In May of this year, I had the honour of being appointed by the UNESCO Director-General to a 12-person international expert group charged with advising on revisions to the 1997 Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel.
The Recommendation, although not legally binding, is the only international instrument that establishes basic standards of employment rights for academic staff. It includes important definitions of academic freedom, tenure, institutional autonomy, and collegial governance.
CAUT was actively involved in the development of the Recommendation from the start. One of my predecessors as executive director, Donald C. Savage, was seconded to UNESCO in the mid-1990s to lead the drafting of the Recommendation. It’s no coincidence then that much of the text mirrors CAUT policy statements from the time.
The Recommendation built a solid international foundation for the profession, but a lot has changed over the past 30 years. For instance, it is largely silent on precarious employment — something that is now sadly the norm in many countries around the world. Precarity not only makes the profession less attractive and unfair but also hollows out core professional rights. Without tenure, contract academic staff simply don’t enjoy the procedural protection for academic freedom.
Meanwhile, technology has rapidly evolved and transformed the academic workplace. The 1997 Recommendation makes some fleeting and anachronistic references to emerging “internet” and “satellite” technologies. But no one at the time could have foreseen the use of synchronous online instruction and digital learning platforms, let alone generative and agentic artificial intelligence. How these technologies affect academic labour and employment rights, who controls pedagogical decisions about their use, and for what educational purposes they should and should not be deployed are critical questions today.
Additionally, the Recommendation had little to say about equity in the profession. There are important sections about equal rights being provided to women and academic staff with disabilities, but nothing else. This excludes many other equity-deserving groups and Indigenous peoples at a time when reactionary governments everywhere are rolling back human rights and employment equity gains.
Finally, there is the question of monitoring and enforcement. Outside of a small circle of wonks, there is little awareness of the Recommendation or the complaint mechanism attached to it. Every three years, the Committee of Experts on the Application of Recommendations Concerning Teachers (CEART) meets to monitor progress toward achieving the recommendations and to review complaints received over non-compliance. Most governments don’t really engage with the process, and many teacher unions don’t use it because they don’t know it exists.
The good news is that there was broad consensus amongst the expert group about these and other gaps in the Recommendation. All the experts agreed that updating and strengthening the Recommendation is critically important given the international backsliding we are witnessing today on academic freedom and institutional autonomy, as well as the erosion of fundamental employment rights of academics.
The work of the expert group concluded in late July. Based on the input received, the UNESCO Secretariat is now drafting updated text for member states to consider. That will take the better part of a year, with a revised proposal set to be considered for adoption by November 2027.
A stronger and more relevant Recommendation will help advance academic freedom and other professional rights at a critical juncture in history. It will be important for CAUT and our counterparts in other countries to press their governments to support a revised document that enhances the status and rights of higher education teaching personnel so that they can fulfil their job of preserving, sharing and advancing knowledge for the public good.
