Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “movement of minds”; a movement set in motion eleven years ago when his predecessor , Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, announced the decision to create the United Nations Academic Impact at the 2009 convocation ceremony of Fairleigh Dickinson University in the United States with the hope that the initiative would “build stronger ties with institutions of higher learning to benefit from your ideas and scholarship.”
How much the United Nations is strengthened by that benefit was reflected again just this week when Secretary-General Guterres launched a new UN Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery, encouraging targeted research for data-driven responses that focus particularly on the needs of people who are at risk of being relegated further and further behind, economically, socially and, yes, humanly, during the pandemic and seeking to support countries recover better from COVID-19 so that they can resume their primary focus on the Sustainable Development Goals. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research and several universities and think tanks from the global South and North, as well as United Nations offices worldwide, contributed to the preparation of this report – a collaborative venture between “two UNs”.
I use that term in the context of a remarkable article that came out in the journal “Global Governance” around the time of Secretary-General Ban’s convocation address in 2009, an article titled “The Third UN” and authored by Richard Jolly, Louis Emerij and my longtime friend and mentor, Professor Tom Weiss of the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, a UN that comprised “NGOs, academics, consultants, experts, independent commissions, and other groups of individuals who routinely engage with the First UN (Member States) and the Second UN (UN staff) and thereby influence UN thinking, policies, priorities, and actions.”
Had the article been written a few years later, after UNAI was established and in gear, I wonder if the idea of a “fourth UN” might have emerged , of academics and experts, whose engagement with the first two UNs was until then far from routine. The “third” UN, primarily of NGOs and civil society, would have a vital and necessary advocacy role which the United Nations Charter foresaw in its specific provision for consultation with them. Academic and research institutions, or individuals, on the other hand are incubators of ideas and seekers of solutions, proving in their work, as we have always held in UNAI, that there is no discipline of study which is beyond relevance to the United Nations. We recognized the considerable academic contribution to the UN since 1945 was largely seen in “immediate “disciplines, like law and international relations, whose spontaneity made their engagement with the Organization and system a matter of ready routine. What we sought to do was built upon this robust base and encourage the investment of scholarship and research in areas that could have a durable, if not always immediately self-evident, UN dimension.
Also, in 2009, as we were finalizing UNAI, another distinguished scholar on the United Nations, Roger A. Coate, spoke of the “complex interdependent and holistic organic world in which the UN operates.” That implied, by extension, response and support to the UN must itself be holistic and interdependent, allowing the wisdom of very precise specialisations to contribute to the easing of that complexity. We have seen in the ten years of UNAI that science , not diplomacy or politics, is the principal source of clarity and conviction on climate change and, indeed , the Sustainable Development Goals whose subsequent definition had so many similarities to the principles of UNAI and that science too would be the principal source for their realization and resolution, although the ability to globally effect them would necessarily be diplomatic and political.
The “fourth” UN’s independent scholarship can lead to an engagement between the institution, the Organization and, ultimately, to global and national society. The “Third” UN offers excellent contributions specifically designed for a United Nations purpose; the “Academic Impact” seeks to effect change and raise the individual voice to a collective position of inquiry, exploration and creative solutions based on research that does not suggest such specificity. Its framework allows institutions to work with the UN and with each other to aggregate a still greater impact in supporting universally accepted principles, including those in the areas of human rights, sustainability, economic development and conflict resolution.
In designing the Academic Impact, we were asked to foresee specific possible areas where such “work with the UN” could be possible. We did so. Some connections were linear and possibly obvious, others more tenuous. But, in looking back, it’s striking to note how prescient those possibilities were, not because we were clairvoyant but because they were so self-evident. Schools of medicine, for instance, we suggested could have bearing on our work in healthcare; those in architecture can yield innovative models for swift, economical housing in the wake of natural disasters. Research on conservation in a faculty of arts can offer the means to preserve the creative work of indigenous communities. A campus that is able to efficiently and economically move to non-conventional energy sources for its power needs can offer a replicable model for other universities and indeed other complexes. An institution that grants credits for student involvement in specific developmental or inter-cultural activities offers a similar example. Beyond their immediate philosophical as much as substantive connection to United Nations objectives, such action could include inputs into policy formulation or the sharing of the specific experience with other institutions and, indeed, with Member States.
It was as I was walking by Bryant Park, a few avenues west of United Nations Headquarters in New York that the sight of its landmark building bathed in teal blue the evening before our anniversary brought to mind both the universality and the intimacy of academic reach. The gentle colour was to celebrate the launch of the Global Strategy to Accelerate the Elimination of Cervical Cancer, whose successful implementation could reduce more than 40% of new cases of the illness and 5 million related deaths by 2050. And I thought of a study, published last month , under the auspices of one of our founding members in 2010, the Vienna Medical University, which focused on the precise “staging” essential to the treatment of cervical cancer which is ultimately dependent on surgery or radio-chemotherapy and the choice between them determined primarily by the stage of disease. Intellectual social responsibility.
And then I thought of another founding member, Ardhi University in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, whose Vice Chancellor, Dr Idrissa B. Mshoro, had written in the issue of the UN Chronicle published just before our launch how, in his country, “only 29 per cent of students were taking science and technology courses, probably due to the small catchment pool at lower levels. While this is so, sustainable and broad-based growth requires strengthening of the link between agriculture and industry. Agriculture needs to be modernized for increased productivity and profitability; small and medium enterprises, promoted, with particular emphasis on agro-processing, technology innovation, and upgrading the use of technologies for value addition; and all, with no or minimum negative impact on the environment.” I thought of the many traditional disciplines that vision comprehended, the necessary and unexpected integrations they demanded, the dots that needed to be connected.
Connecting dots was what I saw in the cover of that issue of the Chronicle, pictured above, created by the United Nations chief graphic designer, Ziad Al-Kadri, and his consistently creative team. Ziad was horrified by my interpretation, he had intended it to represent searching for stars. In the end, both explanations were plausible, the pragmatic and the poetic, each infusing and never conflicting with the other. Much like the possibilities of the Academic Impact itself.
Reaching home, the darkness of the evening mellowing into midnight and on the edge of the day that was to be our tenth anniversary, I began reading a book I had acquired , “A Promised Land”, the memoir of President Barack Obama. As I came upon his recollection of his time in Columbia University, I paused, much as I had at Bryant Park, and reflected, much as I had there.
“Whatever I was incubating during those hours spent alone,” Barack Obama writes, “whatever vision for a better world I’d let flourish in the hothouse of my youthful mind, it could hardly withstand even a simple conversational road test. In the gray light of a Manhattan winter and against the overarching cynicism of the times, my ideas, spoken aloud in class or over coffee with friends, came off as fanciful and far-fetched. And I knew it. In fact, it’s one of the things that may have saved me from becoming a full-blown crank before I reached the age of twenty-two; at some basic level I understood the absurdity of my vision, how wide the gap was between my grand ambitions and anything I was actually doing in my life.”
Fortunately, the audacity of his ideas proved to be one of hope, the fanciful within grasp, the far-fetched within reach. And the next morning, as I joined virtually the 1438 Millennium Fellows on eighty campuses worldwide , I thought how each one of them battled the “overarching cynicism of the times” and allowed their minds to set them free. And how that is what the logic of the Academic Impact is, prompting the question that Secretary-General Ban asked: “why did we not think of it earlier?”
Ramu Damodaran
Chief, United Nations Academic Impact