World Dignity University (WDU)

HumanDHS is primarily grounded in academic work. We are independent of any religious or political agenda. However, we wish to bring academic work into "real life." Our research focuses on topics such as dignity (with humiliation as its violation), or, more precisely, on respect for equal dignity for all human beings in the world. This is not only our research topic, but also our core value, in line with Article 1 of the Human Rights Declaration that states that every human being is born with equal dignity (that ought not be humiliated). We agree with Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, who advocates the building of bridges from academia as follows, "I have always believed that good scholarship can be relevant and consequential for public policy. It is possible to affect public policy without being an advocate; to be passionate about peace without losing analytical rigor; to be moved by what is just while conceding that no one has a monopoly on justice." We would like to add that we believe that good scholarship can be relevant and consequential not only for public policy, but for raising awareness in general.



The ideal of academia is to be free, free of national and corporate interest. Clearly, this ideal is only truly attainable in a situation where the institutional frames for academic work mirror it. Many academics suffer from the lack of the true realization of this ideal.

Global interdependence forces humankind to face global challenges, both ecological and social, and this is a shared responsibility that has to be shouldered jointly. The consequences of global interdependence punish all players who try to preserve a conceptualization of the world as independent national entities that can survive as isolated "islands."

In other words, ideally, all universities of this world that wish to realize their own core ideal of academic freedom, will at some point have to be part of an independent World University. Only then can "faulty generalizations, circular reasoning, mystified concepts, and partial knowledge" be truly unmasked (Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, in Transforming Knowledge, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2005).

Betty Reardon said on July 6, 2010 in Melbu, Norway: "What we do know, we do not know in a way that serves our needs. So, we need to know in different ways, and we need to build new knowledge through new ways of knowing. The new knowledge is in the area of designing new realities, which is likely to be done by speculative and creative thinking that would be communally shared and reflected for common formulation that would be tested in a continual process of social invention."

Our aim, as HumanDHS, is to invite academics around the world into the joint responsibility of leading the world away from divides that might cost humankind its survival in times when only global cooperation can address global challenges.

We ask: Why is there not a World University dedicated to the human rights ideal that all humans deserve to live dignified lives? Academia should be free, free from national or corporate interest. Academic freedom ought to be exercised globally and not harnessed into national or corporate interests. "With science and business merged into a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 'science could be lost in a black hole,'" is the verdict of British scientists in the face of attempts in the United Kingdom to merge science and business even more than before (see also Robert M. L. Winston's BBC World News HARDtalk interview with Stephen Sackur on February 24, 2010).

Would not a truly independent World Dignity University be a more suitable way to realize the ideal of academic freedom? Such a World University should exist, and, ideally, connect all national universities. (Currently, there is one United Nations University, it is based in Tokyo, Japan, and one UN-mandated University for Peace, based in San José, Costa Rica, both are not truly independent.)

We have developed a Strategic Plan that starts with building an alliance with one university (or a core group of universities) that would seed the development of a step-by-step strategy to build a truly global institutional foundation for a World Dignity University. Soon www.worlddignityuniversity.org will be activated and the Global Advisory Board of HumanDHS will be invited to contribute with their thoughts and advice.

The vision is that every national university should contribute to creating a true World University, which would not have a local physical base, but will exist as part of local universities, funded by a Global Education Fund.

We wish to contribute through our Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Global Education Fund. (The Global Education Fund that Barack Obama announced in a 2007 speech is a related idea - he said: "I will support a $2 billion Global Education Fund.").

The World Dignity University will not have to have a local physical base, but will exist as part of local universities that are globally connected. This serves the motto of unity in diversity. Currently global uniformity crowds out true unity, and diversity is being sacrificed for this uniformity. Only true unity can create the space for diversity to flourish. Research on cultural diversity and biodiversity, for example, requires a strong global consensus built on human rights rather than on corporate interest.

Several metaphors can be used to describe the conceptual foundation of unity in diversity that guides this initiative. We use the metaphor of a forest, or a raft, let me here use the metaphor of a tree (see, for example, our Newsletter 12 that describes the work of HumanDHS).

