Summary and Conclusion

APEID Conference on Higher Education and Sustainable Development
Bangkok, December, 2007

Closing Address
Victor Ordonez

Four days ago, at the City Hall in Oslo, a Nobel Prize was awarded to Al Gore. As expected, he once again voiced his inconvenient truth, “The world has a fever,” he said,” and unless we do something about it, the fever will become worse, and the planet will be critically ill.” Two days ago, right here in Bangkok, at the Raja Roy Singh lecture, we were warned by President Stephen Toope, UBC president, that the time for debate on sustainability is running out, and urgent action is needed. In the first plenary of the conference, Peter Taylor, using Thomas Paine, put it even more forcefully, and I quote, “I believe, absolutely, that if my own children and the generations beyond theirs are to experience an existence that is in harmony with all the world’s inhabitants then we need to act now…we need to do this in our own day, and not ask those who come after us to carry the burden we leave for them.”

Distinguished participants,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I have been asked to share with you my summary and my reflections on what has transpired before us the last three days. But before I do that, I thought I should once again sound the clarion call emphasizing the importance of our conference theme, the link between our work in universities and sustainable development; nothing could be more urgent, nothing could be more essential. I congratulate APEID and the organizers of this conference for bringing such a vital matter into sharp focus and for bringing together such a formidable gathering of experts, experience and collective wisdom from all over the university community of Asia.
There is another thing for which I would like to congratulate the conference organizers, and that is for the clarity and elegance of the conference structure itself. APEID seems to get better at these conferences every year. We had three days, with two plenary sessions and two concurrent sessions on each day. True, there was such a wealth of ideas and insights that is has become quite impossible for me to summarize or do justice to all of them: 21 main speakers and panelists in plenaries and some 162 presentations in the concurrent sessions, not including stimulating questions and discussions from more than 300 of you from the floor and in breakout sessions. IN any case the best summary you can find is in the program itself, which gives not only the schedule, but also the abstracts of most presentations, and the names of those who did the presentations, in case you want to follow up or pursue particular questions.
But aside from the opening and this closing session, the four plenary sessions were divided clearly into (1) Paradigms for development, (2) possibilities for development, (3) partnerships for development, and (4) permitting development. (I prefer to call this last session promoting or pursuing development). This gives me the four main points around which I would like to organize my ideas today.

