A report from Paris

Academe, Jul/Aug 1999 by Burgan, Mary A

Economics trumped education at the UNESCO conference on higher education in the twenty-first century. Few professors were invited.

THE FIRST ENIGMA OF THE HEADquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris is which entrance to choose. When AAUP president Jim Richardson and I arrived to register for the conference "Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century," we had to circle and backtrack to discern the lay of the sprawling complex that lies a couple of metro stops from the Eiffel Tower. We were awed by the building itself, a minor Parisian landmark. Its lineage is famousarchitecture by leaders of modernism in the mid-fifties (Marcel Breuer, Pier Nervi, Bernard Zehrfuss) and sculptures by the likes of Calder and Moore. But on the close inspection of trying to discover the right door, we found ourselves negotiating a trail of uneven sidewalks leading to locked gates that guarded straggled plantings. The poured concrete of pillared walls showed the grime of fifties urban modernism gone dead, and the gleam of glass and aluminum no longer glamorized the balconies that hived rows of monotonous offices. Inside, there was muted wood paneling, stark concrete and stone, and dim lighting that barely lit murals by famous artists like Picasso, Miro, and Tamayo. Actually, UNESCO may possess one of the ugliest Picassos in captivity.

Despite the stolidity of the UNESCO complex, we discovered an air of improvisation about the conference itself. We were greeted by many kind people, but no one quite knew where we should go for which forms. We got ourselves registered, but only after Jim Richardson exerted the determined charm of his west-Texas upbringing to wrest the required documents from a confused clerk. The environment was, in short, the very embodiment of bureaucracy. And so was the meeting itself.

Among the sheaves of paper we received were two documents, long-ago drafted and essentially set in stone-despite the fact that drafts were carefully dated to indicate their provisional status. These declarations, to be adopted at the end of the five-day meeting, had very high-flying titles, all millennial in form: one was called "Framework for Priority Action for Change and Development of Higher Education," and the other was "World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-first Century: Vision and Action." These seemed to have been drawn from earlier discussions held in regional sectors; Pat Shaw, director of the AAUP's Department of Organizing and Services, attended one such session last summer in Toronto. His account of the discussions was predictive of the rhetorical and substantial thrust of the main documents in Paris. They carried the urgency of nineties' pronouncements on higher education, which celebrate higher education as the universal solvent for the global economy. Conceived of as a commodity to be dispersed and controlled by corporations and the state, the nature of the process itself-the community in which it takes place, the inevitable complexities of such an essential human interchange as that involved in learning-inevitably elude the official proclamations. What is most troubling is that the essence of what we faculty do should so easily be ignored as the special pleadings of entrenched members of colleges and universities.

Perhaps the dullness of the UNESCO scene came from the weather-Paris in early October can be very dark, and in this season there was much drizzle. More likely, however, the grimness came from the omnipresence of the dismal science, permeating the intellectual atmosphere. There was an obsessive preoccupation with economic competition-its overwhelming threats and its always vague promises. The World Bank loomed, both as sponsor and monitor. So did the International Monetary Fund. There was a hush at one session when a high official from one of these bodies presented. The heavy motif in all aspects of the conference was the power of competition to direct and foster the world economy. That power, left to its own devices, would be the salvation for class rifts, North-South hemispheric imbalances in development, the persistence of poverty, and, possibly, gender inequality. As a corollary, accountability has become a fixation. Everyone was exhorted to try harder to use technology, exert sterner oversight of "outcomes," and connect highereducation institutions ever more intimately with the demands of local societies. Students were imagined to be fixated on vocational education, and colleges and universities were told they must respond to that vision. One of the most egregiously circular pronouncements of faith in the entrepreneurial spirit was lodged in "article four" of the final draft of the conference's proclamation, the "World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-first Century: Vision and Action." There, in response to the call for "an increased awareness of [higher education's] vital importance for sociocultural and economic development," graduates were imagined to be trained to provide their own jobs: "Developing entrepreneurial skills and initiative must become major concerns of higher education, in order to facilitate employability of graduates who will increasingly be called upon to cease being job seekers and turn into job creators." (Emphasis in original.)