Our aim is to make sure to be globally inclusive in our efforts and not duplicate the achievements of others who have already worked with these issues for much longer than we have. It is at the core of dignity to join hands in mutual respect and equality in dignity. Team work in the spirit of solidarity is our motto, guided by the principle of unity in diversity, which helps avoiding humiliating ranking orders that create uniformity or division.

In this spirit, we have embarked on finding similar ideas and movements world-wide. Let us present here a small selection of a growing group of scholars, globally, that share related ideas:
The International Association of Universities, for example, was founded in 1950, as the UNESCO-based worldwide association of higher education institutions. "It brings together institutions and organisations from some 150 countries for reflection and action on common concerns and collaborates with various international, regional, and national bodies active in higher education. Its services are available on the priority basis to Members but also to organisations, institutions and authorities concerned with higher education, as well as to individual policy and decision-makers, specialists, administrators, teachers, researchers and students. The Association aims at giving expression to the obligation of universities and other higher education institutions as social institutions to promote, through teaching, research and services, the principles of freedom and justice, of human dignity and solidarity, and contributes, through international cooperation, to the development of material and moral assistance for the strengthening of higher education generally..." [Read more].

Pledge of IAU Commitment (2006):
"Within this renewed strategic direction and priority actions, the IAU further pledges to continue to work in collaboration and partnership with others in order to:
• Contribute to the development and protection of knowledge, higher education and research in the public interest;
• Strengthen and encourage academic solidarity which aims to reduce inequalities among higher education institutions and promote cooperation rather than undue competition;
• Promote equitable access and equal opportunities for student, researchers and faculty members in higher education;
• Seek to understand and harness the opportunities being brought to the sector by the market, for example through public-private partnerships, while limiting the negative impact of increasing commodification and commercialisation of education with its too narrow a vision of higher education as a service to be bought and sold on the open and competitive market..." [Read more]

Examples of virtual universities (many traditional brick-and-mortar universities have established virtual branches or are at least providing virtual courses):

• The Open University
• the Canadian Virtual University
• the Intercultural Open University
• the Rasmussen College
• the Syrian Virtual University
• the Virtual University of Pakistan
• the Virtual Global University (VGU)
• the American International University-Bangladesh
• the IMA Virtual University-IMA Indian Management Academy India
• the World Federation of Scientists
• Study @ Virtual University
• Hong Kong Virtual University
• One Laptop Per Child
(see video on La communauté du projet One Laptop Per Child et du SugarLabs)
• "European Resource Center on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Intercultural Education" at the "European Wergeland Center"
• European Union's Erasmus Mundus Program for Non-European Countries
• Networks of Excellence
• The World Wisdom Council
• Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning (PGL)
• Scholars at Risk
• The Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR)
• Open University of Catalonia, UOC

See, furthermore, The Global Virtual University (2003) by Lalita Rajasingham:
Since 1986, Lalita Rajasingham's area of research and teaching has been in the application of information technology such as the Internet, virtual reality and HyperReality and artificial intelligence to human communication, particularly to education in multicultural settings. She is widely published internationally and has presented several keynote addresses and plenary papers at national and international conferences. Lalita Rajasingham's co-authored book titled In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society (1995) has helped to pioneer future directions in education for the next decade in many parts of the world, and introduced the concepts of virtual classes, HyperClasses, virtual universities, and virtual learning on the Internet. Her co-authored book The Global Virtual University (2003) similarly breaks new ground, and sketches a philosophical foundation for the future of the university in an era of rapid technological change and globalisation. Based on material gathered from research in the USA, Japan, UK, Taiwan, Brazil, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand, this book is about the shift from the modern university of the nation state to the global university of the future, and presents a paradigm from which it might be constructed.

 


Evelin Lindner, the Founding President of HumanDHS, is currently experimenting with living as a global scholar. She would be a candidate for a professorship at the World University.

Please read about her experiences with this experiment, for example:

How Becoming a Global Citizen Can Have a Healing Effect
Paper presented at the 2006 ICU-COE Northeast Asian Dialogue: Sharing Narratives, Weaving/Mapping History, February 3-5, 2006, International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo, Japan.

