by Erica De Bruin, Secretary-General Emerita, CMUNCE 2005

An Introduction

Unlike the beginning of most great adventures, the start of Columbia's high school conference was unencumbered by soaring rhetoric or grand ambition. It began, unceremoniously enough, when all but one member of the Columbia Model United Nations (CUMUN) team quit early in September of 2000.

Under-funded, possessing neither the prestige of Mock Trial nor the glamour of Debate, CUMUN consisted of one lone man left to welcome the incoming Class of 2004: Will Lim, who installed himself club President by default. In a packed, sweaty orientation room, Will pitched us freshmen the opportunity to run for positions on the CUMUN Executive Board. Most of us went home full both of excitement (the Executive Board! of an Ivy League Model UN team! as only freshmen!) and of ourselves: come election day, as we should have expected, most positions went to seniors and juniors with experience in other clubs.

Attempting to dispel our disappointment, Will told us we could help plan a high school conference if we wanted. The project had been proposed by previous E-Boards, he explained, but nothing had ever been done. Hagar Hajar, Andrew Harris, Sarah Katz, Khalil Al-Salem, Margarita O'Donnell, and I were granted titles with at least the ring of some importance ("Director of External Relations" was mine); and we sat down to have meetings and make agendas. Should be easy, we reckoned. Conferences were only four days long, how much planning could they really entail? It was sometime around the third or fourth meeting when we realized that none of us had ever even staffed a conference before, much less planned one.

And so, eager to learn, Will, Andrew, Sarah, and I packed up for a nearby university to help put on their annual conference. Hundreds of badges, hours of panic, and dozens of cups of coffee later, we had notepads filled with lists of Things Not To Do at our conference. Their conference, it seemed, was a one-woman show: the place was utter chaos until the Secretary General rushed into a room, answering questions and issuing commands a mile a minute. Our conference would not be like this, we whispered. Better planning, we vowed. More equitable division of labor, we promised.

The immediate problem we came back from the conference struggling to solve, however, was that of our name. Catholic University had claimed CUMUNC and Cornell CMUNC. Brainstorming commenced: CMUN? Could too easily provoke jokes of an inappropriate nature. Ditto for CUMUN. CMUNEY ("c-money")? We amused ourselves. But no one could figure out what to make the "EY" stand for. CMUNCE ("sea-monkey")? The Columbia Model United Nations Conference and Exposition. What a name! I don't remember what the vote tally came to, but Ms. Katz and I were victorious in our advocacy of the only acronym in MUN history to so nicely lend itself to mascot selection. We resolved to figure out the "Exposition" bit later.

It was around this time that we also selected new titles for ourselves, titles fitting for the Secretariat. Hagar, being the oldest on staff, became the Secretary-General. Sarah and I took the positions of Directors-General; Andrew became the Under Secretary-General-Committees; Kahlil the USG-Finance; and Maggie the Chief of Staff. Everything seemed to be coming together quite nicely: we mailed application materials, made a website, planned committees, recruited staff, and registered a few schools. We would have crises, and props, and simultaneous translations! Speakers, and tours, and evening excursions! We were beginning to get excited.

The First CMUNCE Ever

Early in the fall of 2001, however, about the time Sarah and I were wandering around wondering whether there was anyone, in fact, whose permission we needed to host a conference on campus, we were contacted by our Advisor at Student Development and Activities (SDA), the office which supervises all student groups. She had received a phone call from a high school teacher regarding a Model U.N. conference on campus. "It must be a mistake," she told him. "No one on campus has planned a conference. They have to go through SDA."

Huh. So that's what SDA was for. Needless to say, we were told that the conference simply could not happen. We had filled out no Event Approval Form. We had reserved no classroom space. We had submitted no budget proposal. We protested: but the high schools are already coming, we cannot cancel! If we cancel now Columbia will never be able to have a conference ever again! In the end, SDA was impressively accommodating of our last minute requests for funds and space, and helped us to plan many of the things we had forgotten.

