By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Mark Burnham
David Suzuki did it. So did Michael Ignatieff, not to mention a number of prime ministers, lawyers, politicians, and diplomats. All were once members of a debate club.
SFU’s Debate Club meets for three hours twice a week, and their sessions consist of training seminars and rounds of practice debates. The seminars are divided into stylistic — which cover styles of debate — and content seminars, which focus on an academic topic. They often have third or fourth year students, sometimes grad students, to come in and hold workshops on certain topics, such as the situation in Syria or the Greek financial crisis. The other side of their meetings is an improvised debate on a certain topic, usually a current event. “The best way to get better at debating is by debating,” says Gordon Welsch, the club’s recruiting director. “It’s a skill like anything else.”
The members are quick to note that there are many transferable skills that students can acquire from the Debate Club, including public speaking and analytical skills. Club president Umer Altaf regularly holds workshops on introductory logic and philosophy to help with these skills. These skills not only help with debating and oration, but also with writing papers. “It’s a lot easier to structure an argument when you have that analytical framework,” explains Chardaye Bueckert, VP of finance. “It becomes easy to come up with things off the top of your head.”
Furthermore, there is a social aspect to the club: you get to meet people that share similar interests who you probably wouldn’t meet otherwise. According to Altaf, a lot of their members want to work in the foreign service, so many in the club have historically been students of IS, economics, or political science. This year, because of an increase in recruitment, there has also been an upsurge in science students as well.
The club competes in both formal and informal debates. “We consistently do well in all of them,” says Umer. Conferences happen on state and provincial level, as well as a national level. Certain larger schools like UBC, SFU, and UVIC also have invitational conferences. Last semester, SFU had a team in the semi-finals of the British Parliamentary Nationals. They also had a speaker beat out a student from Yale to place third at the Northwest Tournament, not to mention a tournament in Seattle where SFU accumulated more trophies than any other school, including Seattle and Yale.
More informally, the International Relations Student Association (IRSA) at UBC challenges SFU to a debate every year. “They did it again,” said Alraf, “we won again.” The judges of the debate are not students, but rather respected community members, including lawyers and diplomats.
The club’s membership depends on the semester, but the active group (the one that regularly competes) tends to fall between 15 and 30. The email list, however, is much larger, with a lot of debaters taking advantage of some of the club’s skill-building services. The club used to operate on a much smaller model, training only six to eight people. “We’re trying to change that, make it work as a larger model,” explains Alraf. “So we’re actually trying to recruit students from all sorts of departments.”
The Debate Club offers many opportunities for personal and professional growth. “It’s really powerful to be confident and articulate when you speak,” concludes Welsch. If you’re interested in getting involved, the debate club meets on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 in AQ5008.
