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IAU Policy Statement
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| The
Buenos Aires Statement |
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The following statement was
adopted by the
Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities
and the
Heads of forty public ad private universities from twelve Latin
American
countries participating in the Tenth IAU Round table in Buenos Aires,
in
November 1994:
1. The
IAU Board and the Round Table stress and emphasise the central
contribution of
higher education and of research to development in all regions of the
world.
2 . To break out of the downward spiral of dependence and of
underdevelopment is crucial for developing countries. Ownership and the
advancement of knowledge together with highly qualified human resources
are no less essential in the least developed countries as they are for
the economically advanced.
3. The IAU underlines the crucial and abiding role of governments
in assuring the resources necessary for higher education and for
research. Although funds from private sources may constitute
complementary financing for higher education, it would not be realistic
to expect that funding of this nature could have more than a marginal
impact on the current crisis in the higher education systems of the
developing nations.
4. At the Sixth IAU Round table held at Harare (Zimbabwe) in
1987, a Statement was issued in response to the document The
Financing of Education in Developing Countries, published by the
World bank. The Harare Statement dissented most emphatically from the
general thrust of the Recommendations of the World Bank which called
for cuts in public spending on higher education, for increasing
reliance on non-public investment in higher education and for a
reduction in the control of the State.
5. The IAU Board and university leaders participating in the
Tenth IAU Round Table in Buenos Aires note with regret that the World
Bank, in its most recent guidelines for lending to education (Higher
Education The Lessons of Experience), published in 1994, retained
essentially the same recommendations to governments as it did seven
years earlier in Harare. They also regret that the World Bank persisted
in linking the granting of loans to the implementation of these same
conditions.
6. This reversion to an approach contested earlier cannot cast
doubt on the soundness of the generalisations in the World Bank
document bout the lessons of recent experience. A major limitation of
the World Bank document is seen in its failure to relate its analysis
and recommendations to any particular vision of society and to the role
of higher education within it. To the degree that this vision differs
around the world, to that same extent is the scope of the
recommendations limited.
7. IAU dissents from, and recommends that its individual Member
Universities contest, any recommended solution to the higher education
crisis that relates solely to economic and financial conditions and
which takes little account of the particular and special political,
cultural and historical aspects of national life. In this connection,
the IAU recommends that its Member Universities advise their
governments to seek as broad a range of views on the options for
developing countries. |
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