Why Debates Can Complement Keynotes for Professional Development in the Age of AI: A Review of Our Public Debate on AI

91.3% rated the event a 4 or a 5; all who submitted post-event follow-ups wanted more debates.

Introduction

Professional development days tend to follow a familiar script. A keynote speaker takes the stage, delivers a polished message, and the audience claps politely. There might be breakout workshops afterward, maybe a panel. Everyone goes home with a lanyard and a slide deck they never open again.

Keynotes are important. They raise awareness, share new information, push the audience’s thinking, and can genuinely motivate a room. But they have a structural problem: they deliver a single message, and when audience members disagree with that message — which they often do — they disengage. The takeaway doesn’t take. The speaker’s conviction doesn’t transfer to a room full of people who walked in with their own convictions.

We think there’s a complementary format hiding in plain sight, one that higher education is uniquely positioned to embrace: public debate.

People Actually Learn From Debates

This isn’t just a hunch. Our research, which we discuss in detail in today’s podcast, shows that audience members genuinely learn from watching debates.

When people encounter competing claims and have to sort through them — weighing evidence, spotting weak arguments, deciding who made the stronger case — the cognitive work involved produces deeper understanding and better retention than passively absorbing a single narrative.

This makes intuitive sense. A keynote asks you to receive. A debate asks you to judge. And judging requires thinking. We talk about student engagement, critical thinking, and engaging the material. We should turn these expectations on ourselves.

Debates Draw Bigger, More Diverse Audiences

Here’s a practical advantage that matters for anyone organizing professional development: people are more likely to show up for a debate because they believe they’ll hear their own point of view represented.

A keynote titled “Why We Should Embrace AI in the Classroom” will attract the already converted and repel the skeptics. Flip it to a debate — “Should Higher Education Embrace AI in the Classroom?” — and both camps walk through the door, because everyone expects their perspective to get a fair hearing.

That alone makes debates a more inclusive form of professional development. You’re not preaching to the choir; you’re filling the room.

Debates Surface Ideas That Keynotes Never Would

When debates include a period of audience involvement — a Q&A, open floor discussion, or even live polling — something remarkable happens. Ideas emerge that no single speaker would have introduced.

Audience members bring context from their own departments, disciplines, student populations, and institutional realities. A keynote is a one-way street. A debate with audience participation becomes a collective sense-making exercise, and the insights that come from the floor are often the most valuable moments of the entire event.

A biology professor explaining how AI tutoring is transforming her lab sections. An adjunct describing the impossible position of enforcing AI policies without institutional support. A librarian pointing out that the entire conversation is ignoring information literacy. These contributions don’t happen when a keynote speaker is holding the mic for fifty minutes. They happen when the format invites the interaction.

People Speak Up Because Disagreement Is Already on the Table

There’s a psychological safety dimension here that’s easy to overlook.

If a keynote speaker has just spent forty minutes arguing a position, standing up during Q&A to disagree feels confrontational. You’re not just raising a point — you’re challenging a person, in front of their audience, after their performance. Most people won’t do it. So the Q&A becomes a string of softball questions and polite compliments, and the real reactions stay bottled up.

In a debate, disagreement is the whole point. It’s already been modeled on stage. When the floor opens, audience members are far more likely to share their honest reactions, concerns, and pushback because the format has already made it clear that dissent is welcome. That’s when you get the real conversation.

Debates Make the Implicit Explicit

Most campuses already have deep disagreements about AI. They’re just not calling them that. They’re playing out in hallway conversations where one colleague confides that they think the whole department is burying its head in the sand. They’re surfacing in committee meetings where a policy proposal gets quietly tabled because no one wants the argument. They’re showing up in syllabus language — one professor banning AI entirely, the office next door requiring it, and neither having any idea what the other is doing.

These disagreements aren’t a problem. They’re a sign that people are paying attention and that the questions are genuinely hard. The problem is that without a structured venue to air them, they go underground. They become resentments, assumptions about what “the other side” thinks, and a creeping sense that the institution doesn’t have its act together. Faculty end up making AI decisions in isolation, students get wildly inconsistent experiences from one course to the next, and administrators are left trying to write policies that paper over divisions nobody has actually talked through.

A public debate doesn’t resolve all of that, but it does something essential: it makes the disagreement visible, legitimate, and productive. When a respected faculty member stands up and argues that AI restrictions are holding students back, and another equally respected colleague argues that unrestricted AI use is eroding the skills students came to develop, the audience sees that this isn’t a settled question with one right answer that someone just hasn’t gotten the memo on. It’s a genuine intellectual tension — and the institution is better off naming it than pretending it doesn’t exist.

