Goodnight is from Houston, Texas. He has a doctoral degree from the University of Kansas. He has researched and taught for 28 years at Northwestern University and for the last 20 years at the University of Southern California. Goodnight lead the way in the internationalization of argumentation studies. He has worked with doctoral programs in Canada, Europe, China and South America.

His spouse, Lynn Goodnight, lead summer high school programs with great success at Northwestern University and USC. Goodnight has been associated with the Fulbright program, ran an egalitarian seminar on communications infrastructure at the USC-China Institute, and is developing critical-productive studies of argument and performance.