As the conference was approaching, in early December, Hagar stepped down as Secretary-General. Swamped with coursework, and attempting to get into the 5-year program at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, she simply could not put the amount of work required into the position. Sarah stepped up to fill the spot, and I became the sole Director General for our first conference.

By January, however, the Secretariat was seeing little of each other. Each of us had our own areas to work on, and little was coordinated. I rarely knew what Sarah or Andrew was working on, only that the "To Do" pile on my desk was expanding at an unanticipated and seemingly inexplicable rate. When the conference came, we were tired and stressed and barely speaking to each other. A school cancelled last minute, and Sarah's high school, Bergan Academy, came to fill the spots. We offered them — and a lone delegate from India — space to sleep on my floor.

Then it started. To my great joy, Sarah brought vision and drive to the position of Secretary-General. She was determined to encourage the delegates to come away from the conference motivated to become more involved in politics, to understand the world around them, and to simply be able to voice their opinion more loudly. Her speech at Opening Ceremonies was wonderful, and probably the first I'd ever really listened to, despite attending dozens of conferences. And I was really, truly proud of us.

The staff we had trained well, or so we thought at the time. The staff rules then consisted of: 1) don't touch the delegates; 2) show up on time; and 3) know your background guide better than the delegates. But we worried that there was much to be done and not enough people to do it. Sarah and I began giving out positions with abandon, neglecting to consult the Chief of Staff. The suite-mate who drove around Brooklyn to pick up a delegate from India was appointed "Director of Transportation." And the friend who volunteered to give a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art became "Director of Artistic Excursions," or something to that effect.

Most significantly, Sarah and I ended up persuading Scott Hartman, then a freshman with no connection to MUN, to come help us move some boxes. He ended up helping the entire weekend, figuring out what needed to get done, and doing it. One of the more memorable contributions was the design of our t-shirts, complete with Scott's rendition of a sea monkey. When the t-shirts arrived, Scott and I bounced happily from room to room, modeling them for the committees, until one delegate pointed out that the mascot in question appeared naked.

By the second day — despite a year and a half of planning — things began to go wrong. The Crisis Room was locked Thursday morning, and we were unable to update any of the crises until Andrew climbed out the window of the Admin Room and scaled the narrow window ledge, a few inches wide and some five feet long, to the Crisis Room window and opened the door from the inside. Later that afternoon, we were informed that a walkie-talkie was missing. When it was all over, the Secretariat had seen too much of each other to want to be in the same room together for over a month. Yet somehow, it — the crises and the stress and the rush and the dozen high schoolers throwing snowballs at each other outside of Hamilton — was the most fun we'd had in months. Somehow, we pulled it off.

Year Two: A Conference Without a Home

We had hoped that planning the conference would only get easier each year, and came out of the first CMUNCE determined to make it better the second time around. Several Secretariat members were going abroad or had other commitments for the next year, and we hoped we had gotten the new Secretariat together with enough talent to put on the next year's conference.

In the meantime however, we volunteered to help host the annual MUN conference of the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA). On May 4th, in the middle of finals, 700 hundred high school students descended upon Hamilton Hall. Unfortunately, garbage and irritated professors were left in their wake, and Columbia University MUN was decisively and unceremoniously banned from hosting a conference on campus for the entire academic year of 2001-2002.

We wondered what rental space cost in the city. We still had barely the budget to cover the conference on campus, where the rooms were free. Calling MUN teams at NYU, Fordham, and CUNY, we attempted to broker deals to use their space. To our great luck, Will Lim, who had transferred from Columbia's Engineering School to pursue a degree in History, had become the President of the United Nations Association of Hunter College. Hosting the conference at Hunter would be inconvenient, but it was space at a minimal cost. We accepted Hunter's offer without a second thought.

The second year of conference planning proved much more challenging than anticipated. To my relief, Andrew returned to chair an application-only committee, and Scott stayed on board as the USG-Admin. But much of the rest of the Secretariat was new. And the conference was growing, more than doubling its size by the second year. We worried that there were simply not enough staff for so ambitious a conference, which, due to the large number of crisis committees, required an exceptionally high staff to delegate ratio.

