September 2023 Recap

A group of debaters pose for the camera.
URDU participants in the Binghamton tournament pose with their awards.

The Debate Union had a busy September, debating far and wide right out of the gate this season! Our first two events were the Social Justice Debates season opener at Rutgers University-Newark and the national policy debate opener tournament at Northwestern University in Chicago. Later in September we headed right down the road to Binghamton University for the regional policy debate opener, and ended the month at a competition in San Francisco called the St. Ignatius Dialogues, at which URDU members presented on some of the best ways to achieve social justice for the LGBTQ community.

Before all of this competition got started, URDU held its annual pre-season retreat where debaters immersed themselves in intensive training before classes started. This was an opportunity to start off the season right, and URDU students made the most of the time to prepare arguments, research, and practice their debating. That was fairly important, given how busy we ended up being in September!

Retreat attendees enjoying some food.
Lara Ozcayir, Faith Liu, and Carly Zubrzycki enjoy a retreat feast.

Bi-coastal social justice debating

A group of debaters posing for the camera.
Everyone who participated in the St. Ignatius Dialogues at the University of San Francisco.

Our debating at Rutgers-Newark and the University of San Francisco happened under the auspices of “Civic Debate,” where students compete and prepare arguments to ultimately be heard by expert and community stakeholder judges. Civic Debate tries to make debate a public-facing activity wherein we engage in dialogue with communities about the issues we cover in our arguments. At Rutgers-Newark, Monica Resendez, Nicole Martinez, and Josh Henderson debated against tough competition and didn't ultimately reach elimination rounds, but had a fantastic experience discussing environmental justice and comparing activist and traditional legal approaches to making change.  

At the St. Ignatius Dialogues at the University of San Francisco, Monica and Nicole had a great showing, especially in Round 1, where they critiqued the idea of the “American Dream” as exclusionary of non-white latinx people - and received the top rank. Faith Liu and Carly Zubrzycki also performed extremely well, taking home the 5th and 7th speaker awards, respectively. Congrats to all of our extremely talented civic debaters!

National and Regional Season Openers for Policy Debate

Two participants pose for a photo.
Isabel Edelstein and Guy Emrich debated at Northwestern University.

 

Isabel Edelstein and Guy Emrich got the URDU started at Northwestern University in the policy debate national season opener. Impressively, they reached octafinals only to run up against a talented Michigan team that ultimately defeated them. With a 4-2 record, they set a fantastic tone for a very successful competitive season ahead.

At Binghamton, the regional policy debate opener, there were several notable successes: perhaps most notably, novices Anastasiia Chyzh and Anastasiya Yushchenko went 3-3, and broke to Octafinals at their very first tournament! Lara Ozcayir and Isabel Edelstein went 4-2 in prelims and broke to Quarterfinals; Richard Tao was recognized as the 5th best speaker among novices; Guy Emrich was recognized at the top Junior Varsity speaker; Lara was awarded 10th best speaker in Open; and Isabel won the 3rd Open speaker award!

The entire team - novices, varsity debaters, junior varsity debaters - achieved successes in September. We’re proud of all their hard work and look forward to more achievements!

What’s ahead for URDU

In October URDU will be stretching its British Parliamentary debate muscles at tournaments from Canada to New Haven, CT, and locales in-between - such as the US Universities Debating Championship at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

We’ll also be continuing on with policy debate at the US Military Academy at West Point’s tournament in the beautiful Hudson Valley (stay tuned for pics!) as well as the Harvard tournament in Boston at the end of the month.

For Civic Debate, we’ll be participating in an online tournament later in the month, and then in November we’ll be hosting the Social Justice Debates Fall Championship as our Brad Smith Debates event on campus. We are excited to welcome anyone from across campus and in the Rochester community to join us for a great event, with expert judges from our community presiding over the final round!

We’re excited for an amazing fall and beyond for the URDU. If you haven’t yet, remember to follow us on Facebook - facebook.com/rochesterdebate - and Instagram - @rochesterdebate.