Lined sheets lay on the desks of a classroom in the Henry Angus building as a gaggle of chatty students await the start of the competition. What might seem to a post-class loiterer to be the nervous energy of an evening midterm was, in fact, the first student-run essay competition hosted by the UBC Ballpoint Society.
The competition’s rules were simple: participants would get one hour to handwrite an essay based on a prompt without prior research or outside help.
Despite the club’s name, writing instruments of all kinds were laid out, including ink, fountain, gel and pencils. They were being twirled between fingers and tapped against desks to create the rhythm of a pre-exam lecture hall. This was the first iteration of what Co-Presidents Beckett Stanger and Eddie Yuan hope to become a monthly occasion of essay-writing competitions that would allow participants to dabble in what they called “light philosophy.”
“[There’s] an appeal of an in-person essay competition where it's kind of secretive,” Stanger said. “You don't really know anything about the prompt. You just get to show up and write, and it's super broad — anybody can be involved in it.”
The essays were judged by Dr. Daniela Boccassini and Dr. Carlo Testa, both professors of Italian studies with decades of experience in the field. Testa opened the competition by remarking on the inspiring fact that young people were willingly in this room to explore the humanistic side of academia outside any collegiate obligation.
The prompt posed for the essay reflected this: in the span of an hour, write about the troublesome age of the 21st century from the perspective of somebody from the 26th century. The aim was to be optimistic.
Four prizes would be awarded to the essayists: best technological elaboration, socio-cultural elaboration and creative elaboration, with the final prize awarded to the essay that successfully brought together all three aspects.
“There is a tension between defending humanist values and thought detached from any sense of commercial return, and the idea that we should give one prize,” Testa explained. “We don't want to foster with our actions an ideology that is in contradiction with the openness we are proposing. It would be contradictory to put one essay above all others in a sort of capitalistic manner. On the other hand, it is a competition.”
The spirit of the UBC Ballpoint Society is old school, tailor-made for aspiring academics, philosophy bros and go-getters looking to pad out their resumes. Still, Yuan emphasized that everybody is welcome, regardless of skill or faculty background. Their goal is to make writing less daunting.
“I think thinking should be approachable,” he said. “Writing should be approachable. They're producing art in there. That should be approachable.”
It’s difficult not to notice that the UBC Ballpoint Society is initiating a cultural exercise that is against the grain of current academic life. The proliferation of AI has fundamentally changed the medium of the essay and the act of writing. What place does a club like this harbour in the age of ChatGPT?
“Certainly, [the Ballpoint Society] is against the grain. You can't use outside resources as well. I think that's really more the essence of it, rather than the handwriting,” Beckett said. “We just want people to produce something on the spot with the knowledge that they have.”
Spontaneous essay-writing requires a sort of instinctive thinking, independent of technology, that the Ballpoint Society wants to encourage beyond the classroom.
“If, as human beings, we deem ourselves intelligent, it is not through the means of mechanized technology that our intelligence comes into being,” Boccassini said.
It was evident that, for the organizers involved and perhaps even the participants, this was not just a regular club event to while away time, but an earnest exercise in intellectual cultivation.
The Ballpoint Society is currently supported by UBC’s English department, which allowed them to use the room in the Henry Angus building for the contest, but they aim to one day become an AMS club and gain funding, explained Stanger. They also hope to find more professors willing to be panellists and more hands for the blog where every essay will be posted.
Yuan wants the competition to continue being free, without any material prizes.
“We really want to make sure that there is no financial incentive to compete.”
One could go as far as to say that competing in the sport of deliberate prolonged thinking in the age of short-form content dominion is perhaps as radical as attending a punk show in what many call a post-literate society.
“Ultimately, the club is a departure from technology, hence why we're the Ballpoint Society. We're not the Keypad Society.” Yuan said. “But beyond [that], it's also just coming together as people. I think, in terms of people who think on the spot … their memories, their instincts, their emotions, I think that is something that we can remind [students] that they still have.”
“Use technology. Don't be used by it,” Testa added.
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