Debating Society
The Victoria University of Wellington Debating Society (Inc.), formed in 1899, the Society is run by an elected committee of eleven people (Victoria University of Wellington students), which organises regular debating grades, public debates, debating tournaments, and social events.
The Society meets regularly during term time and attends national and international tournaments during each of the mid-trimester and trimester breaks. The Society also organises the prestigious Plunket Medal Oratory Contest, the oldest prize for public speaking in New Zealand.
Within New Zealand, it has won the Officers' Cup for impromptu debating at the New Zealand University Games sports tournament for the last thirteen years. It is the current holder of the Joynt Scroll for prepared debating, and it has won this trophy more than any other university. It has won the NZ British Parliamentary Debating Champs in five of the seven years it has been held.
The Society also has a long history of competing in international tournaments. Victoria won the 2010 and 2011 Australasian Intervarsity Debating Championships and reached the Grand Final in 2007 and 2009, finishing as runner-up on both occasions. In January 2009, a Victoria team reached the semi-finals of the World Universities Debating Championships in Cork, Ireland.
The Society has honours boards in the bottom foyer of the historic Hunter Building at Victoria University, which are maintained by the University. The original wooden honours boards were maintained and restored when the Hunter Building itself was restored and renovated in the early 1990s. The honours boards list by year Victoria students who have won the Joynt Scroll, the Bledisloe Medal for Oratory, the Plunket Medal, and the now defunct Union Prize.
Read more about this topic: Victoria University Of Wellington Students' Association
Famous quotes containing the words debating and/or society:
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Being dismantled before our eyes are not just individual programs that politicians cite as too expensive but the whole idea that society has a stake in the well-being of children down the block and the security of families on the other side of town. Whether or not kids eat well, are nurtured and have a roof over their heads is not just a consequence of how their parents behave. It is also a responsibility of society—but now apparently a diminishing one.”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)