What does it mean to belong to a university when our campus is a digital rather than physical one? For many Open University students, there isn’t a shared physical space where everyone gathers between lectures. Students can live hundreds, even thousands of miles apart, study different subjects, and fit their studies around work, family and the rest of life.
Yet universities are about more than studying. They are also places where people meet, exchange ideas and discover that the person in the camera or chat box is not too different, yet sees the world rather differently. The OU Debate Club provides one way of creating that experience at a distance.
Every week students are encouraged to register their interest for Monday evening (in the UK!) from wherever they happen to be, and meet other OU students around a question. It might be a political question, a social issue, an environmental or scientific wondering or something connected to education, or a subject that simply provokes curiosity. The geography disappears for an hour. Someone might be speaking from Scotland. Someone else might be elsewhere in the UK. Another person might have joined from a completely different part of the country. We don’t necessarily know what people’s lives look like outside that meeting.
For the purposes of the debate, what matters is what they have to say. This produces a particularly interesting kind of university community and sets us up with some interdisciplinary skills. The Debate Club reflects that diversity.
At a traditional university, it is easy to find yourself surrounded by people of a similar age, living in the same city and moving through the same academic timetable. The OU is different. Its students come to study from many different circumstances and at many different stages of life.
A debate can bring together people studying law, psychology, sociology, politics, business or subjects that appear to have little connection with one another. Someone’s contribution may be shaped by their studies, but just as often it is shaped by their experience of the world. That means there is no single “OU perspective”. And importantly perhaps there shouldn’t be, as we collaboratively build our critical thinking. A university community doesn’t have to mean everyone agreeing with each other. In fact, disagreement can be one of the things that makes a community intellectually worthwhile. The creation of a space where disagreement doesn’t become hostility.
This is why the structure of a debate matters. There are rules, a chair, time limits and an agreed format. Those boundaries create enough certainty for people to take risks with their ideas.
You can disagree with somebody without needing to dislike them. You can argue against a proposition without if everyone who supports it is unreasonable. You can even find yourself arguing for something you personally don’t believe. For OU students, there is another important element to this. The club isn’t something happening to us somewhere else. It is something students create by turning up and participating.
A regular online meeting might not look like the traditional image of university life. There is no crowded student union building, no lecture theatre to cross after class, and no chance encounter in a corridor. But there is still a meeting – there are still familiar names appearing on the screen. There are still people whose arguments you recognise, whose contributions you look forward to, and whose perspectives you have learned to expect, even if you have never met them in person.
Perhaps that is one of the most interesting things about building a community at a distance. It reminds us that community is not necessarily a place; it’s a sense of belonging and simply people who keep choosing to turn up.
What happens when we debate?
There is a moment in every debate when the question stops being an abstract sentence on a screen and becomes something people care about and want to discuss. Someone has made an argument. Someone else has challenged it. A point that seemed obvious suddenly isn’t quite so obvious. Someone in the audience has started reconsidering their vote.
That is where the OU Debate Club becomes interesting. A debate night is structured. We have a motion, a chair, speakers and time limits. There is usually a warm-up to get people thinking, followed by the main debate, and at the end the audience gets to decide whether the motion has succeeded. The motions themselves can come from members of the community, meaning that what we debate is not simply handed down from somewhere else.
But within that structure, there is plenty of room for the unexpected, because life happens that way! You might arrive intending only to listen and find yourself volunteering to speak. You might be asked to argue for a position you would never normally defend. You might prepare carefully, only to discover that another speaker has raised something you had not considered.
And sometimes the most interesting contribution isn’t the longest or most polished one. It is often a question from the audience, a brief observation, or the moment when someone says, in effect, “I hadn’t thought about it that way”.
That is one of the reasons I think the word debate can sometimes be misleading. We tend to imagine debating as a contest between two people who are determined to prove each other wrong. There is certainly an element of competition in a formal debate: there is a motion, opposing positions and ultimately a vote to decide a winner to take it home. But the competition is only part of it. The other part is curiosity.
What happens if I defend an argument I disagree with? What evidence would change my mind? Why does another person see this issue so differently? Is the disagreement about the facts, or are we starting from completely different assumptions? These questions can take a debate somewhere much more interesting than simply deciding who “won”.
They also make the club accessible to people with very different backgrounds. You don’t have to be studying traditional decisive subjects like law or politics. You don’t have to have previous debating experience. You don’t even have to speak every time. You can listen. And listening is not a passive activity.
One of the things I have increasingly appreciated about the club is that the audience is part of the debate. Their vote determines the outcome, but their presence also changes the discussion. A speaker isn’t talking into a vacuum; they are trying to communicate an idea to other people. That creates a strange and useful balance between confidence and humility. You need enough confidence to stand up and make your case. You also need enough humility to recognise that somebody else might have a point.
Perhaps that is what happens when a Monday night meeting becomes a community. We don’t necessarily leave with the same opinions we arrived with. Sometimes we leave more certain – sometimes less certain. And occasionally, the most successful debate is the one that leaves you with a better question than the one you started with.
