Higher education unions from around the world thanked CAUT last month for the pivotal role it played in the development of a UNESCO statement on the rights of academic staff.

Meeting in November in Malaga, Spain, higher education and research affiliates of Education International marked the 10th anniversary of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, the first international instrument that sets guidelines for the treatment of academic staff.

“The recommendation has had an important impact on higher education around the world,” notes CAUT president Greg Allain. “In cases where academics find they can no longer freely teach and do their research, or where their work leads to prison or the death penalty, the recommendation is an unambiguous reminder just how wrong and arguably immoral are those practices and conditions.”

EI’s senior coordinator for higher education Monique Fouilhoux said the recommendation is important because it commits governments to “respect academic freedom and tenure, to promote collegial governance, and to ensure decent terms and conditions of work. Importantly, it defines academic freedom to include the right to engage in political activities in the same manner as other citizens and the right to be able to criticize one’s own educational system and the institution where one works.”

According to Allain, by the mid-1990s CAUT had been working for more than 10 years within a loose federation of national academic staff associations and unions around the world to promote academic freedom and to defend the interests of academics and researchers. Working with these associations, Pat Finn of the Carleton University Academic Staff Association agreed to develop a detailed proposal for a joint UNESCO/ILO declaration.

In 1994 the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, with the support of the CAUT executive, seconded then CAUT executive director Donald Savage to UNESCO headquarters in Paris to draft a final proposal.

Savage says the proposal went through several drafts and faced stiff opposition from a number of “authoritarian and right-wing governments.”

According to Savage, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia were strongly opposed, but so were some conservative Western governments and other nations whose cultural histories did not recognize or understand academic freedom.

It required years of difficult negotiations to overcome resistance in UNESCO, but the recommendation was eventually adopted by member states at the general conference on Nov. 11, 1997.

“As a recommendation, the statement doesn’t have the force of law like a convention or a treaty,” says Allain. “But 10 years on, it is being used in a range of political and collective bargaining strategies.”

Allain cites a lengthening list of Canadian labour arbitrations where the recommendation has played a highly-visible and practical role in the defence of academic freedom.

In Malaga, Australian National Tertiary Education Union president Carolyn Allport also announced her union has made the first ever complaint to UNESCO alleging violation of the recommendation. The NTEU’s action stems from legislation enacted by the former John Howard-driven government in Australia that seriously undermined the academic and collective bargaining rights of staff.

“We need to make use of the UNESCO recommendation more often and more effectively,” Allport said. “We need to be more active in promoting the recommendation as the core international standard for higher education and research workers.”

“Ten years after the adoption of a major international initiative focused on academic staff rights, Canada and CAUT are in the limelight,” Allain says. “We should be very proud that CAUT led the way in drafting and winning endorsement of the recommendation.”