UNESCO Day 2 Part 2 of 3

UNESCO Day 2 Part 2



I left off at the end of the official UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education +10. The official program ended around 6pm. I then went to have dinner with Charité, my colleague. We had a very nice dinner and then joined the other students for the meeting to plan our strategy for the final day of WCHE. The night before I had been up until 3 am working with the students and finishing some of my own work, so I was hoping for an earlier night. However, that was not to be.



The night started innocently enough with a discussion of how we had done that day. The agenda was only supposed to go until 11 pm. Not bad. 11 pm. Then we started talking. I shared my stories of not being able to talk in the session. I shared the success of the question I asked being included in responses to the panels. I listened as other students shared their successes and failures of the day. It was already 10 pm.



All that time the drafting committee was drafting in the room next door to us. We knew that while we were plotting they were doing the work that would determine the outcome of this whole conference. We started talking about how we wanted to influence the document. We had won some of the battles from the previous day, we had lost others. The sentence on General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) had been lost. The US won that battle. The sentence on raking of universities was taken out. We had won that battle. Education was no longer described as a “public good” but was now a “public service.” We were rearing up for another battle. We also needed to know how to make sure that UNESCO continued the work with students. We needed a sentence to include that would make UNESCO responsible to students without making them responsible for students. We finally agreed on a sentence. We sent it via Skype to our student representative. The next day it was in the document. Education also went back to being a “public good” the next day. (We won that battle too!) It was now close to midnight.



The final topic discussed was the student plenary the following day. There was some confusion over how exactly UNESCO had decided who would speak on behalf of students. Although we were happy that students were included in the closing plenary, we were very upset that they were not students sent with a mandate to represent student bodies. These students were either interns with UNESCO or we were not sure what. Therefore they could not be held responsible to anyone except UNESCO. What kind of freedom would they have to say what those sitting in that audience needed to hear from students? The decision was made that we needed to get a student of ours on this panel. After an elongated discussion we agreed that there would be a working group that would spend the later hours of the evening deciding three things. First, what is our method of getting a student on the panel; second, who will that student be; third, what will that student say. I ended up in this working group. It was an accident, but I am glad that I stayed because it gave me a greater insight into the politics of the student group of which I was quickly becoming a key part. It was now 1:30 am. Break – find some food and then off to discuss how we would save the world.