UBC Debating Society
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since June 2006. |
| University Parliamentary Debating |
| World University Debating Championship |
| Regional Championships |
| Australasia · Europe John Smith Memorial Mace · North America |
| National Championships |
| Australia · Canada · Ireland |
| National Organizations |
| APDA · CUSID English-Speaking Union · NPDA |
| Styles |
| Australasian · British Parliamentary |
| Lists of debaters |
| Global · Canadian |
| Clubs |
| Cambridge · Glasgow · Otago Oxford · UBC · Cork · Western Ontario TCD Hist. · TCD Phil. |
The UBC Debating Society is a constituted student club of the Alma Mater Society of the University of British Columbia. The club is also a varsity athletics[1] team with support from athletics and recreation. In 2007 the club and the university hosted the World University Debate Championships[2].
[edit] History
The first incarnation of the Debating Society was at the then-new Vancouver College in 1902. Their founding president, Desmond Bailey, wanted the students of the province’s first public, post-secondary institution to "readily have the skills of rhetoric, oratory, and argumentation at their disposal - giving our province the leaders that it deserves."
In 1906, Vancouver College was taken over by McGill and renamed the McGill University College of British Columbia and in 1908, the Vancouver College Debates Union was rechristened the Undergraduates’ Literary and Debating Society.
Women had a prominent role in this new Society, which had a woman as its first Vice-President. However, despite the absence of any evidence that men were overtly trying to exclude women, a Ladies’ Literary and Debating Society was created in 1910 to provide a venue where women could train in debate without fear of intimidation or ridicule by male members. "The Ladies’ Lit", as it came to be known, was a major venue for political dialogue and was very involved in the progress of roles for women at the university college.
When the new University of British Columbia opened in 1915, the Ladies’ Lit and the Undergraduates’ Lit were remodeled as the Women’s Literary Society and the Men’s Literary Society to allow the two sexes to be on equal footing. This separate-but-equal model of debating failed to gel with the student population and served to only deepen gender rivalries and take away the focus on public speaking and debate.
The next stage in the evolution of the Literary Societies was an attempt to rejuvenate what had become not only an anachronistic structure, but also an activity of declining student interest. In the efforts to overcome student apathy towards debating, the formation of a new Literary Club was proposed--the Literary and Scientific Department--open to both men and women but "limited to students who were willing to take an active interest in the society". A concerted attempt was made to create an elite group of energetic participants in order to fulfill the society's first objective in "a province deficient in public speakers."
1917 was the first year of the Department which quickly expanded to include the Player’s Club, the Musical Society, the Chemistry Society, Sigma Delta Kappa Society, and the Agricultural Discussion Group with the then university president, Dr. Sedgewick, as Honorary President. By 1955, the Literary and Scientific Executive, as it came to be known, changed its name to the University Clubs’ Committee to focus exclusively on the governance of the different clubs and the new Debating Union was formed. The name changed once more in 1976 to become the UBC Debating Society.
Throughout the history of the Society, numerous personalities have helped form the culture that marks the Debating Society as the oldest student group at the University. One such person was the president during the beginning of the Second World War, Oliver Bailey. Son of Desmond Bailey, Oliver became president in the spring of 1939, with his first act being a public debate, "This House believes that Munich was right", referring to the Munich Conference of September, 1938 in which Neville Chamberlain negotiated for peace in Europe with Adolf Hitler. Although Mr. Bailey won the motion from the government side and history proceeded to prove him wrong, he was nevertheless one of the student voices that argued passionately for his fellow men to take up arms against the Nazis and in 1941, after completing his degree in engineering, he became a captain in the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps. He died at Dieppe on August 19, 1942 and, as tribute for years afterwards, members of the Literary and Scientific Department would say that any person debating alone was debating with Oliver Bailey.
Nora Coy was one of the charter members of the Women’s Literary Society and was also the first female president of the Alma Mater Society, UBC’s student union. She was a strong speaker but did not come into her own as a debater until after her presidential term when the campus debates on coeducation were reaching their zenith. The debate raged in the student newspaper, the Ubyssey, including one letter signed by "L’Homme Indigne" that declared, "we have put up with coeducation, why should we allow so many of our societies to be diluted with the weaker sex." At that year’s Closing of the House, Miss Coy found herself arguing for coeducation and integration of the male and female debating socities. To protest the letter, she replaced the traditional glass of water for herself, and her competitors, with a glass of gin. When her male opponent paused to drink from his glass and choked in surprise, she cried out, "There are worse things diluting society than women, monsieur!" The audience was so amused that the common toast amongst members of the debating societies became the simple phrase, "To Nora."
[edit] Modern Day
The UBC Debating Society is a dominant force in western Canadian debating. In 2003 the club was established as a varsity team[3]. In 2002 the club hosted the Canadian National Debating Championships and in 2007 it hosted the World Universities Debating Championships.
