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Letter from the Co-Presidents
September 10, 2003
Dear Delegates and Faculty Advisors:
It is with great enthusiasm that we send you this year's faculty workbook and registration guide. Whether this is your first time with Harvard Model Congress or you've been coming for years, we are confident that you will find this year our most exciting year yet. We're building on those things that have always made our Boston and San Francisco conferences great and adding new elements that we think will further enrich the experience.
Harvard Model Congress is now in its nineteenth year, and though we remain focused on our fundamental mission of inspiring high school students to participate in civic life by creating a dynamic environment where they can learn from one another and through their interactions with American democracy, our size and scope have changed tremendously. Today, we serve nearly two thousand students on both coasts with a volunteer staff of more than one hundred and fifty Harvard students, running conferences in Boston and San Francisco as well as the Harvard Political Education Program, a tutoring program that brings our hands-on educational model into a dozen local Boston and Cambridge schools every week.
With this mission in mind, we endeavor each year to make our conferences even better than the conferences before, and this year is no exception. Over the past few years we have encouraged delegates to contact their chairs with questions they might have in the months before the conference. This year, we hope to utilize exciting new technologies to further improve the preconference experience, ensuring that the educational process extends far beyond the four days of the conference. We hope that the revamped website we will be unveiling this fall will help us meet that goal by providing delegates access to discussion forums, links to relevant news, resources for research, and an online briefing book.
In addition, we hope to continue to improve integration between our three programs with the reintroduction of the Elections committee as a permanent program. Through it, delegates will get a sense of the rigors of the campaign trail and the challenges of electoral politics as they strive to secure the highest office in the land. By interacting with both congressional committees and a host of our special programs, these candidates will forge connections across the landscape of the entire conference that will impact every delegate. With its institution this year, we are confident that we are adding the final piece of American civic life to a conference that is the most complete and comprehensive collegiate government simulation in the nation.
Throughout its nineteen years, Harvard Model Congress has remained dedicated to the same fundamental mission. We aim to teach our delegates the processes of American government and to introduce them to some of the policy dilemmas affecting our republic. As much as we aim to educate these students, we also seek to inspire them. By putting them in the shoe
In the span of four memorable days, your students will immerse themselves in a dynamic dialogue about public policy that will transcend the specific topics discussed in their briefings, one that will engage them to think about what our values as a nation should be and how those values ought to be implemented as policy by the institutions of government. More importantly, they will learn that participation, whether it takes the form of a letter to a congressman, a personal commitment to read the newspaper every day, the willingness to serve on a jury, or the simple act of casting a vote is the single greatest defense against indifference and injustice, and that it is the pursuit not of a weekend but of a lifetime. In raising their voices over the course of this conference, they will be taking their place in the timeless struggle of all democracies to constantly reinvigorate themselves through discussion and debate, and, in doing so, ensure the future vitality of our own.
These goals have had us working on HMC 2004 since last spring and through the summer, and we can hardly wait to see that work come to fruition. We very much look forward to working with you throughout the fall and meeting with you at the conference in February. Welcome to Harvard Model Congress 2004.
Yours truly,
David Arrojo
Co-PresidentMatthew Ocheltree
Co-President