“C’mere now, what’s this all about? It seems real fancy.” the guy serving the identical platter of sandwiches, pastries and tea for the third day in a row asks me. At this stage, I’m still not entirely sure how to answer his question. I’m at the Tomorrow’s Leaders Conference organised by The Elie Wiesel Foundation, hosted by Trinity College for forty Trinity students only. “Are you actually at a conference?” my parents question me. There’s nothing about this conference on the internet, there’s nothing on the Trinity website, there’s nothing on the foundation’s website. You’d be hard pressed to find anything on campus indicating its presence, aside from a single non-descript board in the Arts Block with “Tomorrow’s Leaders Registration Desk this way” written on it. For a conference which aims to teach us to question norms and authority, it’s certainly testing us before we even start.

The founder of this group, Prof. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and a man asked several times by Benjamin Netanyahu to become the President of Israel, is certainly a remarkable human being. Spoken about by all the staff and guest speakers in hushed reverential tones, with comparison to Nelson Mandela aplenty, this tiny eighty-six year old man and his wife Marion plunge the room into silence the moment they walk in with President Michael D. Higgins to open the conference. One guest speaker told one of the masterclass sessions that he was convinced it was Elie Wiesel’s conversation with Bill Clinton that made him decide to intervene in the Balkans. The Wiesels have a lot of friends in high places, our guest speakers who conduct the small group masterclasses that form the bulk of the conference include no less than five Nobel Prize winners, Sir Richard Roberts, Dudley Herschbach, Sheldon Glashow, Peter Agre and Prof. Wiesel himself. Throw in three legends of American broadcasting, Ted Koppel, Jeff Greenfield, Marvin Kalb and previous winners of the foundation’s ethics essay prize and you’ve got an eclectic group of people to learn from. Various selfies posted by the foundation’s Facebook page in recent weeks show they’re also mates with Bono, Tom Hanks and George Clooney. Perhaps the lack of publicity is to keep the gathering of many influential people hush-hush for security reasons, at the same time, the silence is deafening, and suspicious.

There’s no doubt that this conference was thought-provoking, each day of the conference had a theme of issues around which we were given masterclasses, panel discussions and guest talks. These ranged from media and technology, women’s issues, the environment and conflict resolution. It’s incredibly difficult not to be moved by Magogodi Makhene’s account of being tear-gassed in her

home of Soweto as a child and her discussion of South African identity in her essay. Sarah Ransohoff’s essay which provides analysis of the links between slavery and modern-day oil markets is a particularly compelling highlight for myself which leads to many heated discussions throughout the groups. During the discussions about women’s issues, many of us were perplexed that Georgene Herschbach, who was attending as “wife of a guest speaker” was not the keynote speaker for this day, she was an Associate Dean of Harvard College and was responsible for leading the committee on diversity in the college’s admissions process and provided us with an extremely unique and fascinating insight in overcoming the notorious systemic and institutional challenges in university admissions.

Our keynote speaker for women’s day is Chelsea Clinton, who speaks fluently about levels of female engagement in business and politics, dropout rates of females in STEM subjects in middle school and her parents’ initiative for promoting female participation. Questions range from the strangely personal, such as Ted Koppel’s opening gambit of asking why she didn’t adopt her husband’s surname to which she replied “Honestly Ted, I don’t know you well enough to answer that question.”, or how she was planning to share parenting work with her husband. Questions of a more political nature include her views on corporate America engaging with women’s issues with regard to the major supporters of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Initiative, such as Citibank and Nestle, which have been heavily criticised in the past for their treatment of female workers. On this issue, Clinton is markedly vague, speaking in a broad sense about the need for government mandates on improving working conditions for women. Clinton doesn’t give much time to answering a question about her own ambitions to run for US President, stating that she has different priorities at the moment. The session ends with a group photo in the Exam Hall and Clinton moves on swiftly to speak in UCD.

The conference finishes with a gala dinner in the Mansion House, with entertainment from the renowned American violinist Sirena Huang, opera singer Terry Cook and poem reading from the Irish actor Brian Merriman. During dinner, I’m trying to make a ticker in my head of how much this conference is costing the foundation, which certainly isn’t short of cash in any case. Their HQ is on Madison Avenue in New York, their guests are staying in The Merrion, they have private coaches to save their guests the marathon trek from The Merrion to Trinity, they’ve booked the Mansion House for dinner and flown over entertainment from the USA for us. We haven’t paid a cent for any

of this, similar conferences such as One Young World cost in the region of €3,000 per person to attend. It’s still not clear to us why this foundation picked Ireland of all countries, Dublin of all cities and Trinity of all colleges to host this conference.

So was it all worth it in the end? Could all that money have been better spent giving further funding to the foundation’s academies for Ethiopian child refugees in Israel? I’m unsure of the answer, I know that I and many of my colleagues left this conference incredibly inspired to become more engaged in issues of ethics and social justice, I also know that some attendees are planning to form our own break-off group to focus on tackling these issues together. I’d like to be able to go back to the guy who was serving us food and tell him that we’re learning how to make a difference and take action, I hope many of us will, I’m just feeling a bit more sceptical than I should. Prof. Wiesel said at the opening session “None of us are running for office, there is no agenda here, no ideology.”. For a group that chats with heads of states regularly and has its fair share of influence and money, I’m not sure how easy it is to digest that sentence. I leave the conference inspired and optimistic for the future, but with question marks reluctant to leave the back of my head.