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Section: October 1998
Front
Page
Lead Story
They're talking on campus...
On the Road
ActionLine NEA
In the Know
From Capital to Campus
NEA Affilitates in Action
Higher Education News
Money Savvy
The Dialogue
Thriving in Academe
Speaking Out
World Higher Ed Conference
Two NEA higher education leaders will be on hand for the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education to be held in Paris on October 5 to 9
Roger Knutsen from Green River Community College in Washington, the president of the National Council for Higher Education, NEA's advocacy group for higher ed issues, was invited as a faculty observer. Virginia Ann Shadwick, a librarian at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association, is one of five delegates representing Education International, NEA's international affiliate and an official nongovernmental organization invited to the conference.
The unique conference has on its agenda "a far-reaching reform of higher education worldwide," notes its sponsor, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Organizers say the delegates---academic leaders from nearly 180 countries---will address how to expand access to higher education, improve how postsecondary institutions are run, and strengthen the ability of these institutions to meet the needs of the society.
In all, 2,000 delegates will attend the conference. In addition to national delegations of higher education leaders and government officials, there will be delegations from business, faculty, and student groups.
The United States, which dropped out of UNESCO in 1984, does not have an official delegation but is sending a 40-member delegation at the invitation of UNESCO. The U.S. delegation includes former NEA President Keith Geiger. The conference takes place at a time when government support for higher education is declining in most countries. So there promises to be a major debate over issues related to underrepresented groups and between those in favor of significant state support for higher education and those, including international lending agencies such as the World Bank, pressuring poorer countries to charge tuition.
Delegates will also debate how far universities should go in training students to meet the needs of business and industry.
The main conference document, the World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-first Century: Vision and Action (www.education.unesco.org), is slated to be adopted at the conference.
But passage is not assured because of those remaining differences on the role of state funding and the use of tuition to make up for the decline in state efforts.
The draft document states that "access to higher education should be based exclusively on individual merit" but avoids tackling issues such as how to define merit or provide access for disadvantaged students.
