The Model United Nations program (MUN) is extremely popular; some might say that MUN is too popular in that students join merely to get the MUN name on their resume. These students, of course, are tourists and university recruiters do not take them seriously. By and large, “MUN” is a tick mark on a university application and no more. Thousands of students do MUN. It is unoriginal and thus largely ignored by most serious institutions.
However, MUN is an amazing learning opportunity when taken seriously. Students learn more in a four-day conference than in a
Our 2012 HMUN Delegation with RC Grad and Harvard Man, Can (RC10)
month of courses. They learn through their research and mostly from their peers. Peer-to-peer education is the most effective according to ongoing research and the MUN model emphasizes this approach.
Perhaps the most beneficial parts of MUN are the Specialized Agencies. Set up in a Security Council format, small groups of about 15 students role-play characters from an event in a particular period of history. They are chaired by the ‘leader’ of the time who communicates by laptop with a nearby ‘crisis room’. The people in the ‘crisis room’ are the keepers of incredible research and have thought through a variety of scenarios: they send in various messengers, a senator, a president, etc who tells the council of impending attacks, assassinations, and other twists and turns. They are in turn questioned by the council before they leave the room allowing the debate to continue on a different track.
At our own RCIMUN, we have set up one such Specialized Agency each year. We started with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (the Security Council from those days). The students who set it up spent months researching every aspect of the crisis, buying scholar;y articles, accessing (and buying) the trove of MUN documents available from the period, communications between the US and the USSR, etc. Those who attended were given study guides prepared by our students well beforehand and came prepared to play the characters in the Security Council of the time. Their knowledge base was in-depth.
This year, at Harvard MUN (HMUN), two of our students were in wonderful Specialized Agencies. One was the “Council of Pompey the Great” and the other was the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 1853″ (I had no idea that 25 million people had died due to the setting up of
Marcus Antonius Wishes to have the Floor
this odd Chinese breakaway state). Three incredible days of debate and discussion. The “Council of Pompey the Great” had a final night crisis where the members were taken from their beds at 1:30 a.m. and debated until 5:00 a.m., with many of their number being assassinated 
It can be intense and very entertaining.
True learning.
