The following is a guest post by Sir John Daniel, the chief executive of the Commonwealth of Learning, in Vancouver, and a former assistant director-general for education with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
————————————————————————
On September 12, 2002, speaking at the United Nations to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that the United States would rejoin Unesco. The United States had quit Unesco in 1984 to protest the restrictions on press freedom inherent in the controversial New World Information and Communication Order. That issue, however, had disappeared with the Berlin Wall and a return to the cultural and educational organization was overdue. I was then serving as Unesco’s assistant director-general for education and we were delighted.
Today I am dismayed that the United States has now stopped its financial contributions to Unesco again—and believe it could hamper American universities’ ability to interact with their counterparts overseas. U.S. lawmakers are angered with the Unesco vote to admit Palestine, and unless there is a change of heart in Washington, the United States will have to withdraw fully from Unesco after a two-year grace period.
Both the United States and Unesco lose by this second divorce. It again breaks the silver thread that links the founding ideals of the United States with those of the United Nations. Just as Eleanor Roosevelt helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so the American poet and Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, contributed the most lapidary sentence to Unesco’s constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”
Americans have continued to play important roles in Unesco affairs, not least in higher education. In recent years Philip Altbach, a professor at Boston College, led the research theme at Unesco’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, and Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, chairs the Unesco Portal on Recognized Higher Education Institutions. This portal is an excellent example of a collective global response, through Unesco, to the worldwide menace of degree and accreditation mills that no country can deal with alone. Although the end of U.S. funds to Unesco does not preclude the involvement of distinguished American scholars in its work, it inevitably saps their moral authority.
Unesco is an effective network for promoting American approaches to higher education because developing countries give more credence to ideas they encounter through Unesco than in bilateral discussions. A major address by Jill Biden, an educator and the wife of the U.S. vice president, at the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, for example, gave the American community-college model greater international prominence. In addition, Unesco’s University Twinning and Networking and Chairs programs facilitate partnerships between American and foreign universities that are free of any tinge of neo-imperialism. There would be no formal ban on American universities from participating in these programs if their country officially left Unesco, but Unesco might well be less interested in accepting bids from the United States.
It is healthy for the United States to fight its corner in multilateral discussions rather than retreat into American exceptionalism. In 2005, for example, the United States at first considered that the preparation of the Unesco/OECD Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Cross-Border Higher Education was unwarranted interference in its affairs. However, by taking an active role in the discussions, it ensured that these guidelines would be voluntary and non-binding, while nevertheless contributing to a framework for quality assurance that has had a beneficial impact in numerous countries–with indirect benefits for American institutions.
More recently, in debating the fundamental principles underpinning higher-education systems in the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education communiqué, American advocacy contributed to a statement that upheld higher education as a public good without trying to define the corporate structures appropriate for advancing that good.
I am now leading a joint project of the Commonwealth of Learning and Unesco, in part financed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, to foster governmental support for Open Educational Resources internationally. This project will contribute to wider global adoption of open resources and, in particular, of Creative Commons licenses–an American innovation. The rest of world can benefit from observing, through these international discussions, the vigorous tug of war that is going on in the United States between publishing interests and proponents of open access.
The first American withdrawal from Unesco in 1984 took place in a different world. Economic and cultural power is now more dispersed and the pace of change has increased, notably in higher education, where the United States is a powerhouse of innovation. It would be tragic for the country to be absent from key discussions of the new dynamics of the global knowledge society, some of which will take place at Unesco. As soft power grows in importance, Unesco, for all its frustrating inertia, remains a vital forum for most of the world’s states.
