Council of Europe Forum on Higher Education: Declaration

Posted by on July 28, 2006

[Thanks to PHENND Co-Chair Ira Harkavy for forwarding the following.]

To the participants of the Council of Europe Forum on Higher Education and Democratic Culture (22 – 23 June 2006)

It is with pleasure that we take this opportunity to remind us all of the important and stimulating event which brought us together less than a month ago as well as of the Declaration we adopted and the Call for Action we agreed upon.

The Declaration affirms the need to increase the commitment of higher education institutions to a democratic culture and sustainable societies and calls for action to promote the principles of democratic citizenship, human rights and civic responsibility in higher education.

We are now in a position to launch the site which was announced at the Forum. The site is intended to provide all those who commit themselves to promote the principles outlined in the Declaration with a platform for the exchange of information and an opportunity to make their efforts and activities visible so that they can serve as examples for others.

The site offers basic information on the Forum and the Declaration and the possibility to consult the list of those who have become members of this network and their activities and efforts.

You have the possibility to become member online and to input information on the activities you undertake to promote the principles of the Declaration.

Any higher education institution as well as any other institution, association or organisation, governmental or non-governmental, involved in higher education policy orientation may become member of this network provided they support the principles of the Declaration by undertaking activities to promote them.

These activities can be of different and varied nature and the input form on the site provides you with a ? non-exhaustive – range of the main thematic orientations and types of activities to choose from.

In a first phase it will also be important to input any activity you undertake to promote the Forum, the Declaration and the network site in the multitude of networks you belong to as well as contributions to journals and publications. This will allow us all to appreciate the efforts undertaken to spread the information as widely as possible.

The Declaration includes a call for a special publicity effort on or around 10 December ? The International Day of Human Rights ? and also the day on which the Nobel Prizes are announced. We invite you to share your ideas for further and effective publicity.

The presentations and speeches at the Forum will be edited in book form in the Higher Education Series of the Council of Europe and shall be available in Spring 2007 in time for a review and evaluation of the progress made during the first 6 months after the Forum.

Last but not least, the web site

http://dc.ecml.at

– ?dc? stands for ?democratic culture?

– ?ecml? stands for ?European Centre for Modern Languages?, a Council of Europe institution whose mission is to encourage excellence and innovation in language teaching and learning

– ?at? stands for ?Austria?, where the ECML is situated

The ECML kindly offered to host this site on its server which allowed us to design the site with its central features as interactive online databases.

The site is operational as from today, however, as you will certainly understand, it will need further work to complete it and to shape it into the useful, yet simple tool that we expect it to be.

Please let us know of any mistakes, errors and malfunctions that you may discover; this will be of great help to us to improve the site further.

We also invite you to disseminate this information as widely as possible through your communication channels.

Best regards

Josef Huber
Administrator
Higher Education and Research Division

Directorate of School, Out-of-School and Higher Education
Directorate General IV – Education, Culture and Cultural Heritage, Youth and Sport
Council of Europe
E-mail: josef.huber@coe.int
Internet: http://www.coe.int/higher-education