Queen's Debating Union
The Official Crest of the QDU
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| Formation | 1843 |
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| Type | Student debating union |
| Headquarters | Kingston |
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President
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Betsy Studholme |
| Affiliations | World Universities Debating Council, Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate |
| Website | www |
The Queen's Debating Union is the largest and only English speaking debating society at Queen's University in the city of Kingston, Ontario. It was founded as Canada's first debating society in 1843 and became one of the four founding organizations of Canadian inter-varsity University debate. It continues to be an active club on campus and has a strong presence both domestically and internationally as a prestigious and successful competitive parliamentary debating club.
Founded in 1843, the Queen's Debating Union (or QDU) is the oldest student organization at Queen's University and the oldest varsity debating organization in Canada. The Dialectic Society, the original manifestation of the QDU, was responsible for founding in 1858 and initially administering the Alma Mater Society, the student government organization for the University. Later the formerly all-male Dialectic Society incorporated the Levana Debating Society, the club’s all-female equivalent, to become the modern incarnation of the Queen's Debating Union.
Queen's debaters were highly involved in constructing and maintaining the first manifestations of inter-collegiate debate among Canadian institutions, in particular organizing a longstanding set of competitions with the University of Ottawa beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The club was also responsible for establishing initial links with debating societies in the United States. A 1908 debate between teams from Queen's University and Bates College is believed to have been the first international collegiate debate to have taken place in North America.
The Queen's Debating Union is a member of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate (CUSID), a national organization which governs and represents university debating across the country. Members of the QDU travel both nationally and globally to participate in competitive varsity tournaments where a broad set of intellectual issues, from bioethics to international political economy, are discussed and debated. Canadian debate tournaments occur in two primary styles of debate. British Parliamentary and Canadian Parliamentary, which involve four and two pairs of debaters respectively, both emphasize a style of debate using a combination of facts and rhetoric to achieve persuasive argumentation.
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