We called it the “darkling plain”, or “3B” in the friendly phrase of the  elevator operator  as we plunged to the almost Julius Verne centre of the earth , the “third basement “ below United Nations headquarters, shorn of all light that was not fluorescent, soft table or vivid imagination. It was this last that led La Neice Collins and Omar Hernández of our team to devise the idea of UNAI SDG Hubs two  years ago, even as our office spaces above ground were being refashioned to be environmentally secure and engineeringly sound.

In the 24 months since , the hubs have proven both their mettle and the wisdom of their choice; just today, Nagaoka University of Technology convened it’s STI-Gigaku conference with a focus on the SDGs, bringing four of the hubs together, even as it plans a larger one in December. The University, and its irrepressible and creative focal point Mami Katsumi, are also responsible for the evocative poster linked to this article, testament to the power of education in that city which once sold a hundred sacks of rice to finance a new school.

Our northernmost hub, the North Star for the creative harnessing of our oceans, was featured in a surging article last week where Sverre Ole Dronen looked back on the University of Bergen’s two years as our hub for SDG14, on life below water, so vital to life above it.  And the United Nations flagship journal, UN Chronicle, and its restless and innovative editor, John Sebesta, have brought hubs directly into the global conversation with articles by them as “responses” to the policy briefs  issued regularly by the United Nations Secretary-General framing issues of international concern in the context of the pandemic.

Just this week, Dr Lamina Mohsen of our hub on global health responded to the Secretary-General’s policy brief on COVID-19 and the need for action on mental health. Her line about frontline workers needing to be aware of their physical and mental health limitations would resonate with us all.

A reflective essay by Dr Elizabeth Mkandawire of our SDG hub on “zero hunger”, the University of Pretoria, responded to the Secretary-General’s brief on the impact of the pandemic on food security and nutrition, with its sharp academic focus on how research networks can prove themselves down to earth.

Juan Romo, Rector of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), hub for SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities, in an article  responding to the policy brief  on “COVID-19 in an Urban World” speaks of the need for “an interdisciplinary approach that combines technical, legal, economic and social perspectives” in courses related to town planning.

A compelling argument to protect financing for higher education is made by Vice Chancellor Dawn Freshwater of the University of Auckland, hub for SDG 4 on quality education, in response to the policy brief on education during COVID-19 and beyond.

Innovations by our hubs, even if necessarily briefly, are captured in the global landscape Mami-san has shared, and they continue exploration at this traumatic time. Keeping online students at the same level as those “offline”, for instance , was a worry for Kristu Jayanti College in India , hub for SDG 1 on poverty, which it addressed by giving students access to lessons  a day in advance allowing them, as Principal Reverend  Augustine George says, to go through the material and clarify any  doubts as the teacher takes the class.

And the Energy Policy and Development Centre of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, our hub for SDG 7 on sustainable energy, has initiated SDG 7 “Global Society” open to institutions that have a finite year long programme leading to actual CO2 emission reductions.

 I thought of that this Tuesday, when I “met” Daniel Wubah, the ebulliently effective President of Millersville University in the United States, at the annual meeting of AASCU, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Daniel shared with me how his university had “the rare chance to construct an entirely new building, funded in part through philanthropic giving, giving  opportunity to not only demonstrate sustainable principles through the building’s form and function but to also contribute to sustainable outcomes in the surrounding community. Using the utility cost savings associated with zero energy design to raise awareness of the SDGs and directly impact the community in SDG goal areas maximized the gift’s investment value.”

As higher education institutions (HEIs) “identify ways to leverage successes to develop success platforms, the SDGs provide a galvanizing framework that helps to establish a university-community responsibility paradigm – the connective tissue that aligns elements of a system around shared purpose. Building on a long history of community engagement, HEIs must play a central role in raising awareness of the SDGs not only through coursework, but through partnerships and projects that directly increase community prosperity and through that prosperity, university vitality. Zero energy buildings and other forms of regenerative design offer a new instrument around which to develop these partnerships and projects – transforming university buildings from spaces that not only benefit society through learning, but through investment and engagement built around the building’s performance.”

That “not only” spurred another “not only” in mind, a reversal perhaps or, like a building annex, an extension. That in their work individually on specific SDGs, and collectively on their essential whole, our hubs not only promote an integral scholarship response, but transform their own spaces , allowing their achievements on campus, as Daniel and Millersville have done, to offer worldwide example, to adapt the popular phrase, to  think local and act global.

The theme of the AASCU conference this year was a quotation from the American civil rights leader John Lewis, whom we lost some months ago, “if not us, then who? If not now, then when?” Questions sadly not rhetorical, demanding articulation and answer, whether on human rights or the sustained development upon which so many of them depend. To return to the “darkling plain” with which we began, the parentage of that reference in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”,

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The alarms of struggle and flight continue to be confusing, and at times coordinated. And, as Antonio Guterres’s call for a global ceasefire suggests, there must be an ignorance, innocent or deliberate, in the persistence of clashes between armies at a time where it can only be solidarity that matters, the solidarity of institutions, as our hubs attest, the solidarity of ideas, the solidarity of common ethical purpose, the solidarity of the us and the they, the now and the then.

Ramu Damodaran
Chief, United Nations Academic Impact