UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) has been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a year-long John E. Sawyer Seminar, to study disputation—formalized argument—in a historical, comparative, and interdisciplinary framework. The seminar will take place at UCLA during academic year 2007–08.

Effective government in the United States, and in other countries, requires peaceful and productive public debate, but the possibility of such debate is no longer secure, as witness the notoriously bitter divisions that now disrupt the US Congress. Only twenty years ago, in a time of strong political differences, a nominee for the Supreme Court as sharply defined as Antonin Scalia won 98 votes in the Senate, the only nays coming from Senators Garn of Utah and Goldwater of Arizona. In 1993, the Senate vote on Ruth Bader Ginsburg was roughly the same: 96 to 3, with one Senator, Riegle of Michigan, not voting. The negatives were Senators Helms of North Carolina, Nickles of Oklahoma and Smith of New Hampshire. Many might now find these few dissenters heroic and the lopsided results troubling, seeing the latter as symptoms of lax or expedient conscience. But nothing like these votes or the debates surrounding them seems possible in current circumstances. Our much greater danger is not excessive accommodation but dysfunctional hostility in the public square.

Like other problems of large cultural scope, which need solutions on the same scale, this one has deep historical roots, some of them in the ancient universities of medieval Europe, specifically in the practice of disputation. CMRS, with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, will therefore examine disputation in a historical, comparative and interdisciplinary framework through a year-long and public John E. Sawyer Seminar, “Disputation: Ways of Arguing In and Out of the University."