Shout-outs from across the planet for the world debating champions: Media in Australia, Israel and Russia are applauding the teams from Monash and Haifa who won the grand final and ESL-final respectively in Botswana where the World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC or Worlds) where staged over New Year’s Eve. But there is also rumour that miscalculations in the tab led to teams not breaking mistakenly.

At abc.net, people are proud that Fiona Prowse and Victor Finkel from team Monash A took home the title of world debating champions. On top of that, other Aussie teams had eminent results too: “Australian students dominated the tournament that has been running over the past week with five finishing ranked in the top 10 speakers in the world.”

On the website of The Australian, world champion Fiona chats about how she and her team mate had prepared for Worlds and how it felt to draw the position of Opening Government:

“’We definitely felt like we got the short straw, but Victor and I have both been in these finals before and in both cases we were the team proposing the motion, which is often the most difficult position,’ Prowse said. ‘So when we drew it again, we thought the gods weren’t looking down upon us, but it turned out for the best, luckily.’

‘When we were preparing for this tournament, we did some research on Zimbabwe because we felt as the tournament was being held in Africa . . . it could crop up,’ she said.

‘The first thing we tried to do was explain that there was an imperative to actively help because the humanitarian crisis was actually getting worse and the Zimbabwe power-sharing agreement had failed between (President) Robert Mugabe and (Prime Minister) Morgan Tsvangirai.’

‘We also tried to talk about it in the broader context and show the importance of supporting true democracy in Africa.’”

Monash University is one of two big universities in Melbourne and belongs the “Group of Eight”, the leading universities in Down under. That university maintains eight campuses three of which are abroad: South Africa, Italy and even London. Chancellor of Monash University is Alan Finkel, father of world champion Victor.

Click Botswana reports that Fiona and Victor became world debating champions and announces the amazing numbers of participating nations from the African continent:

“Fiona Prowse and her debate partner, Victor Finkel, were crowned champions of the 31st World Universities Debating Championship hosted by Botswana. […] This year, there were a record number of schools representing 10 African countries which participated, although none advanced past the preliminary rounds.”

Mignews, a Russian news platform, also records the Israeli WUDC winners Michael Shapira and Meir Yarom of team Haifa A:

“In the ultimate round, the team from the University of Haifa defeated teams from the Netherlands, Slovenia and Malaysia. Shapira and Yarom debated in the final about the motion ‘This house believes that courts should break up consistently dominant political parties.’ Other topics included prohibition of striking unions, a right to possess nuclear weapons and many more.”

Israel21 knows what the Israeli winners study at university:

“Debaters Michael Shapiro [sic!] and Meir Yarom, from the University of Haifa, were named top ESL team after 12 rounds of debate at the competition. Shapiro, who is studying philosophy and general history, and Yarom, a law student, debated on a range of topics including nuclear weapons, Internet privacy and union strikes.”

The debaters of St. Andrews University published an abbreviated version of the Worlds tab on their Blog where they have a strong focus on the results of Scottish teams and speakers. St. Andrews is a rather small university, but is regularly ranked among the top 100 universities of the world. Recently, the Scottish university was ranked third after Cambridge and Oxford in Great Britain. St. Andrews is where Prince William studied and met his fiancée Kate Middleton.

More trouble about the tab relates Alfred Snider on his Global Debate Blog. Some Daniel who had obviously been a judge at Botswana Worlds, complains about miscalculations in the tab.  According to his own notes, the US-American team Cornell A should have broke to octos:

“I have noticed AT LEAST one major error on the Botswana tab and still have my notes to prove it. In Round 7, Cornell A (Irene Shao and Emily Zhang) are recorded as having taken a 4th and UBC A are recorded as having taken a 3rd. In fact, the results were the other way around meaning that Cornell A should have had an extra team point. If Cornell had finished with 1 more team point they would have qualified for the break, finishing as they did on 17 team points and more speaker points than team number 32. Although they might have been in a harder room had the tab team not messed this up so it can’t be said with any certainty that they would have broken, it still seems to me that someone from Botswana Worlds owes them a big apology.
This note will stay here until such an apology (which must surely be public) is forthcoming.”

Before that, Florian Prischl and Manos Moschopoulos had also recognized mismatches in the tab in their tweets on Twitter. However, those were not affecting the integrity of the data provided, Manos added. Until now, no statement was released by the CA team of Logandran Balavijendran.

Since 1981, debaters from all over the world have been competing at the World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC) at alternating locations across the planet. It was not before 1996 that the British Parliamentary Style became the mandatory format for this annual tournament. The African continent has been host to previous Worlds and has been staging the Worlds now for a third time, this year from 27 December 2010 to 4 January 2011 at the University of Botswana, Gaborone. Language of debate is English and there are three categories: “Main” for native speakers, “ESL” (English as a Second Language, for those who prove great proficiency in English) and “EFL” (English as a Foreign Language, for those who studied English as a mere subject).

apf / glx