The simulation is a consortium of colleges and universities, most of them in the mid-Atlantic states, with a few further afield. Membership has grown and contracted over thirty years as faculty have arrived, retired and moved, which is the ordinary life of a thing held together by people rather than by an institution.
The institutions
Current participants
- American University
- Elizabethtown College
- James Madison University
- John Carroll University
- Susquehanna University
- University of Scranton
- West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Institutions that have taken part over the years
- Gettysburg College
- Millersville University
- York College of Pennsylvania
- McDaniel College
- University of Lynchburg, which took part as Lynchburg College
- Liberty University
- Indiana University of Pennsylvania
- Lebanon Valley College
- Bloomsburg University, since merged into Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania
The first three institutions to bring students, in December 1993, were Gettysburg, Millersville and Susquehanna.
Responsibility rotates. The member institutions take turns staffing the Commission on a published schedule that runs years ahead, and hosting duties move around the membership in the same way, so no one campus owns the simulation.
How big it is
The published account of the simulation describes roughly fifteen institutions and about 150 undergraduates at a three-day event each November. It has been larger: by 2010 the consortium counted fifteen member institutions and close to 200 students a year.
A delegation runs from about six students to about twenty, averaging around a dozen. A delegation of that size will hold a head of government, two or three ministers sitting in different councils, often a commissioner, and several members of the European Parliament. Because the consortium has fewer institutions than the Union has member states, about half the Union is represented in any given year.
Cumulatively, more than three thousand students have taken part since 1993.
What a student does beforehand
Preparation is run by each institution in its own course, so the requirements differ, but the shape is consistent. A student is expected to arrive knowing two things in depth: the country, meaning its political system, its economy, its relations with its neighbors and what it wants out of the Union, and the person, meaning the office its holder occupies, the powers that office actually carries, and that individual’s own record and political constraints.
Most delegations write a country profile and a study of the individual they will play, prepare a short speech to deliver in their body, and write something afterward reflecting on what happened. Several institutions run the preparation as a full semester course and treat the simulation as its culminating exercise.
Bringing a delegation
New institutions have joined throughout the simulation’s history, and the consortium has historically waived the first year’s membership fee for a new member precisely to lower that barrier. The practical questions a prospective faculty advisor asks, what it costs per student, how a delegation is funded, how early the money has to be requested and what the embassy visits involve, are set out at length in the published chapter on the costs and benefits of running this simulation, which is listed on the Research page.
Ask about joining
If you teach at an institution that might bring a delegation, or you would simply like to know more about how the simulation works, write to us here and someone from a member institution will reply. Tell us roughly how many students you might bring and whether you would run it inside a course; that is usually enough to give you a useful answer.
Current fees, dates and registration are set annually by the member institutions and are not published here. An inquiry sent through this form is passed to a member institution; it does not register a delegation.