First, paradigms for development. The word paradigm, that is, a revolutionary way of looking at something and then changing fundamentally the way we act accordingly, is one that has been dominant in my vocabulary the past several years. I am convinced that the world has changed so dramatically and quickly that we can no longer assume that what worked before works today. This is true not only with regard to universities, or to basic education, but to every modality of life, from the way we work and play, to the manner we acquire and transmit information, to the way resolve ethnic tensions, to the way we administer justice, to the way we govern states.
Sheldon Shaeffer reminded us last Wednesday that our conference title calls upon us, not just to reform or improve education, but to re-invent it. This is not just a play on words, but a call for a new paradigm.
But as we cast about for a new paradigm for higher education, we must first re-examine the old paradigm and test its continuing validity. We all know this paradigm, and many speakers have referred to universities as the bastions of knowledge, with its main functions of teaching, to disseminate that knowledge, research, to produce that knowledge, and service, to use that knowledge. Mr. Zhu of Tongi, Vice Chancellor Sharifa of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and President Kim of Handong University used it in their presentations yesterday. Only this morning Prof .Purwadi of Indonesia once again referred to it.
But the world has changed. Universities no longer have the monopoly, or even the dominant role in today’s knowledge society. The World Bank has affirmed what we all know, “knowledge itself is the most powerful driver of social and economic progress in the world today.” Because of that knowledge is everywhere. It is transmitted at speeds, quantities, and modalities unimaginable twenty or even ten years ago.
In the old days, the seeker of knowledge would go to the universities and its great libraries; now where doe he/she go? To Google, to Wikipedia. For specific information, one need not look up bibliographies or catalogues; one merely looks up the e-mail of the specific expert or source and comes into direct contact with him or her. Are universities as knowledge brokers being marginalized?
Let take an example from everyday life. When you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, you check for messages on your cell phone, scan the internet, and take your Starbucks coffee on your way to work. From where comes the knowledge that makes all of that possible? From universities? Or from multinational consumer corporations, from telecom companies, from silicone valley, or from the coffee kitchens of Seattle?
On a larger scale, the largest scientific achievements of mankind are in space travel, medicine, and sadly the ever more awesome arms race. Again, for these knowledge is generated in NASA and governments, in labs of pharmaceutical companies, and in the military. Even in monitoring the MDGs, information is no longer sought in universities, but in data bases, NGOs and IGO around the world. Where is the university?
Let me ask a provocative question: is it possible that one day universities as we know it be obsolete, as knowledge transmission and development takes on modalities and speeds yet unknown, as knowledge continues to explode, new ways of delivering it evolve, and new knowledge needs arise?
This morning, Dorte Kristofferson passed on to us a lesson from her boss, that in higher education one must be patient, because it has a slow and regular rhythm (programs of study that last years, endless meetings before policy change, etc.). But the world will not be patient, it will not wait for higher education to catch up with it.
Yet in all of this, those of us in higher education must find our unique role, our special niche in society. We must see to it that all of society are benefited by this knowledge, that the currency of knowledge is not usurped by those in wealth and power to oppress and dominate the rest. Ironically in some societies universities perpetuate this. What we need is a new paradigm.
I submit that his new paradigm must be the pursuit of sustainable development—ensuring the continued and progressive survival of the planet. I must confess that once my understanding of that popular catch phrase was limited to the environmental dimension. I thought this meant that if development could not be sustained, the planet would not survive as we ravage its resources with greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and global warming. But now, thanks to the UN decade for Sustainable Development, and to the initiative of the government of Japan and UNESCO, I realize that threats to the survival of this planet are also in the economic, social, and cultural spheres. The planet will not long survive if one thirds of its population continue to hold only 3% of its resources (as Prof. Kim reminded us yesterday) and the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. It will not long survive if different cultures deal wit their differences through intolerance, violence and war. It will not long survive if the politics of power methodically starves off disenfranchised cultures, and allow them to die of avoidable diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.
In this context, universities have a specific role: to marshal their efforts and resources to reverse those alarming trends. Of course, universities cannot do it alone. A giant step toward reversing the unhealthy trend of a neo-liberal consumerist, greed based society has recently been taken here in Thailand, and on the opening day we gratefully learned of the initiative of His Majesty King Bhumibol of Thailand, espousing “sufficiency economy.” It is now incorporated into the Kingdom’s 8th long term planning cycle, as Khun Warapon announced to us on Monday.

Second, the possibilities. I was obviously not able to attend all 162 breakout sessions, although it would have been wonderful. Nevertheless, I had a chancre to look at the abstracts, and like you I am sure I was amazed and impressed by the number of case studies and experiences that have tried to bring ESD into the mainstream of university life. It was such a smorgasbord of experiences that I have had to pick my favorites as I am sure you did, depending on your particular interests. Some of you in agriculture went to the sessions where agricultural programs introduced ESD dimensions. Those of you in health, or in TVET, or in community service, or in minority education, all went to sessions related to your particular interest.
My own interest was in the ever greater use of ICT in education, and this drew me to the relevant sessions. My concern is that ICT would be again a tool to discriminate against the less privileged, but this was assuaged by wonderful case studies of ICT use in the Yekooche first nation community in northeastern British Columbia, and the use of low-tech SMS and cell phones in remote areas by Allama Iqbal Open University in Pakistan.
But beyond specific examples, I began to distinguish between two types of case study interventions. The first type were innovations introduced as a concession to the importance of ESD. Universities remained within traditional boundaries and approaches, but added new subjects or ideas to existing programs. The second type of case examples presented a much ore fundamental shift in orientation. These examples, as typified by Quest University in Australia or HanDong University in Korea, showcased a fundamental reorientation of the mission of the university. In Quest University, for example, after taking basic courses, students no longer majored in a traditional academic discipline such as biology or psychology, but had majors which were issue related, such as global warming, multi-ethnic conflict resolution, and so on.

