New partnership promotes HE’s contribution towards SDGs

Recognition of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the ‘best hope we have’ to achieve positive change, and the role of universities in leading such change, has inspired a new partnership between University World News’ SDGs Hub, a key resource on sustainability for the global higher education sector, and the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association (HETL).

“The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are really the best hope we have of making the world a better place, in terms of reducing poverty and building peace,” said HETL founder and chief research scientist Patrick Blessinger, who is also an an adjunct associate professor of education at St John’s University and adjunct instructor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, New York.

Referring to University World News’ SDGs Hub, he said: “I think we have a real opportunity here to disseminate – maybe more than any other website other than the United Nations itself, of course – the latest findings on SDGs … critical information from other higher education leaders around the world to see how they are implementing the SDGs, and their thoughts and opinions on emerging trends in sustainable development.”

SDGs: A legitimate framework

Based, as they are, on the input of thousands of people worldwide, Blessinger said the UN Sustainable Development Goals offer a “legitimate framework through which to meet the needs of the world’s citizens” – and higher education is well-placed to take a leadership role in working towards those goals.

“We’ve been aware of [carbon emissions] for over 100 years now, but we haven’t had the political will or the hard science until very recently to show without any doubt that global warming is real, that it’s caused by human-generated carbon emissions,” he said.

“I realised that this is something in which higher education really needed to take a leadership role,” he noted.

A global online network of over 500,000 higher education professionals and thought leaders from over 180 countries in six continents, HETL aims to advance the scholarship and practice of teaching and learning.

HETL, a non-profit organisation, has achieved special consultative status with the United Nations, and has made the promotion of rights, democracy and sustainability a key focus of its activities.

In support of academic and pedagogical pluralism, HETL works with individual educators as well as educational institutions, associations, centres, and other educational groups.

HETL has underlined its commitment to sustainability with a series of publications under the banner of Innovations in Higher Education, Teaching and Learning (which includes 50 individual titles) and more recently another book series focused on implementing SDGs in higher education named Global Perspectives on Higher Education Development.

HETL has published several volumes of SDG research from higher education faculty and leaders worldwide through its book series, such as Integrating Sustainable Development into the Curriculum and Introduction to Sustainable Development Leadership and Strategies in Higher Education.

Additionally, HETL’s publications titled Frontiers and Sustainable Futures focus on current developments on SDGs from higher education faculty and leaders.

Alongside this, work published in the internationally peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education by HETL, and organised by the association, seek to bring together industry leaders to develop and introduce sustainable strategies in higher education.

“This work is focused around: How do we develop global higher education to make it more responsive to the pressing needs in society, in the world?” said Blessinger.

The power of social networks

Reflecting on the origins of HETL, which date back to 2010, Blessinger said: “At that time, social media was just starting to have a presence in the world. Just to give some perspective on that, in 2010, LinkedIn only had about 10 million members. Now it's up to a billion members.

“I thought: these are excellent tools to start bringing people together in a professional way. I started a group on LinkedIn, and to my surprise, it exploded in terms of people joining the group.

“Within a few months, I already had several thousand members in the group. What that taught me was that there was a real demand to bring together educators in higher education.”

Social media offered an effective way for those educators from all corners of the globe to network, collaborate, discuss issues and challenges in higher education and come up with solutions.

Key among such challenges now is global warming. In light of the impending threat of climate change – and the consequences already being seen in terms of, for example, temperature rises and species extinctions – sustainability has become a fundamental part of the agenda for most institutions, noted Blessinger.

“Universities have a social responsibility to do work that has a positive impact. A lot of work is being done right now to produce research, different models, and different technologies, which are improving tremendously to help bring about those SDGs.

“It wasn't initially at the top of most higher education institutions’ priority lists, and certainly was not part of their mission or vision statements. But fast-forward to today and we see, by and large, that colleges and universities are really taking this seriously,” he explained.

Institutional approaches

As higher education has adapted to cater to a much greater proportion of society, Blessinger says its role in achieving the SDGs has become increasingly pronounced, although institutions will invariably differ in their approach.

“Every institution will need to decide for themselves how to address the SDGs, depending on their particular mission, the students they serve, the communities they serve, the country they’re in,” said Blessinger.

“In some countries they may not have the total freedom to go ‘all in’ on the SDGs, but they have to make those assessments.”

“We have some wonderful examples of universities doing SDG-related work, from Harvard to a lot of other schools.

“If you visit their websites, you can see they have full strategic plans and are sharing studies they’ve developed on how they want to implement the SDGs and make that part of their own institution,” said Blessinger.

Such information then becomes part of a wider repository of global SDG-related knowledge and best practice.

“Those are no small tasks,” said Blessinger of universities’ efforts. “And if others have already done a lot of work in those areas, why reinvent the wheel?”

Openness to change

Although international leaders agreed the 17 SDGs as targets to be met by 2030, Blessinger believes they are more likely to be reached by 2050.

“The SDGs are enormously ambitious. One of the goals [SDG16] involves securing world peace. That alone is a massive undertaking,” he said.

Other SDGs include eliminating extreme poverty and achieving gender equality. Along with the ambitious nature of the goals, Blessinger acknowledges that there are “tensions” within institutions, for example, around divestment from fossil fuels or arms suppliers, which make progress towards the goals fraught.

“There are always going to be tensions,” said Blessinger. “It’s just a natural part of life, whether it’s at the individual, group, institutional, social or international level.

“An institution, by definition, is an organisation that is stable. Institutions have developed customs, rules and structures over many years that help them to endure from generation to generation.

“But no institution is isolated from the world and there are always changes going on, so they have to be able to respond to those changes,” he noted.

However, Blessinger said he has witnessed an acceleration in openness to change among industry leaders and in higher education bodies, driven by what he calls a shift from elitist to universal education models.

“What I’ve observed in working with a lot of educational leaders, from faculty to presidents and vice-chancellors, is more and more willingness to be open to change, and more understanding that if an institution wants to be relevant in this world, it needs to be part of it,” he said.

“The top universities have always, throughout the years, had sort of a strategy of exclusion. We have morphed over the last 100 years from an elitist type of higher education system to a mass type of higher education system, and now to a more universal type of system.

“By and large, I think the world is headed in the right direction, and it gives us hope that a lot of these problems will one day be resolved,” he noted.

UWN’s SDGs Hub partners include the International Association of Universities and ABET, the quality assurance organisation.