David Edwards

David Edwards, PhD, is the General Secretary of Education International (EI), the global voice of teachers and education support personnel. He has led the organization since 2018, following seven years as Deputy General Secretary. EI unites 375 member organizations and represents more than 33 million educators across 180 countries.

Higher education systems around the world are navigating profound political, economic and technological shifts.

Our last World Congress, which took place in 2024, made it clear that the defence of academic freedom remains a top priority for our movement in higher education and research. This decision was prompted by a significant escalation in the number of attacks on academics and scholars in a context of rising authoritarianism that is eroding democracies around the world.

These attacks are exploiting structural weaknesses that decades of higher education policies and reforms have created, including chronic public underfunding and marketization that drives the sector into competitive funding models as well as precarious employment. Unions have been warning about the consequences of these misguided policies for a long time and now our fears are confirmed: they have created fertile ground for attacks on academic freedom and made our universities vulnerable to political pressure and financial coercion.

At the same time, we cannot lose track of the fast and uncritical deployment of artificial intelligence and digitalization in the sector. These developments pose additional challenges that unions must address.

We were there at the invitation of the General Union of Palestine Teachers (GUPT) to attend a graduation event and a solidarity conference marking the International Day of Education.

Our delegation consisted of 13 leaders from unions that had contributed generously to our Solidarity Fund, which provided Palestinian teachers a lifeline when the government of Israel stopped their pay. CAUT is one of those unions, and Executive Director David Robinson was part of our delegation.

The Israeli military stopped us at the border, and, after nearly seven hours of interrogation and insults, we were deported back to Jordan.

I believe the whole experience speaks to Israel’s policy to isolate Palestinian educators and scholars from international solidarity. They are actively trying to make it hard for the rest of the world to see what’s going on in Palestine. Reality directly contradicts their narrative, so they are trying to control the flow of information to suit their agenda.

Ironically, their fear of teachers standing in solidarity with colleagues and students in Palestine and their attempts to intimidate and silence us only strengthened our collective resolve to continue supporting Palestinian education and to amplify the voices of those who, despite a genocidal war and military occupation, continue to teach and to build hope for future generations.

I am grateful to CAUT for your support and to David Robinson and all union leaders in that delegation for putting their safety on the line to show their solidarity.

I think we should all be very concerned. The U.S. has been a leading global actor in research and higher education for decades, but now this whole sector is under attack. The Trump administration has withheld federal funding to blackmail universities into submission, it has attacked academics and students to silence critical voices, and it has even denied or cancelled visas for students and staff.

These attacks are not isolated. Over the past few years, we have seen similar developments in Hungary, Türkiye, Argentina and many other countries where authoritarian governments seek to instil fear and discourage dissent.

The consequences are not limited to higher education or research institutions — they have a far-reaching impact on democracy itself.

We must mobilize and organize to demand that governments fully fund public education as a common good. International solidarity is key. The challenges we face are largely the same across contexts and this is especially true in higher education because the sector is globalized. Higher education unions around the world are in the same fight, and there is a wealth of information and experience we can draw on and share to support one another and inform our strategies.

Education International’s Go Public! Fund Education campaign provides the framework to unite national struggles and maximize their impact. Funding is political, and recent efforts to defund higher education institutions to force them to obey political orders show just how relevant and timely the campaign is.

Education International and our member organizations have long championed the Recommendation as the only international standard focusing on the status of higher education teaching personnel and providing a global definition of academic freedom. Unions have used it extensively in their national struggles to hold governments and institutions accountable. We now have to mobilize at both national and international levels to defend existing provisions and expand rights.

Most of the provisions in the Recommendation are yet to be achieved in many contexts, so we must ensure that they are maintained. At the same time, we have the opportunity to strengthen the language in certain areas facing new or long-standing challenges: collegial governance and managerialism, tenure, well-being, equity and the implications of AI and technology.

Another key aspect that is essential for unions is that this revision is a chance to reinforce monitoring mechanisms. However, this is also where the challenge lies, as many governments are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept multilateral oversight.

The major lesson of Go Public! is that mobilization works. We’ve seen it at the national level, for example, in Kenya, where the Universities’ Academic Staff Union used the campaign to mount a strong defence of public higher education and blocked a government proposal to privatize the sector.

At the global level, the campaign has already delivered important victories, including the recommendations of the United Nations High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession and the Santiago Consensus — the first internationally agreed framework recognizing the student-teacher relationship as the bedrock of education and part of the common heritage of humanity.

Both apply to all levels of education; they support union demands and are a key asset in national advocacy. They also provide a strong foundation for the upcoming revision of the UNESCO/ILO Recommendations on the Status of Teachers.

Higher education can fulfil its public mission only when institutions receive adequate core public funding and are collegially governed. Academic freedom is a prerequisite of independence, and tenure is the strongest defence against political and economic interference.

Our job as unions is to make the case for publicly funded and democratically governed institutions with full academic freedom as a fundamental public good. We have to reach out to students, parents and communities to make this point and build strong coalitions because this struggle is bigger than us; it’s about our democratic societies as a whole.

First, thank you, CAUT, for your solidarity. Thank you for standing with us — and with the world. Your work to advance our shared values and to support sister unions to grow and thrive despite challenging circumstances is deeply appreciated.

Second, I urge you to continue on this path. As our President Mugwena Maluleke recently said, “the future belongs to solidarity, not fear.” Let’s build this future together.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to take pride in your work as educators and unionists. What you do matters and makes a world of difference for your students and colleagues around the globe.