On Monday, UVA hosted its fifth annual Student Oratory Competition in the Dome Room of the Rotunda. The competition consisted of undergraduate and graduate finalists performing speeches they had written for the chance to win the grand prize of $1000. On the judges’ panel were former White House speechwriters, including Ed McNally, speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush; Paul Orzulak, speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore; and Landon Parvin, speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan. Also on the judges’ panel was last year’s undergraduate winner, Sidney Seybold, Class of 2025. The contestants wrote and performed speeches responding to a prompt: “Describe an event from American history and explain how it illustrates a founding principle of our Declaration of Independence.”
The Student Oratory Competition is a budding tradition at UVA. It materialized in 2021 from the idea of a group of students in an undergraduate speechwriting class. Since then, it has grown significantly, seeing a record number of applicants this year. Undergraduate and graduate applicants are asked to submit a written speech, approximately five minutes, responding to the given prompt. Out of this pool, cohorts of finalists for the undergraduate and graduate divisions are selected. These finalists then attend the competition, where they perform their speeches to a panel of judges and a public audience. The judges deliberate and select winners from each division, announced at the event.
This year’s competition featured four finalists from each division. The undergraduate finalists were second years Anant Gautam and Nolan Hite, and fourth years Madeline Livingston and Deaana Wilbourn. The graduate finalists were Elizabeth Baldwin, a third-year law student; Brandon Morgan, a first-year student at the Darden School of Business; Thomas Murphy, a second-year law student; and Michael Rattner, a first-year law student.
Springing from the open-ended prompt, the finalists’ speeches spanned space and time, sweeping from the streets of 1960s Memphis to the rural Pacific coastline, to the frozen tundras of Siberia, and to the bloody battlefields of 1940s France. Their contents tied labor activism, technological advances, the Civil Rights Movement, and even an exploding whale to the American ideals embodied by the Declaration of Independence. The students delivered inspiring performances, conveying excitement, humor, grief, and passion through their orations.
After the speeches concluded, the judges deliberated for several minutes, and McNally took the stage to deliver the panel’s decision. The winner of the undergraduate division was Deaana Wilbourn, whose speech centered on the experience of her grandfather, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, and tied the immigrant experience, social reform, government tyranny, American ideals, and the Declaration of Independence together into one powerful speech. The winner of the graduate division was Elizabeth Baldwin, who told the tale of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, a city-wide labor movement in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tragically lost his life supporting. Elizabeth’s powerful speech emphasized the reflection between Thomas Jefferson’s profound declaration that “all men are created equal,” and the simple statement painted on the picket signs of the Memphis sanitation workers: “I am a man.”
Deaana and Elizabeth each received $1000 for their victories, and Deaana will have the opportunity to serve on the judging panel of next year’s competition. Before delivering the decision of the judges, McNally gave a personal remark to the contestants that perfectly summed up the spirit of the event: “I invite you, as a speaker to a speaker, to dare to be provocative, to dare to be contrarian, to dare to be audacious, just like the founders, just like Mr. Jefferson.”
The competition can be watched in its entirety on YouTube here.
Leave a Reply