The MUIC Debate Club participated in the Malaysia Asian British Parliamentary Debating Championship 2023 at Taylor’s Lakeside Campus, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on September 22-30, 2023.
Landing in the Garden City of Lights ushered in a new era for the MUIC Debate Club with a revitalization of its rosters and a step forward in philosophy. Bumping shoulders and voicing arguments with some of the circuit’s greats was just a small factor going into this tournament. As a team, MUIC’s debaters set forth into Kuala Lumpur hand in hand with allies from Chulalongkorn University to learn, adapt, and grow as a community.
It was in this new stride that the club sent in to compete not just its debate teams, but its adjudicators, as well. Paneling and adjudicating for some of the best rooms of the tournaments was where the club members’ exposure to new practices and tactics were being taken and applied into some of the sessions that they hope to have later in the term.
One of the team’s adjudicators, Mr. Patsha Ha, a senior Physics student, was declared an Adjudicating Panelist, an award given to those who had a high judging score in the qualifying rounds, giving them a chance to judge more high-stakes rounds.
It was also here that the club’s debating teams experienced probably its greatest growth and success. Debate is disparate and varied in the ways you can shape and deliver your ideas to a judge. Weighing and analyzing these different flavors of argumentation is a hard and difficult job that takes an objective eye and a patient mind. “Getting to listen and judge in some of these rooms is frighteningly enlightening. Ideas that I’d never have expected delivered in a manner I’ve never heard.” These are the words and ideas that the club hopes to soon have coming out of debaters’ mouths all across the Thai circuit, and it is a sentiment that the MUIC debaters share with their many partner universities.
Most of all, this tournament kickstarted a fire in many of the team members’ hearts; these goliaths of debate are not invulnerable with many of the club’s teams alongside Chulalongkorn taking home 1st Place wins in many of the rounds. Despite heart-wrenching losses, and battered victories, it has renewed the MUIC debaters’ efforts into moving forward hand-in-hand towards a hopeful Thai championship.
