Renewing Our Mission

Anyone entering the Union during Term will immediately recognise a thriving organisation situated, once again, at the heart of Cambridge student life.  Recruitment of new members across all of the colleges and from the widest social backgrounds is increasing year-on-year with over 5,000 members currently in residence.  If the University is a microcosm of the world’s most talented students and teachers, then the Union is a place in which that microcosm can find common cause.

The Union is by some margin the largest student organisation in Cambridge and, as such, it is influential in the life of the University as a whole.  It brings to Cambridge a great variety of speakers, exposes members to the widest spectrum of opinion and, in the process, broadens their horizons far beyond the confines of syllabus or geography.  A successful Society places our members at the epicentre of debate whilst enhancing the reputation of Cambridge as a whole.  A rich and varied programme of debates, speaker meetings and social events, together with improving facilities makes the Society a natural focus for student life.  Alongside the intellectual stimulus provided by events in the Chamber and the magnificently refurbished Library, the recreational rooms of the Union provide space for members to interact informally.  

Although best known for its weekly debates, its speaker meetings and its place at the centre of Cambridge student life, the Union has also long been active in spreading the skills and habits of debating to a much wider public. Always mindful that the Society was founded to defend and to promote free speech, student members have long been engaged in what would now be described as an “outreach programme”, proselytising the value of debating, both by example and through well-founded programmes to students in other universities, in schools and in the community at large.  

Over the years, the Society has established a fund of expertise and a tradition of good practice which our undergraduate and graduate members are keen to share with their less privileged contemporaries. Whilst it is fast becoming fashionable to look for ways of engaging young people in the political process, members of the Society can rightly claim never to have lost sight of this critical objective and to have developed more successfully than any other institution the means of doing so.

Funding the Society’s core mission is a key objective of the 200th Anniversary Campaign.