Harvard Model Congress Attracts 700 to Boston

About 700 high school students descended on the Copley Marriot last weekend for a simulation of the U.S. Congress, kept busy by a team of 70 Harvard students who had them scuttling to committee meetings, attending press conferences, listening to speeches, and dealing with crises to learn how our system works.

Positions in the Congress, the judiciary, the press corps, and the executive branch were assigned by the individual high schools.

Each student was assigned an actual Congressman's name, constituency, and party affiliation, and was expected to know how their person would act in various situations. They also wrote bills, wrangled about them in committee, and voted them up or down in mock Senate and House of Representatives sessions.

The program also included a model judiciary which consisted of about 54 students playing attorneys and judges. After four preliminary trials, those who were judged by the Harvard staff as well as their peers to be the best, were elected into the Supreme Court. Cases tried included a sodomy case and a search and seizure case involving a student's locker.

Twenty students participated on the press corps where they were divided evenly among two rival newspapers, the HMC Post and the HMC Today. The reporters covered committee meetings, attended press conferences, and tried to infiltrate the model National Security Council, because it was the only committee that held closed door meetings. They poked Walkman headphones under the door and dug NSC notes out of waste-baskets. The newspapers were laser printed at Harvard and distributed every morning and evening.

At 7:00 a.m. Saturday, Harvard students manufactured a crisis in which the president of Panama was assasinated, a riot broke out at the U.S. embassy, and the CIA was found to be involved with drug smuggling. Students on the NSC were woken up at 6:30 a.m. and summoned downstairs to deal with the situation. As the day progressed, the Harvard crisis-makers were busy manufacturing bits of information which they alternately passed on to the different groups in the NSC--the White House staff, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the State Department--who generally kept the information to themselves.

"It went very, very well," said Theo Lubke '89, president of the Model Congress. He noted that the students were well researched and the Harvard staff concerned themselves with making sure that the students both learned a lot and had fun.