Giving Life to the Human Family
In: Journal Offerings, an International Magazine. Please see here a long version of this paper, written in 2006. This is not an academic paper. It is a very personal text that tries to capture the struggles of my life in ways that embed them into larger historical contexts and filter out "lessons" that could be useful for others. It is a analysis of my life, which responds to the questions put to me by the Journal Offerings (the headings represent their questions).

Auswirkungen von Demütigung auf Menschen und Völker
Vortrag aus Anlass der 3. Verleihung des SBAP. Preises in Angewandter Psychologie, verliehen vom Schweizerischen Berufsverband für Angewandte Psychologie SBAP an Evelin Lindner, October 2006.

 



Links

 

The 2nd International Symposium on Peer Reviewing: ISPR 2010
Organized in the context of The SUMMER 4th International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management: KGCM 2010, held on June 29th - July 2nd, in Orlando, Florida, USA.
"As you know, only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that 'peer review works well as it is.' (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192) "A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research." (Horrobin, 2001) Horrobin concludes that peer review "is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance." (Horrobin, 2001) This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors. But, "Peer Review is one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice" (Goodstein, 2000), it is a necessary condition in quality assurance for Scientific/Engineering publications, and "Peer Review is central to the organization of modern science…why not apply scientific [and engineering] methods to the peer review process" (Horrobin, 2001).
References
• Chubin, D. E and Hackett E. J., 1990, Peerless Science, Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy; New York, State University of New York Press.
• Horrobin, D., 2001, "Something Rotten at the Core of Science?" Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 2, February 2001. Also at www.whale.to and post.queensu.ca.
• Goodstein, D., 2000, "How Science Works", U.S. Federal Judiciary Reference Manual on Evidence, pp. 66-72 (referenced in Hoorobin).

The Idea of a University
The Idea of a University, Hilton Pasadena, California, USA, Aug. 5-8, 2010.

The 3rd International Symposium on Academic Globalization
The 3rd International Symposium on Academic Globalization: AG 2010, June 29th - July 2nd ~ Orlando, Florida, USA.

Scientists Urge Respect on Advice
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
A group of senior academics has called for reassurances from the UK government that it will respect the independence and freedom of its scientific advisers. The release of their statement follows the sacking of the former drugs adviser Professor David Nutt. In it, they endorse a set of principles for the treatment of scientific advice. These include protecting advisers from political interference and not using disagreement with government policy as grounds for criticism or dismissal. The statement, which has been sent to government officials and ministers, calls for government to agree to ensure the academic freedom and independence of scientific advisers and to properly consider their advice. The government already has a code of practice which is supposed to ensure the proper use of scientific advice and the protection of its advisers. The new principles also include allowing advisers to speak publicly about their work and enabling expert committees to have independent press officers. There is also a call to ensure that reports by expert committees are not criticised prior to publication...
Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8345823.stm.

The Open University, UK
The OU provides university education to those wishing to pursue higher education on a part-time and/or distance learning basis, including disabled people, who are officially a priority group for the university. The British Government asked the Open University to continue the work of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) when it was dissolved. The CNAA formerly awarded degrees at the polytechnics which have since become universities.

Universities Merged into Business
Dius, England's department for higher and further education has been scrapped, two years after its creation...
See more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/8086233.stm.

Scientific Integrity
THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary
March 9, 2009
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
SUBJECT: Scientific Integrity
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security. The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity. By this memorandum, I assign to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (Director) the responsibility for ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement with scientific and technological processes. The Director shall confer, as appropriate, with the heads of executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and offices and agencies within the Executive Office of the President (collectively, the "agencies"), and recommend a plan...
Please read more at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Memorandum-for-the-Heads-of-Executive-Departments-and-Agencies-3-9-09/.

UNESCO Chairs Network and International University Cooperation
On this site extensive information can be found on UNESCO's International University Cooperation.
See, among others, UNESCO's UNITWIN initiative:
UNITWIN is the abbreviation for the UNIVERSITY TWINNING and networking scheme. The Programme was established in 1992 following the relevant decision of the General Conference of UNESCO taken at its 26th session. The UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme was conceived as a way to advance research, training and programme development in higher education by building university networks and encouraging inter-university cooperation through transfer of knowledge across borders. Since it was set up in 1992 the programme has aroused great interest among Member-States.

