IF YOU CALL UP Mather 311, where some of the people who make up the power structure of the International Relations Council and its Model United Nations subsidiaries live, you may get a recording that will tell you to leave a message when you hear the tone, because no one is home. The recording is the product of a machine called Phonemate that is listed in the inventory of official equipment of the Harvard National Model United Nations, and it is a little intimidating at first to unsuspecting callers.

The first time I talked to the Mather 311 Phonemate it took me by surprise and I didn't know what to say at the sound of the tone, so I hung up. I called back an hour later and a person answered. I asked to speak to Sam Wee, who was secretary-general of the Harvard National Model United Nations last year.

"Did you just call?" the person said. I said I had.

"And you hung up, without leaving a message?"

Yes.

"Don't you realize you have to leave a message?" the person said. "Sam Wee gets over one hundred phone calls every day, and he can't keep track of them unless they're on the recording."

SAM WEE IS from Wichita, Kansas, as is his roommate Don Nicholson, this year's secretary general of the Harvard National Model United Nations. In a suite adjoining Wee and Nicholson's, lives Clark Pellett, from Atlantic, Iowa, who was secretary-general of last year's Harvard Model United Nations along with Jarius DeWalt, who is from a small town in New York. Twice every year they and some other Harvard students run a mock United Nations conference for high school and college students from across the country, arranging and presiding over four days of conferences and social events that are intended to approximate the experience of United Nations delegates. It is a big job for them and an important one, for they have to supervise a chaotic stream of events, and carry on a noble tradition of model diplomacy that dates back to 1925, when the first Model League of Nations was held at Harvard.

But somewhere along the line a gear slipped, or something failed to connect. This year some of the people who run the Model United Nations are in trouble because in the course of running the conferences some distinctions, subtle but important ones, somehow became blurred for them, and although they were very busy and under a great deal of pressure, they did some things they shouldn't have done. The small-town kids running a big-time show spent more than $5000 in four days in December, during the high school Model U.N., on expenses for their Harvard undergraduate staff.

FROM WHAT CAN be pieced together, it went something like this: The conference began on December 12, a Thursday, at noon. That night the staff spent $560 for a dinner at Joseph's, a restaurant they listed in the conference program as "very expensive" and the "favorite of Proper Bostonians." They went out to lunch and dinner at restaurants on Friday and Saturday, spending $240 at the cheapest meal, and then ended the conference with a $46.3 lunch on Sunday. There was also an $800 liquor bill--the delegates being underage couldn't drink, but their faculty advisers and the Harvard students could--and several miscellaneous expenses, personal expenses and petty cash items. All the money came from delegate and delegation fees the high school students had paid to come to the conference. The purpose of the conference may have been, as the group's bylaws say. "To promote a greater understanding of the United States's role in world affairs," and "to operate exclusively for charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes," but the people who ran it seem to have gotten something more out of it as well.

A financial report on the conference that a three-member board of auditors prepared last month calls the expenditures "improper management of funds" and "a tendency to distribute benefits...by calling it a conference-related function," but people who work in the Model U.N.'s like to refer to them as "errors of judgment."

PERHAPS THE MODEL U.N. line on the whole affair is the most accurate. At the group's college conference last weekend, certainly, the kind of mentality that led to all the dinners and expenses seemed so closely tied to the mood of the whole conference that what happened appears almost inevitable. The conference is held at what Model U.N. brochures describe as "Boston's elegant Sheraton Hotel," in a succession of conference rooms with names like Exeter, Commonwealth, Hampton and Kent, in the kind of enclosed, unreal atmosphere that big hotels are so good at breeding. Muzak drifts through the halls; imitation classical urns are scattered discreetly in corners: hotel defectives wander around, checking things out. The leaders of the conference were, above all, smooth and in control. They were dressed in immaculate double-knit suits, and wore typed nametags with a bewildering assortment of bureaucratic titles: there were, for instance, six assistant under-secretaries-general, two assistant deputy secretaries-general, and five vice presidents, among other officials. You could tell the really important people because they had entourages, so that whenever they walked down the halls they carried two or three people in their wake.

It is the kind of atmosphere where the power and importance of it all, its big-time, don't-cut-any-corners quality, is over-whelming. Expensive dinners and high liquor bills seem as much a part of the conference as international diplomacy. So the line between proper and improper conference expense--as long as no one is pocketing any money, of course--is a fine one, if it exists at all. The expenses are just a part of the ambience of the conference, and probably never occurred to DeWalt or Pellett as being morally wrong.

If the various secretaries-general do not appreciate the fine distinctions as well as their auditors--a slicker, more worldly-wise group from New York and Chicago--it is more out of small-town innocence than corruption. Harvard is a confusing place where it is hard sometimes to get the strong ethical education that administrators are always saying the University should provide. It is easy to get things mixed up here in thinking of ethics, because Harvard's ambience is one of delicately inter-related bigtime-ness and education--just like the Model U.N.'s To someone coming here from a place very different in scope, ambitious and eager to find a niche, Harvard could impart the desire for big expense accounts almost as easily as the desire for knowledge. The people in Mather 311 staged a conference that seems to have been almost a mirror of what they saw in Harvard. They created a United Nations that really was a Harvard model.