CSU, Chico News

Reflecting on a unique opportunity to portray American diplomats in a time of war, California State University, Chico students felt they gave an unprecedented effort representing the United States at this spring’s 2002 Model U.N. Conference in New York City.

The CSU, Chico team picked up a Distinguished Delegation Award and an Outstanding Position Paper Award for the conference, which ran March 25-30. CSU, Chico students have now garnered awards at 11 of the last 12 conferences, which typically include approximately 2,000 student delegates from roughly 200 schools around the world.

“This was the strongest team I’ve ever seen,” said CSU, Chico senior Mark Bourgeois, president of the Model U.N. club and a three-year veteran of the conference. “As I walked from location to location at the conference, I could hear in the hallways, ‘Chico’s really good.’ We got a lot of compliments.”

Bourgeois said it was virtually impossible, because of the scoring system the Model U.N. uses, for the Chico team to be named the outstanding delegation, as it has been in the past. To be the number one delegation, each team’s representative must be judged the top participant in his or her committee or conference. Typically, smaller delegations, representing smaller countries, take home the honors, using a small number of experienced students. “For us, with 33 students in our delegation, to take home any award is really incredible,” Bourgeois said.

Model U.N. team member Richard Elsom, another veteran of past conferences, said the learning experience the students gained was unbeatable. “Back in the fall, some of the new students could never have anticipated what they were going to learn and be able to do,” he said. “To watch them in action a few months later was remarkable.” Elsom, a former Associated Students president, said the Model U.N. was perhaps “the best education experience a student can have.”

Attracting a lot of positive attention at the New York conference was CSU, Chico delegate Khaled Dudin, who represented the team on the Security Council. “The other school advisers praised the job he did, while students from other delegations asked him for advice,” said CSU, Chico political science professor C. Richard Ostrom, the team adviser. “He knew some of the other countries’ positions better than they did.” When the students met with representatives of the U.S. Embassy, the same thing happened, Ostrom said. “The embassy people found he knew as much as they did on some issues,” Ostrom said.

A Palestinian who is now a permanent resident of the United States, Dudin found the task of representing U.S. positions in the Middle East challenging, to say the least. “One day in the conference, moments after I leave the Security Council room, I’m watching Israeli tanks on TV going into an area where I am from,” he said. “The hardest thing that a diplomat does is represent policy made by others. That was put to the test,” he said.

Dudin, who has been to three Model U.N. conferences while at Chico, said his role forced him to strenuously argue against positions he personally held. “At one point, I had to keep a whole room of Security Council representatives from using their veto powers to corner the Israelis,” he said.

Dudin said he did take the time after the conference to explain to other students what his personal views on the Middle East were. “Some of them were surprised I was Palestinian,” Dudin said, chuckling, taking their surprise as a compliment.

The Chico delegation included three other international students: another Palestinian, a French citizen whose family is originally from Morocco and a Japanese student.

CSU, Chico was asked by the National Model U.N. to represent the United States at the 2002 conference. Schools put in requests for what countries they would like to portray, but last fall, in the post-Sept. 11 climate, no university team asked for the United States. Because of CSU, Chico’s strong track record, the Model U.N. asked Chico represent the U.S., and Chico accepted.

Ostrom said that, despite all the additional work preparing and training to be the United States, the experience for the students was definitely worth it. “It was a great achievement to get a ‘Distinguished’ award as the U.S. Everybody’s an expert on the U.S., so it’s difficult to shine in that context, but the students did it. We had the strongest delegation ever.”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 23rd, 2002 at 7:58 am and is filed under 2002 Spring.