Sunday, February 13, 2005
What a Maroon
As you might know, this last week about 150 University of Chicago students hosted 2,200 plus high school students at the seventeenth annual Model United Nations at the University of Chicago (MUNUC), and I was one of them. It cost me a lot of sleep and a lot of time which could have been spent studying, but I did it because it interests me and because it was a great experience for me in high school. This is the very first paragraph from Joel Lancetta's story on MUNUC in the Chicago Maroon, the school paper:
This past weekend, Model United Nations of the University of Chicago (MUNUC) hosted one of the premier high school United Nations simulations in the country for the 17th year. Some 150 Chicago students sacrificed time and sleep to teach thousands of high school delegates that, unlike the Bush administration’s policies, diplomacy and debate can work.
Personally, if there's one lesson that model U.N. conferences have taught me, it's that the U.N. is almost useless. No model U.N. committee I have been a part of has ever done work that can be described as effective and decisive. You might chalk this up to delegate inexperience, but I think that it's telling that most delegates have less regard for state sovreignty and individual freedoms than most real U.N. delegates.
One would think that the recent real-world examples of U.N. ineffectiveness during the tsunami and the U.N.'s willingness to let slide the genocide taking place in the Sudan would help counter that impression.
Perhaps if Mr. Lancetta had listened to NU law professor Douglass Cassel's keynote speech, which discussed the U.N.'s morally repulsive behavior towards genocide in Sudan, he might have realized his misconception. Perhaps, if he had paid attention to Rathergate he would have realized how unwise it is to allow personal bias into a news item, let alone an overt political statement. Instead, we get prosaic gems like this one:
A nagging suspicion continually crosses my mind throughout the session: Are these kids smarter and shorter than we were at their age?
Probably.
This past weekend, Model United Nations of the University of Chicago (MUNUC) hosted one of the premier high school United Nations simulations in the country for the 17th year. Some 150 Chicago students sacrificed time and sleep to teach thousands of high school delegates that, unlike the Bush administration’s policies, diplomacy and debate can work.
Personally, if there's one lesson that model U.N. conferences have taught me, it's that the U.N. is almost useless. No model U.N. committee I have been a part of has ever done work that can be described as effective and decisive. You might chalk this up to delegate inexperience, but I think that it's telling that most delegates have less regard for state sovreignty and individual freedoms than most real U.N. delegates.
One would think that the recent real-world examples of U.N. ineffectiveness during the tsunami and the U.N.'s willingness to let slide the genocide taking place in the Sudan would help counter that impression.
Perhaps if Mr. Lancetta had listened to NU law professor Douglass Cassel's keynote speech, which discussed the U.N.'s morally repulsive behavior towards genocide in Sudan, he might have realized his misconception. Perhaps, if he had paid attention to Rathergate he would have realized how unwise it is to allow personal bias into a news item, let alone an overt political statement. Instead, we get prosaic gems like this one:
A nagging suspicion continually crosses my mind throughout the session: Are these kids smarter and shorter than we were at their age?
Probably.
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