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" by William Deresiewicz
In The American Scholar, 77 (3, Summer), 2008, available at theamericanscholar.org.
- Deresiewicz's definition of "being intellectual": "being passionate about ideas"!

Rosika Schwimmer and World Government
Rosika Schwimmer or Bédy-Schwimmer "Rózsa" Rózsika (1877-1948) tried to create a world government. In 1935 she formed the World Centre for Women's Archives with Mary Ritter Beard. She received a World Peace Prize in 1937 and formed the Campaign for World Government with Lola Maverick Lloyd. In 1947 she was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize but no one received it the next year...
Please read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosika_Schwimmer, or, please read also Remarks on the History of Hungarian Feminism by Judit Acsády.

The Earth Federation Movement
The Earth Federation Movement includes a worldwide association of World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) Chapters and affiliated independent organizations, such as many youth, environmental, and human rights organizations, that affirm the creation of a non-military, democratic Earth Federation under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. We have several web sites associated with our work for global peace with justice, environmental sustainability, and prosperity such as www.earthfederation.info.
Dr. Glen T. Martin is the Secretary-General of WCPA and President of the Institute on World Problems. Since its founding in 1958, the WCPA has focused on creating a non-military, democratic Constitution for the Federation of Earth. It has done this through four Constituent Assemblies of World Citizens meeting from 1968 to 1991, when the Constitution was finally completed in its present form.
WCPA now works to get the nations and people of the world to ratify the Constitution through the criteria specified in Article 17. The Constitution is permeated by the concept of human dignity, focused especially in Articles 12 and 13 on human rights. WCPA sees the ratification of the Earth Constitution as a central structural change, creating global democratic institutions of unity in diversity, that can facilitate the deep spiritual change toward planetary maturity that is also necessary for a world of peace, with justice and sustainability.

Joseph P. Baratta
Joseph P. Baratta (2004)
The Politics of World Federation
Vol.1: The United Nations, U.N. Reform, Atomic Control.
Vol. 2: From World Federalism to Global Governance
Westport, CT: Praeger
Please see here the Introduction to both volumes.
Please see here an editorial on the work of Joseph Baratta and Virginia Swain.

Garry Davis: World Citizenship, World Passport, World Presidency, World Service Authority, World Government of World Citizens, World Government House
Garry Davis (Bar Harbor, Maine, July 27, 1921) is a peace activist who created the first "World Passport." A former World War II bomber pilot and Broadway actor, he renounced his American citizenship in Paris in 1948 to become a "citizen of the world." Davis founded the World Service Authority, which now issues the passports - along with birth and other certificates - to applicants. Davis first used his "world passport" on a trip to India in 1956, and has been variably admitted into or jailed by countries around the world after using his world passport. Up to 150 countries have purportedly accepted the world passport at one time or another. In France, his support committee was co-founded by writers Albert Camus and André Gide and the Abbé Pierre (quoted from wikipedia).

Rosika Schwimmer and World Government
Rosika Schwimmer or Bédy-Schwimmer "Rózsa" Rózsika (1877-1948) set out to create a world government. In 1935 she formed the World Centre for Women's Archives with Mary Ritter Beard. She received a World Peace Prize in 1937 and formed the Campaign for World Government with Lola Maverick Lloyd. In 1947 she was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize but no one received it the next year...
Please read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosika_Schwimmer, or, please read also Remarks on the History of Hungarian Feminism by Judit Acsády.

Worldwide Universities Network
WUN is an international alliance of 16 leading research universities who have come together to create a worldwide partnership to generate significant advances in research, graduate training, education and knowledge transfer. The partners are committed to excellence, innovation and impact and as such are collaborating in multi-disciplinary areas of global significance to enhance the contribution of Higher Education to the opportunities and challenges of globalisation. WUN serves to build international faculty-driven communities of interest, and provides the infrastructural support and intellectual venture capital necessary to enable innovative multi-institutional projects of the sort that are impossible for a single institution or an ad hoc collaboration to deliver and sustain.