Professor Winston P. Nagan, Sam T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law, Director of the Institute of Human Rights, Peace and Development, University of Florida and STIAS fellow will present a talk with the title:
The Future of Higher Education
The salience of basic human rights values
Abstract
This presentation will focus on issues of scientific responsibility in teaching and research, drawing on the experiences of Einstein and the Manhattan project. The focus then shifts to a biographical gloss on student activism and the pressures on intellectual freedom and its suppression during the apartheid era. I then briefly examine the current challenges of student protests in South Africa and the implications it holds for higher education. The third part of the presentation focuses on a clarification of the underlying values in higher education and how these may be strengthened by rooting them more concretely in the international bill of rights.
Winston P. Nagan was born in South Africa and educated at the University of Fort Hare. He left South Africa for exile in 1964 and studied law at Oxford University, graduating with the degrees BA honors and MA. During this time he also raised funding for the establishment of a prison education scheme for all political prisoners in South Africa. He continued his studies at Duke University, where he received the degrees LL.M and MCL. He completed his doctoral studies at Yale and left for a position at the University of Florida where he currently serves as Sam T. Dell Research Scholar Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Human Rights, Peace and Development.
He was elected to the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, and later as Chair of the Board. He was also largely responsible for the ratification by the US of the Convention that outlaws torture, and for the Convention on Civil and Political Rights. He established the Human Rights and Peace Centre at Makerere University, Uganda as well as the East African Journal of Peace & Human Rights. He was active internationally in the promotion of peace and justice during the war in Southeast Asia. He is the principal drafter of the Declaration of the Fundamental Human Rights of the Shuar Nation of Ecuador. His works on political economy and the new paradigm can be found in the World Academy’s journals, Cadmus and Eruditio – www.worldacademy.org/home-demo/index.html.