Scott and I found ourselves heavily involved in areas we had paid little attention to the year before (including the substance of the conference — the committees, the topics, the crises — and the staff, who required recruiting, interviewing, training, and supervising), in an unfamiliar space, and facing the challenge of keeping staff, advisors, and delegates happy while schlepping them across town by bus in the freezing cold.

Our time at Hunter was not without its merits, however. We had focused a great deal on the quality of the conference guides, and as a result committee debate was more informed and in-depth. The Hunter MUN team was hard-working and dedicated to making the partnership work. And they proved quite adept at publicity: somewhere on the second day of the conference I was tapped on the shoulder by a staffer who casually mentioned, "The Voice of America is here. And some guys from a German television station." And so CMUNCE had its brief moment of fame, as several delegates and staff members were featured on the V.O.A.

Take Three: The 2004 Conference

By the third year, things were beginning to fall into place more easily. We had succeeded in building a staff deeply invested in the conference, and more experienced than it had ever been. For the first time, we had with us a CMUNCE alumnus: a delegate from the 2002 conference, who came to Columbia and became the president of the freshman class. We were able to work on improving the conference in areas we had not been able to focus on before, such as making the guides into an annual, published journal entitled The Columbia World Review, securing speakers for non-crisis committees, offering more diverse tours and evening activities, and using better space on the Columbia campus.

Fortunately, Sarah came back from London, rejoined the Secretariat as Secretary-General Emerita and Editor-in-Chief of the first volume of our annual publication, and helped secure the world-renowned economist and Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs for a conference-wide lecture. Scott continued to work closely with the Columbia administration as Director-General, masterfully orchestrating our return to the Columbia campus. Andrew led his own crisis staff, directing a superb application-only committee for the second year in a row. Additionally, we were able to bring some talented staff members from the year before on board, including Mike Stoops, Craig Hollander, AnnMarie Perl, Nilo Couret, Celia Zeilberger, Paul Mazzilli, and Carrington Lee. The background guides were better written, the entire staff better trained and more cohesive, and the delegates better prepared than in years before.

Not to say that there weren't problems: background guides were later going out than desired. Schools cancelled last minute (again). And the morning of Opening Ceremonies, I lost my speech, putting Sarah and me out of commission for the three hours before the conference as we jointly attempted to write a new one.

But nothing seemed like a challenge we couldn't handle. In fact, most of the weekend, the Secretariat wandered around the conference looking for things to do. We were able to talk with advisors, sit in the committees, watch the crisis staff perform, and see the delegates debate and persuade and problem solve. And we felt we'd done something great — that the three and a half years we'd put into the conference had come to something, that it was no longer us just pretending, but a conference, a real conference, which would go on after we left. And that made everything worth it.

Postscript

A few weeks after CMUNCE 2004, while still in a state post-conference euphoria, we committed the ultimate act of hubris: we Googled ourselves. Much of what one would expect showed up: high school club plans, members of our staff posting resumes, the Voice of America piece, the website of some German conference that stole a Background Guide.

Most interesting, however, were some things we hadn't expected to see — the online journals and blogs of several delegates who had just returned from the conference. Was it wrong to read them? Surely not — they were online, after all. Was it wrong to quote them on the website? Not knowing who the students were, we could not contact them for permission. We chewed this over for a bit, sought legal councel, and came to the conclusion that if you Google yourself, its fair to use anything that comes up.

And thus, I shall end this history with a few choice excerpts. One of the most exuberant began: "THAT WAS INSANE. INSAAAAANE. THAT WAS THE MOST CRAZILY AWESOME MODEL UN CONFERENCE EVER. THAT FREAKING ROCKED. HOLY CRAP. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD" (capitals, italics, and expletives all the author's own). Needless to say, the Secretariat toasted this appraisal, and each other, quite heartily. But our favorite review? As one erudite delegate put it: "CMUNCE was Muthafrekin [sic] awesome, my Hommie G." We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

Please note: if the above quotes are yours, let us know at info@cmunce.org. We'd like to quote you officially in promotional material.