academia and post 2015: fit for purpose?
TRANSCRIPT
• Some Troubling News• How can academics make a
difference?• Where do we go from here?• Some Future Directions
Agenda:
• Magnitude: • How can we make something this
encompassing readily understood?• Public Knowledge: • Only 1 in 4 Americans can name the
current UNSG; 2 in 5 didn’t know enough about him to evaluate his job performance
• Partisanship:• Fox News 7/21/14: “centerpiece of the
latest multi-trillion-dollar U.N. bid to reshape the planet along largely socialist or progressive lines”
Post-2015 Domestic Challenges
It is customary in these discussions for academics to bemoan their lack of “real world” impact.
Conventional debates about the influence of academics focus on influence ex ante.
But this view overlooks a role for academics as interlocutors between the UN and the public
And this role is vitally important moving forward
• Communicating Complexity
• Mobilizing Collective Action• Active learning strategies can place
Post-2015 at the heart of course assignments
• Training Skills Too!• Using students as a “force
multiplier”
Bridging the Gap
• Communicating Complexity • If every professor who teaches on the
UN wrote one op-ed or blog post…
• Mobilizing Collective Action• Engaging students through local UNA
chapters / community outreach
• Training Skills• Op-ed writing• Data visualization
Where can we go from here?
• Address the information deficit• “What’s the UN doing?”
• Sell engagement with Post-2015• “Why should I care?”
• Strengthen accountability• “How can we hold governments to
their words?”
What would this do?
• Going Younger:• Tailoring the message to K-12
• Going Global: • Scaling up to UN MOOCs
What else is there?
Are we ready to embrace this challenge?
• Cartoon by Jack Ohman from David Newsom “Foreign Policy and Academia” Foreign Policy 101 (Winter 1995-1996)
Source for image