On 24 October 2022, the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) hosted at UN Headquarters in New York an event to mark United Nations Day, a commemoration that remembers the entry into force of the Charter of the United Nations. It aimed to highlight what universities and colleges worldwide are doing concerning global challenges, what multilateralism means for institutions of higher education, and what these institutions mean to the United Nations.
The gathering served to answer questions about ways to improve the relationship between academia and the United Nations and enhance the role of faculty and student’s role in the organization’s work. The event had an audience of almost one hundred people in the conference room where it took place, and many more hundreds joined live from around the world via UN Web TV, including Nadiia Konovalova and Volodymyr Sytin from the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. It was the first event hosted by UNAI at UN Headquarters since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As a global community, we all know this, we are facing just an onslaught of challenges and crises,” warned Jayashri Wyatt, Chief of the Education Outreach Section at the Outreach Division of the UN Department of Global Communications. In this framework, she commented, “higher education plays an absolutely critical role in responding to them, through open dialogue, research, teaching and community engagement which drives research-based solutions to address these very serious issues.”
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, stressed that “the academic community has been a valuable partner for the UN, and this connection has only grown since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.” “We have the opportunity to hear from UNAI’s member institutions about their thinking on the UN and the role we play on the global stage,” she said. “You can really be part of the solutions,” Ms. Fleming added.
More information:
https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/unai-marks-un-day-discussing-role-higher-education-multilateralism