Princeton WUDC 1995

The final

Princeton hosted once again in 1995. The overall winners, in a 6-5 decision, were the University of New South Wales (James Hooke and Jeremy Philips), who defeated Oxford (Rufus Black and Rod Clayton) in the final, and Harvard (David Panton and Ted Cruz) in the semifinal. Chitra Jenardhanan from Nanyang in Singapore became the first English as a Second Language speaker to win the Best Speaker award.

At the council meeting, two colleges bid to host in 1997 - Stellenbosch and Deree. After presentations and questions, Stellenbosch was selected as the host by a vote of 13-6-1. Australia also proposed standardization of format to British Parliamentary after a heated discussion between Australia, New Zealand, Scotland and Singapore in favour of standardization, and the United States and Canada against, a motion was passed to delay consideration of the issue until the following year.

Princeton also had serious problems with judge numbers. Most colleges failed to send a judge and the 2 teams per debate set-up required twice as many judges as normal. In the preliminary rounds, many rooms had only one judge. As a result the N-1 rule was mooted for future championships, thus ensuring that sufficient judges would be available, but it would not be until Stellenbosch '97 that council would vote to enforce this guideline.

There is an urban myth that after Princeton Worlds council voted never again to allow Princteon to host or never again to leave the US host depending on who is telling the tale and the axe they are grinding.  There is no such rule at Worlds Council.

This History of the World Debating Championships comes in 3 parts. From 1976 to 1990 it is taken almost word for word from the 1991 Toronto WUDC Tournament booklet. Who wrote it isn't known but it was provided by Randal Horobik. At the start of the section on Worlds in 1981 is an extract from an e-mail by Clark McGinn, Convenor of Debates, GU Union 1980 -81 and 1981 and Convenor of the First World Debating Competition, 1981. The history since 1991 has been compiled initially by Colm Flynn and edited by many contributors to Wikipedia. Unfortunately Wikipedia deleted the history due to copyright concerns so we are back here. Hopefully anyone who contributed to the Wiki article before it was deleted will be happy to see their work preserved here.