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The High-Level Political Forum on sustainable development, HLPF is the central global platform for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs and rethinking higher education for sustainable future. Recent US Project-2025 initiates some actions to facilitate educational reforms.
Background
The HLPF meets annually under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council and every four years at the level of Heads of State and Government under the auspices of the General Assembly.
The HESI’s main priorities are: rethinking higher education for sustainable future with the SDGs representing “a lifeline to universities and higher education”. There were multiple activities around higher education and sustainability at the United Nations High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development which took place in New York from 8 to 17 July 2024, coordinated by the UN’s Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, HESI
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, addressing the previous HLPF noted that “human rights-based approaches to development are powerful tools” that make peoples and states safer and more resilient. These approaches place necessary emphasis on peoples’ wellbeing, reducing inequalities and resuming states’ paths towards realizing the 2030 Agenda and SDGs.
Citations and source at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/sdgs/high-level-political-forum-sustainable-development
HESI Community
The Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, HESI was launched following the Rio+20 Conference in 2012 as an open partnership between several United Nations entities and the higher education community; it aims to enhance the role of the higher education sector in advancing sustainable development by facilitating multi-stakeholder discussions, actions and the dissemination of best practices.
During 2024-2025, the HESI is chaired by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), UN University, UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), and the Sulitest Association (a non-profit organization and online platform aimed at improving sustainability literacy around the world.
Additional UN partners in HESI include UNESCO, UN Environment Programme, UN Global Compact’s Principles for Responsible Management Education initiative, UN-HABITAT, UNCTAD, UNITAR, UN Office for Partnerships, and UN Academic Impact.
Together with hundreds of university networks, student organizations and higher education institutions they collectively form the HESI Community.
Each year, HESI organizes a global forum as a special event to the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), which is the UN’s main platform for the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the global level in order to highlight the critical role of higher education in achieving sustainable development.
More in: https://sdgs.un.org/HESI
AI in sustainability
The HESI Global Forum-2024 on “The Future of Higher Education for Sustainable Development” (taking place in the UN headquarters this July) is the world-wide special event, as well as the UN’s main platform for reviewing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Both the digital issues in education and the generative AI have been regarded as the main elements in transforming the world with immense potentials.
The head of innovation and education, Jonghwi Park, at the Tokyo-based United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) warned that the “world was feeling very divided about AI,” including regarding sustainable development. Present aspects of using ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in higher education, as well as academic research devoted to using deep data and AI to better understand the impact of academic journals in achieving SDGs are becoming most urgent issues in SDGs implementation.
Reference to: https://www.ohchr.org/en/sdgs/publications-and-resources
The US Project-2025
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) was developed over the past two years at the cost of US$22 million; it lays out a plan for a total revamping of America’s government, including the education policy.
Historically, the US Higher Education Act of 1965 mandated that higher education institutions that seek access to federal funds must be accredited by one of several organisations, both at the states’ and federal level (e.g. in Florida, it is the Decatur, Georgia-based Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges).
However, there are already numerous critics of the Project-2025: some say that the whole idea “is not totally new”. Among the negative things are, e.g. reducing the role and/or eliminating the US Department of Education, end the so-called accreditation cartel, concerning reducing federal student aid programs and terminating “loan forgiveness programs” established by the Obama administration. Other criticism is about “suppressed funding for research on climate change and the environment, which reduced dramatically the federal indirect cost payment that sustains science and other academic research.
Still others, basing their ideas on the economist Milton Friedman’s critique dating back 70 years that public schools were an illegitimate state-supported monopoly, like the author of the Project 2025 chapter on education (Lindsey M Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation), calls for the abolition of the Department of Education.
Even Olivia Troye, who served as an advisor to Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, poured cold water on the idea that Trump was unaware of Project 2025: “this is preposterous,” she told this July, “if you look at the collaborators and the authors of this plan, a lot of these people came directly from serving in his cabinet during his administration”.
She explained Trump’s attempt to keep the plan at arm’s length by saying: “Donald Trump knows that what is written in this plan is so extreme that it is damaging to his possibility of getting elected; and that’s what he’s concerned about.”
Although Project 2025 does not define “American exceptionalism”, its authors, Republican politicians and operatives, as well as critics of Republican education policies in states such as Florida, know exactly what is meant: the belief that the United States is a specially chosen nation and that slavery, for example, was not essential to the founding of the nation nor the cause of the Civil War (1861-65). Nor would it be correct, according to the proponents of the American exceptionalism, to say that American history is replete with incidents of misogyny or ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.
The next administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of the funding (i.e. saved from area studies programs) for the international business programs aimed at teaching about free markets and economics.
Reporting of foreign gifts is another item in the Project-2025: the proposal that many in the US higher education call “confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s, CCP influence in higher education”. Presently, numerous US universities have received more than US$100 billion in gifts and grants from Chinese organisations with ties to the CCP, and the American government has been lax in enforcing the regulations around reporting foreign large foreign gifts.
In response to these facts, some expressed ideas aimed at “reversal the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce Section 117 of the HEA, which directs colleges and universities to report gifts from, and contracts with, sources outside the US worth US$250,000 or more.”
Some even go as far as calling the Project a “plot”, including such areas as the admissions and the curriculum of institutions, employing what is termed the “unitary executive theory” to reclassify federal scientists and others as political employees subject to firing, and empowering the President to impound funding for research and programs deemed “antithetical”.
Thus, implementing Project 2025 will require Trump’s election and the Republicans taking control of both the Senate and keeping their majority in the House of Representatives. If all three comes to pass, American higher education, “will face a tumultuous future, featuring an aggressive and intrusive federal government, erosion in funding with no alternatives, a cavalcade of political litmus tests, and erosion in the US’ science and technology capability”.
Critics already offered two further warnings: a) Trump’s vindictive plans to harness the Department of Justice to go after critics might be expansive enough to include academics and university leaders; and b) some also predict that the blue versus red state divide (i.e. republicans vs. democrats) will also accelerate, with an appreciable further decline in the autonomy and vitality of public universities in Republican dominated states.
All references and citations from: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240724222030984&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GLNL0797