: “Any person, any study.” It's nice to win championships, like last year we won the North American Debate Championship, but what we really want is to take people who aren’t very good and make them, at the very least, feel better about their ability to speak and debate. Perhaps we take someone that's terrible and make them average. That's more exciting to us than it is to take someone that's already good and maintain that superiority in the field. The bottom line is we’re really about education. We want to help people gain skills, knowledge, and confidence in something they might not have been able to do if our program wasn't here.