This past December the Dalhousie Medical Debate Society sent the team of Alyson Horne-Douma and Tim Holland (me) to the World University Debate Championships. Although the top schools in central and western Canada make a priority of securing positions and sending teams at this top-end academic competition, it had been 5 years since an Eastern Canadian University had secured a position and sent a team to the World Championships. For the first time ever Dalhousie Medical would join the ranks of the top schools throughout the world. Unfortunately the forces that be didn’t seem to think this endeavor valuable enough to bother taking the debate team’s application for funding to the Dean or Alumni Association, so the position secured by Alyson and Tim was looking like an empty hope. However, an angel with a funding account saw the importance in this opportunity to show off Dalhousie Medical to the world, and the project came together. So, we want to offer our huge thanks to Dr. Stewart and the Humanities in Medicine program for their huge support (and funding).

This year’s World University Debate Championships (WUDC) were held in Bangkok, Thailand at the beautiful Assumption University (a campus that consists of buildings that look more like palaces than faculty building). Admittedly Alyson and I both felt pretty lost showing up to this enormous event on the other side of the world. Fortunately the other Canadian Schools had seen that Dalhousie listed among the lists of competing schools that were posted all over the place, and quickly took us into their family. So, I’m going to echo another big thanks to McGill, U of T, and York/Osgoode who especially helped make our stay in Thailand that much more fantastic!

Before getting into our story of competition, I’ll give a brief overview of how World-level debating works. Basically, you’re given a topic 15 minutes before the round, and you’re assigned to a side (pro or con). The debate then happens between 4 teams (2 pro and 2 con) over the span of about an hour. The teams are ranked first through fourth and assigned points accordingly. After 3 days of debating the top teams move on to sudden-death octo-finals (which is called breaking), and everybody else is eliminated and watches for the final 3 days of the tournament. I should answer a common question here: all the debates are in English; however, there are special categories for non-Anglophones, so that during the final three days, the top ranked non-Anglophone teams compete in their own set of sudden-death finals.

During the first two days we had our ups and downs, which are quite clearly reflected in our rankings in the first set of rounds: first, fourth, first, fourth, first, fourth, second, fourth, third – in that order… Right here is likely a good place to explain a major problem about this particular tournament. You see, the tournament coordinators ran this tournament in a very… how can I say this in a P.C. way… I can’t… they ran it very Thai. Hey, they are Thai so no surprises, I guess. They went for huge glitz and glam: huge opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies complete with crazy dancers and elephants, royal endorsement, they even rented out an entire amusement park for us on New Year’s Eve. But (this is a big but) they totally frakked up on the basics. The food was a terrible attempt to comfort our Western needs with over-fried chicken and mushy fries when they could have served the legendary ethnic food that Thailand is famous for. They ran hours and hours behind schedule. The final round was introduced by a guy who rode in an elephant escort, but the microphones didn’t work. And most importantly they did next to nothing to ensure a solid judging pool. As you can imagine good judges are key to a good debate tournament, because without good judges there no way to know who’s really winning.

So, as it turns out the judges that gave us our firsts (and that one second) tended to be judges who were ranked amongst the top in the world, and our fourths (and one third) tended to be judges that… well… were basically some crap debaters who couldn’t qualify to compete, but that wanted to come so they could say they judged at World’s. In a way this was frustrating, but in a another it was very encouraging. Supposedly the tournament was possibly the worst judged tournament ever, and that the judges at other WUDCs would be more inline with the judges that gave us firsts, which bodes well for future WUDCs.