In the mid-1990s, Chris Ryalls and I took over advising the Model United Nations from Bernadette Coyle. Her activity was limited to two trips: the YMCA Model United Nations in Hershey, Pennsylvania and the Princeton Model United Nations in Princeton. Last week I wrote about Hershey, so naturally this week is my Princeton blog.
I think Princeton was actually in the fall, so it came first. Having never attended a conference before as an advisor, we needed some assistance. The Princeton MUN staff was fine to work with. They walked us through how to sign up for countries and get committee assignments. They did have one peculiarity about their conference that still shocks me to this day: our students would be rooming on campus with college students. And even crazier, according to campus policy (?) the faculty advisors were not allowed to stay on campus.
You read that correctly: we were to leave our high school students in the charge of college students overnight. On the one hand, that made our jobs seem a lot easier: hang out while committees were in session, then go home and sleep in our own beds, return in the morning. Even then we found it hard to believe that this policy was something our school would allow, but Bernadette had been taking kids to Princeton for years without incident and with the evident approval of the school administration and Board of Education.
I remember very little about visiting the committees. All meetings were held in academic buildings (there are few classes on Friday and none on the weekend during what I think was a three-day conference), so it was neat to see more of the beautiful Princeton campus. We had a small crew, so it was easy to see all of them in action. We dutifully went from committee to committee, and at the end of the day gathered the students together, talked about how things had gone, what they should work on the next day, and how we would be checking on them first thing in the morning.
The next day, Saturday morning, we split up the list of students and popped into their committees to make sure they were there, not that there was anything much we could do if they were missing. Everyone was present and accounted for though, and the day continued — albeit a longer day — like the first day. We repeated the process from the previous night and expected to repeat the final day in the same pattern.
Except when we arrived on Sunday, there was one distinct difference. Two of our girls were in the same committee, serving as a double delegation. We stood in the back of the amphitheater scanning the rows looking for our two students. Perhaps because we were looking for two girls, one with a distinctive color hair, we had initial trouble. Eventually we found one of the girls, I’ll call her Amy (not her name). We waved at Amy to get her to come over to talk with us. “Where’s Cindy (also not the real name)?” Amy shrugged and said: “I don’t know, she never came back to the room last night.”
I hope you can at least begin to imagine the chills that went up our spines at that response. We asked Amy if she knew where Cindy was, and she admitted that Cindy had hooked up with a Princeton student. Amy assumed that Cindy was still with that student. It wasn’t long before Cindy showed up. I can’t remember a thing about the conversation we had with her, but I do remember how on Monday, Chris and I met with the vice principal. He would later tell us that he called her down and spoke to her, and that she begged him not to tell her father. He didn’t give details, but the suggestion was that there might be some kind of abusive relationship. As a consequence, he was opting to give her some punishment without informing the parents. This was a student I didn’t have in class and only knew through this new activity. I had no idea whether what she told the VP was true or not, but I suspect this approach would not have been replicated in 2020. Of course there’s no way this trip would have been approved in 2020, and after this experience some 25 years ago, the advisors themselves said “never again.”
We’ve had a handful of issues with students over the years: inviting friends to visit them in their hotels, lighting a piece of paper on fire and sliding it under the hotel room door (yeah, that happened), spitting on people from their balcony (sigh), and various health crises… but nothing quite reached the level of this situation. It wasn’t long after that Princeton moved its United Nations conference to an East Brunswick Hotel. We attended that one time, but after realizing that students would be stranded in a hotel in the middle of a highway for 72 hours with a single excursion to Princeton (and what a busing nightmare that was), we were done. I’m not impugning the efforts made by the students in the International Relations Council who sponsor the conference, but the only thing we’d really be paying for is the name, and we’d learned before long that the name doesn’t have much to do with quality. See my recent blog about Yale Model Congress…
Fenster on Education 