Third, partnerships. Because the task of sustainable development transcends the task of universities, partnerships and participation are inevitable. And in a globalized society, such partnerships have to be both local and international. On an international level, we learned from the shared experience of the UNESCO Chairs, of HanDong University, of Okayama University, and of the University of British Columbia. On the very important local level, we heard about the experiences at Waikato University in New Zealand, at Tongi, at Universiti Kebansaan Malaysia, and at Allama Iqbal Open University.

Fourth, permitting development, or better, pursuing or promoting development. Here we move from the conceptual to the practical. It is all well and good to understand the fuller dimensions of ESD and indeed to look at it as the new higher education paradigm. But as I said, a new paradigm in not just new way of looking at things, but more importantly a way to change one’s work and behavior in accord with that new way of thinking.
Academics have a sometimes undeserved reputation of being more interested in understanding a problem than in solving it. In dealing with sustainable development, we cannot fall into the same analysis paralysis; we must act. To prod us into action, I present a set of three practical questions:
1. If you change your paradigm, in what way will your university be different? Will you teach your academic subjects—accounting, algebra, etc.—any differently? Will your nursing courses be different?
2. Can you imbue your faculty with this same fervor and commitment to sustainable development? How? Faculty will determine the tone, ethos, as well as relevance and quality, of your university.
Very often, universities have elegant sounding mission statements that are largely left on university plaques and not transformed into operational implications. And yet there is a science and methodology to translating high sounding mission statements to school goals, to department objectives, and eventually to daily lesson plans.
3. How do you know if you are succeeding? What are your measures? You are not alone on this, and you cannot take all the credit or blame, but you must be able to point out your contribution will be.
Allied to this is the importance of quality assurance, as pointed out by Antony Stella and by Dorte Kristoffersen. Evaluation and assessment are evolving sciences and are already difficult when measuring transmission of standard of quantitative information; it is even more difficult when measuring effectivenss of paradigmatic change or behavior modification. But it must be undertaken.
And aside from providing a benchmark, as Kristofferson said, it is also, especially within an accreditation framework, a means of capacity building, of awareness raising, of motivating and redirecting mid-sets.

Distinguished participants,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me conclude. Like me you have been to several education conferences such as these. They are often a chance to reunite with old friends, make new one and establish contacts, and learn a few ideas on innovative particles that perhaps you can use to improve your work when you get home. But as I have tried to show, this conference should be different from all the others you have attended. It strikes at the very heart of what universities of the future should be about. Director Sheldon Shaeffer at the very beginning reminded us that the very title of this conference calls for re-inventing, not just reforming or improving our systems. The times call for a fundamental shift, a fundamental re-orientation on how we look upon our work and how the urgency of this new perspective demands no less than a revolutionary re-thinking and re-doing for sustainable development.

We are called upon to establish a radically new paradigm of sustainable development for the role of higher education in this fast changing world. We are called upon to discover new possibilities in translating that paradigm to carry out the mandates of our universities. To this end, are called upon to expand our partnerships and participation, both locally, and because of a globalization where knowledge knows no boundaries, internationally as well. Finally, we are called upon to lead our universities in the practical day-to-day pursuit of sustainable development, translating that imperative into new approaches and mind sets for our faculty, our students, and the communities we serve. By your coming to Bangkok UNESCO and APEID hope that they have lit a spark in each of you, and that you spread that spark to your faculty, your students and your communities and eventually fan that spark into a flame. The future will bring changes beyond our imaginations. But it is our duty as universities and as human beings to ensure that this planet will be sustainable and that we do not destroy this future environmentally, socially, economically, culturally, morally. The cause we serve, the sustained development of our planet as one that continues to be free, peaceful, just, progressive, and harmonious, is not only urgent but vital. We have no choice. The mission is important but nothing short of noble. After all, this fragile planet Earth is the only home we and our children, and our children’s children, will ever have. There is no other.