That kind of honesty is rare in professional development. Most PD events are designed to build consensus, to get everyone rowing in the same direction. But on a topic like AI, where the direction itself is what’s in dispute, forcing premature consensus just drives the real conversation back underground. Debate does the opposite. It says: we know you disagree, we think that’s healthy, and here’s a space to do it well.

Debaters Sharpen Their own Thinking

It also produces something that’s surprisingly rare in higher education conversations about AI: genuine familiarity with the other side. Most of us consume information that reinforces what we already think. We read the articles that confirm our instincts, follow the voices that echo our concerns. Debate preparation forces you out of that loop. A professor who’s skeptical of AI has to spend real time understanding why serious people are enthusiastic about it — not a caricature of their position, but the strongest version of it. And the reverse is equally true.

What often happens is that debaters come out of the experience with a more nuanced version of their own view. They don’t switch sides, but they get sharper. They know which of their arguments hold up under pressure and which ones don’t. They’ve identified the places where they need better evidence or where the honest answer is “I’m not sure.” That kind of intellectual refinement doesn’t come from sitting in the audience at a keynote. It comes from having to defend your ideas against someone who’s actively trying to dismantle them.

The Conversation Doesn’t End When the Event Does

Perhaps the most practically valuable thing about debates is what happens afterward.

A keynote gives people a summary they can repeat. A debate gives people an unresolved tension they want to keep working through. Attendees leave arguing with each other — in the hallway, over lunch, back in their departments, in the group chat that evening.

That spillover effect is the holy grail of professional development. You want people to keep thinking and talking about the ideas on their own time, not filing away a slide deck and moving on. Debates create that momentum because they don’t hand you an answer. They leave you with a question you now feel equipped — and motivated — to keep wrestling with.

Debates Model the Intellectual Humility We Need Right Now

When experts publicly disagree with one another, it signals something important to the audience: uncertainty is normal. Reasonable, informed people can look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions. That’s not a failure of expertise. That’s how complex issues actually work.

In the AI space, this message is especially critical. The technology is evolving so rapidly that confident, singular narratives age poorly. A keynote speaker who declares “AI will replace all grading within two years” gives you a takeaway that’s either right or wrong. When stated with high confidence, it becomes unbelievable. A debate that pits that claim against a more cautious position gives you something far more durable: a framework for thinking through the question yourself.

This is Especially True in AI

AI is not a new software tool — it is a civilization-transforming technology reshaping how we produce knowledge, communicate, work, create, and make decisions.

echnologies of this magnitude don’t arrive with instruction manuals. They arrive with profound uncertainty, competing visions, and consequences that take decades to fully understand.

History tells us that the societies which navigated these moments best were the ones that argued about them openly, while the ones that struggled let a single narrative dominate. Higher education is squarely in the middle of this right now.

Nobody has AI figured out — not the vendors, not the researchers, not the administrators writing policies — and the most dangerous thing an institution can do is pretend there’s consensus where there isn’t one. A keynote that tells faculty “here’s how to integrate AI” assumes the fundamental questions have been answered. For most people in the room, they haven’t. Should educators train students to work alongside AI or to do what AI cannot? Is AI-assisted writing still the student’s writing? Does personalized AI tutoring represent democratization or the hollowing out of the student-teacher relationship? These are questions where thoughtful, informed people land on opposite sides, and where the quality of an institution’s response depends on how well it can hold that tension rather than collapsing it prematurely.

In a moment when a civilization-transforming technology is pressuring every institution to move fast, adopt fast, and decide fast, debate is the format that insists on the one thing we can’t afford to skip: careful, adversarial, public reasoning about what we’re actually doing and why. If education can’t model that kind of deliberation for its own community, it’s hard to argue it can model it for anyone else.

Making It Work

None of this means keynotes should disappear. They serve a real purpose, and a great keynote can be transformative. But if your professional development programming is only keynotes and workshops, you’re leaving a powerful format on the table.

Debates work best when they have a clear, debatable proposition — not “Let’s talk about AI” but “Resolved: Universities should allow students to use AI on all assignments” or “Resolved: UMW should become and AI University.”

They work best when the debaters are knowledgeable and genuinely disagree. And they work best when there’s structured time for the audience to weigh in, vote, and continue the conversation.

Education already has deep roots in argumentation, rhetoric, and the open exchange of ideas. Debate isn’t foreign to the academy — it’s foundational. We just need to bring it back into the professional development space, where the stakes are high and the questions are far from settled.

The AI conversation in higher education is too important, too nuanced, and too contested to leave to a single voice on a stage. Let’s debate it.

What Do You Think?

Watch our debate and let us know.