ABSTRACT
The key principles of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) founding act, setting out its noble mission of intellectual solidarity, is a good starting point for examining the organization’s involvement in higher education:
That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed; [. . .] That a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind; [. . .] For these reasons, the States Parties to this Constitution, believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives.
