After having been selected for the first time in 2015, North-West University (NWU) academic Prof Klaus Beiter has been reappointed for a second term as one of 16 ambassadors to the global Magna Charta Observatory (MCO) in Bologna.
He is one of only three ambassadors from South Africa, the other two being a former vice-chancellor of a major university and the executive director of a private higher education operator.
Prof Beiter’s responsibilities as an ambassador include serving as a consultant to universities worldwide that have signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, and to seek advice that would enable them to better comply with human rights and university values.
Moreover, he provides policy advice to the MCO and engages in research related to the observatory’s work. He attended a high-profile meeting of ambassadors at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, in June this year, and in September he will attend the MCO’s annual festive signing ceremony and conference in Bologna.
“I’m delighted to serve for another term as ambassador to the MCO. I accept this responsibility in the full knowledge that higher education around the world is under ideological and corporate attack. I have especially expressed the hope that the NWU would also sign the Magna Charta Universitatum, thereby committing to upholding academic freedom and other important university values,” says Prof Beiter.
More about the academic
Prof Beiter has been involved in academic freedom work since 2011, when the New York-based NGO Scholars at Risk, an organisation that attends to the plight of persecuted scholars worldwide, invited him to lead a project on academic freedom and academic mobility.
He was a European Union Marie Curie fellow at the University of Lincoln in the UK from 2013 to 2015, where he did research on the protection of academic freedom in European and African countries with Prof Terence Karran, a leading education policy scholar on academic freedom.
Since joining the NWU in 2016, Prof Beiter has focused on the repercussions the increasing commercialisation of universities has on academic freedom, and on furthering the promotion of academic freedom as a human right under the United Nations system.
More about the Magna Charta Observatory (MCO)
The MCO is a global non-governmental organisation in Bologna, Italy. It is an independent think tank and monitoring body, committed to actively promoting academic freedom, the right to higher education, and more broadly, university values such as creativity, innovativeness, social responsibility, community service, inclusiveness and equity. Its work has notably also influenced the human rights work of the Council of Europe and its court, the European Court of Human Rights.
Prof Klaus Beiter.
