Chennai Worlds 2014

Chennai Worlds 2014 (CW14) is the 34th World Universities Debating Championship, hosted and conducted by Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India under the aegis of Rajalakshmi Institutions on 27 December 2013 – 4 January 2014.

Chennai Worlds 2014
Chennai Worlds 2014
General Information
TypeDebate Competition
LocationChennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Host CollegeRajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai
Dates27 December 2013 – 4 January 2014
Number of Participating Teams372[1]
FocusWorld Universities Debating Championship
Websitehttp://chennaiworlds.com/
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The World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) is the world's largest debating tournament, and one of the largest annual international student events in the world.[2] It is a parliamentary debating event, held using the British Parliamentary Debate format. Each year, the event is hosted by a university selected by the World Universities Debating Council. The tournament is colloquially referred to as "Worlds" and the winners of the open competition acknowledged as the "world champions". The event was ultimate won by a team from Harvard University (Josh Zoffer and Ben Sprung-Keyser), who competed in the Grand Final against teams from the Glasgow University Union, Cambridge University, and the University of Sydney Union. The World Champion 2014 in the category "English as a second language" is Berlin A (Dessislava Kirova and Kai Dittmann) and in the category "English as a foreign language" Bandung A (Vicario Reinaldo and Fauzan Reza Maulana).

Controversy

The event was marked by considerable controversy, including:

  • Failures by the university administration to meet budgetary obligations to pay independent adjudicators in non-controlled currencies (resulting in strike threats, ultimately jeopardizing the 7th round of the tournament).[3]
  • Difficulties experienced by Pakistani participants upon arrival in the country.
  • The decision to hold a motorcycle exhibition during Women's Night, an event traditionally held to support and celebrate female participants, in order to appeal to males [4]
  • Relocation of the tournament hotel from the ITC Grand Chola to several more distant and lower quality venues, without sufficient room to house all the participants.[3]
  • Efforts by those hotels to lock participants out of their rooms (as late as 2AM, on multiple occasions, to settle incidental room charges).
  • The withholding of passports from participants attempting to catch flights out of the country in an effort to force them to pay funds promised by Rajalakshmi Engineering College.[5]

See also

References
  1. Chennai college to host World University Debating Championship | Business Line
  2. debating.net - WUDC history Archived 27 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  3. "Monash Debating Review: How (not) to Run Worlds: Advice from two people who needed it - Harish Natarajan and Michael Baer". Archived from the original on 18 January 2015. Retrieved 17 January 2015.
  4. Twitter / Chennai_WUDC: Motorcycle stunt show at
  5. Global Debate: Chennai WUDC - A Report from Afar and Inside - Alfred Snider
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