On March 12, 2010, the public radio show "This American Life" ran a story on the Life Raft Debate entitled "I'd Like to Spank the Academy." The story followed the events of the 2007 Life Raft Debate in which the Devil's Advocate, Jon Smith, a professor in the Department of English, successfully argued that all the panelists should be drowned because they were merely trying to be funny, not to educate or to defend the importance of their respective disciplines. Following the broadcast, several colleges and universities in the United States and abroad began hosting Life Raft Debates of their own.