Diplomatic Training

When social studies teacher Diane Haleas
re-established the Model United Nations club at Chicago’s Saint Ignatius College Prep (SICP) in 1999, she could not have imagined how many lives it would touch, or how much success it
would enjoy through the decades.

This year, the club, known as SIMUN—an acronym for Saint Ignatius Model United Nations—celebrated its 25th anniversary at the same time the Model United Nations club at Chicago’s Cristo Rey Jesuit high school celebrated its one-year anniversary. That club was founded by a first-year English teacher at Cristo Rey named Peter Haleas (SICP ’10), a former member of SIMUN and Diane’s son.

“It’s a full circle moment,” Peter Haleas says.

Soon after founding the club at Cristo Rey, Peter took 12 seniors to SIMUN XXIII, the latest of an annual conference at SICP where more than 1,000 students engage in UN-style meetings. They break into committees and debate topics that range from current events to key moments in history. A favorite topic is the Cuban Missile Crisis, where one committee plays the Soviet cabinet and another plays the Kennedy cabinet.

While students role-play the actual characters of the time, they are not bound to arrive at the historical outcomes. This makes for unpredictable debates, followed by drafting of position papers, negotiation and revision of those papers, and presentations aimed at swaying decision-making.

“I was always Russia,” says Jiore Craig (SICP ’09), a former SIMUN secretary general. She says the experience she gained through SIMUN—assuming the mindset of a foreign power—was fortuitous preparation for the international relations work she has done since, specifically studying Russian disinformation in United States elections.

She is now a resident senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has offices in London, Berlin and Washington, D.C. “I really felt I belonged in those rooms,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of imposter syndrome, and part of that is the practice and exposure I got in Model UN. It’s not very predictable. There’s an ad hoc nature to it, and that’s like life.”

Adam Akan was SIMUN’s secretary general in 2022, when the club won its first national championship at Georgetown University. He was so inspired by his high school experience, he went on to start a Model UN club at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a rising senior.

“To this day, I have never seen a group of 30 people so uniformly driven by one goal,” says Akan (SICP ’22) of his SIMUN experience.

The Saint Ignatius Model UN club dates back to the 1970s but was put on hold for several years until two SICP students, inspired by the summer program they attended at Georgetown University, requested its return in the 1990s.

Today, Diane Haleas takes 25 to 40 of SIMUN’s more than 100 members—or “delegates” in club lingo—to conferences around the country and across the globe.

“Ms. Haleas’ passion for the SIMUN family and teaching inspires me every day to pursue what I love,” says Margaret Marcus (SICP ’26), who will serve as SIMUN’s secretary general next year.

In February, SIMUN won its second national championship at Georgetown, where 175 high schools from more than 30 countries came together in friendly competition. The club has also won more than 60 Best Large Delegation Awards. As they strive for such achievements, SICP campus minister and spiritual advisor to the club, Fr. Patrick Mugisho, SJ, helps students keep things in perspective.

“He is a gift from God,” says Diane Haleas.

Father Mugisho came on board shortly before SIMUN won its first championship. In the Midnight Mass tradition he initiated, students gather in the evening at their hotel for a Eucharistic celebration.

“We take time to pause, reflect and share what we’re feeling, how we see things—to just build those bonds of the family, of the group, that are made not only to learn how to win competitions but to learn how to lose and stay together,” Fr. Mugisho says. “It’s the idea of the wholeness of a Jesuit education.”

The message has resonated with delegate Hannah Kopec (SICP ’25). “My team is my rock, and that rock is made through faith and practicing our faith together,” she says.

After taking his Cristo Rey Model UN club to his mother’s SIMUN XXIII conference, Peter Haleas took the team to area conferences at three other nearby schools: the University of Chicago Laboratory School, Francis W. Parker School and Lyons Township High School.

“The Chicago Model UN subculture is the strongest in the country,” he says, acknowledging that SIMUN is the gold standard. “What my mom has built at Saint Ignatius is incredible. There’s really nothing like it.”

To close out its inaugural year, the Cristo Rey club hosted an in-house conference to give non-member students an opportunity to try Model UN themselves.

“It was a smash,” Peter Haleas says. “When students do Model UN, they immediately see how it will open the doorway to a lot of the skills they want in terms of self-confidence, leadership and understanding the global community.”

The Cristo Rey club draws inspiration from the Ignatian ethos Diane Haleas has cultivated in SIMUN for years.

“With Model UN, we’re building the skills of the self, but we’re building in what I hope is a selfless manner,” Peter Haleas says. “We’re building those skills to be valuable to the greater world community and to other people.”