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UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Paris, 5-8 July 2009

The UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education closed on 8 July 2009 with a call to governments to increase investment in higher education, encourage diversity and strengthen regional cooperation to serve societal needs.

Five leading organisations (see below), committed to upholding academic rights and assisting refugee scholars throughout the world, put forward a platform calling on the organisers and participants of the World Conference on Higher Education to ensure that higher education values had prominence in conference discussions and in any resulting plan of action.

The Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR), the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), the Scholars at Risk Network (SAR), the Institute of International Educations’ Scholars Rescue Fund (SRF), the Foundation for Refugee Students (UAF) and the West African Research Centre (WARC) called on the organisers and participants to seek:

1.) Further dissemination of the 1997 Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel and also further dissemination of information about existing mechanisms designed for ensuring such standards are put into place.

2.) More discussion and activities with regard to UNESCO’s complaint procedures relating to breaches of academic freedom and a review of the steps taken to involve organisations that represent higher education communities in activities aimed at promoting and defending their academic freedoms.

3.) Leadership from UNESCO, in the form of a directive or other broadly distributed statement and related activities, on the responsibility of the higher education sector to assist higher education professionals displaced by threats experienced in their own countries and a specific plan of action to deal with the grave threats and many thousands of refugee scholars from Iraq.

4.) Leadership from UNESCO in establishing an annual International Academic Freedom Day to highlight the importance of academic freedom, institutional autonomy and social responsibility not only for the education sector but for all members of society.

The collaboration insist that solutions to the challenges of higher education, including personal, targeted attacks against higher education professionals and institutions, require a deep commitment to international higher education values-including academic freedom; institutional autonomy; access; accountability and transparency; quality; social responsibility and respect for human rights.

The Executive Director of NEAR was invited as a guest speaker and talked at length about academic freedom in public and private partnership. The full text of his speech can be found here, as well as the joint platform and the World Conference on Higher Education Communiqué.

Joint Platform: http://www.nearinternational.org/documents/NEAR_Mailer.A4.AW.pdf

NEAR Speech: http://www.nearinternational.org/documents/WCHE_Speech_FINAL.pdf

Communiqué: http://www.unesco.org/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/ED/pdf/WCHE_2009/FINAL%20COMMUNIQUE%20WCHE%202009.pdf