Current News

This was an extremely eventful season, as usual, for the URDU. A few highlights stood out for us: big achievements in Policy Debate, great successes in BP, and some great, educational events hosted and attended in Civic Debate. The URDU continues to be a large, diverse squad, both in terms of the high numbers of women, PoC, international, and LGBTQ-identifying team members, but also in terms of the huge range of intellectual experiences we create for our students. We pride ourselves on being the most premiere high-level intellectual environment for the most curious, adventurous, and thoughtful UR students.

This year we attended more than twenty competitive events all across the United States, North America, and the rest of the World. We traveled to: Houston, TX, San Francisco, CA, Toronto, Canada, Burlington, VT, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Nashville, TN, Boston, MA, Miami, FL, and Mexico City, Mexico - among other places.

In the Fall there were a couple of big highlights: first, in Policy debate we took a big crew of novice debaters to the US Military Academy tournament at West Point, NY, and closed out the final round (advanced two Rochester teams to finals)! That tournament brought many big achievements for many of our competitors. Second, we hosted the Fall Championship of the Social Justice Debates on campus, bringing together six expert judges from on- and off-campus to judge the final round and share their expertise. We were extremely proud of the learning opportunity we were able to create for our debaters and the UR campus community at this event.

Over the winter we sent a team to the World Universities Debating Championship in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where the debaters competed against the top teams in the world. Those who did not attend and were in Rochester worked hard at our Winter debate camp in preparation for the upcoming Spring semester.

In the Spring, our BP debaters traveled far and wide, competing against talented teams at events from Nashville, Tennessee to Mexico City, Mexico. Two of our experienced BP competitors, Charles and Stine, also reached quarterfinals at the McGill tournament in Montreal. Our Policy crew continued their Novice successes with big wins in Texas, New York, and Boston - including debating in and finishing as semifinalists in the first-ever Spanish Language Northeast Regional Championship division for Policy debate! As a huge capstone achievement for the URDU, we were announced as the Cross Examination Debate Association Novice sweepstakes winner for 2023-2024 due to all of our Novice victories throughout the season. This was an historic achievement for the team!

All-in-all, this season was a great addition to the archives of URDU debate! We are thankful for all of our amazing students, who took on challenging topics ranging from environmental justice, to nuclear policy, to high-level economics and geopolitics debates. While we are sad to have lost a couple of special team members to graduation - good luck Stine and Tenzing! - we look forward to welcoming back many of our members and to introducing a new set of students to this activity in the 2024-2025 season!