Dhaka University’s Institute of Business Administration (IBA) has finished as a finalist in this year’s Hobart and William Smith Colleges’ Round Robin debate championship and they have secured the second place in the tournament.
The IBA students competed with participants representing Ivy League institutions such as Yale University, US, Cambridge University, UK, and Harvard University, US and became the first-ever Asian university to achieve this feat.
The judges chose Yale University team as champions of the final round, and Harvard University emerged as the runners-up.
This year the prestigious debate tournament was held online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Sourodip Paul and Sajid Khandaker, undergraduate students of DU’s IBA, represented Bangladesh in the tournament.
Sajid Khandaker, a finance student of the university’s 2016-17 academic session, was awarded the prize of the debate competition’s second-best speaker.
Sourodip Paul, who is also a student of finance of the institute’s 2014-15 academic session, secured the spot of the seventh-best speaker, beating 32 world-class competitors representing 16 universities, confirmed Marlene Pierce, the tournament’s co-convener, to Dhaka Tribune on Monday night.
In 2019, IUB represented Bangladesh in the competition but failed to reach the finals.
The HWS Round Robin follows the World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) format, where four teams face off with two teams representing the proposition and two teams representing the opposition.
The round robin component ensures that every team debates against every other team exactly once in the preliminary rounds.
Debaters and judges participating in the HWS Round Robin debate tournament 2019 represented universities from around the world, including Harvard, Oxford University, Melbourne University, London School of Economics, Stanford, Tel Aviv University, University College Dublin, Yale, and Zagreb University. Last year’s tournament was won by Oxford, with Melbourne taking second place.
While Hobart and William Smith regularly earn victories against top teams in other tournaments, because the Colleges host the Round Robin, the rules restrict the HWS team from competing. HWS invented the Round Robin format for WUDC style debating in 2007 and the tournament has become one of the most prestigious in the world.
This year’s event was originally scheduled for April, but was postponed because of the Covid-19 crisis.
The HWS RR is the premier international tournament of champions in debating. It is a highly competitive debate tournament in the world and many would agree that winning it is second only to the World Championships in prestige, Eric Barnes
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Philosophy Department (chair) Director of Debate, said.
Many Asian teams participated in the RR in the past. Each year, the winners of the United Asian Debating Championships and the Asian BP Debating Championships are qualified to attend, and they generally do, he said.
However, Sajid Asbat Khandaker and Sourodip Paul were the first Asian team to qualify for the final round of the RR. They did so by placing second at the end of preliminary rounds, Eric added.
IBA, DU is the first university participant from Asia to complete the HWS Debate Championship as finalists, Eric added.
