“We have to find ways to work together,” UN education expert tells Harvard audience

Thoughts on a recent talk by a sociologist from Pakistan at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, at a lecture series in honour of the late Indian sociologist Rama S. Mehta. Previous speakers include Benazir Bhutto, Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair, among others.

Digital technology and AI may well erode the oral traditions developed over centuries that trained the human mind to memorise information, but teachers will continue to play a critical role in students’ lives. Human interaction and critical thinking are more essential than ever before, and so is the “need for dialogue even — and especially — when we disagree.”

These are some of my key takeaways from a recent talk at Harvard by sociologist Farida Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

Underscoring the last, crucial point, about the need for dialogue, she says, “We have to find ways to work together.”

She references way of finding ways to work together and hear each other is Side by Side (The New Press, 2012), which features Palestinian and Israeli versions of history, and blank pages allowing readers to choose.

Censorship and preventing one point of view from being heard — for whatever reason — leads to a slippery slope. “Today, you stop someone from speaking; tomorrow, they’ll stop you,” she told me informally later in a follow-up conversation.

Making a difference

At the talk, she quoted her favourite phrase from ICESR, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: “Freedom is indispensable for scientific research and creative activity.”

She also emphasised that “academic freedom is necessary for democracy.”

The key, she said, is to ensure that all parties are given a fair chance and treated equally for their views, which is “patently not the case.”

Farida Shaheed is the longtime executive director of Shirkat Gah, the voluntary women’s collective founded in 1975, the year she returned to Lahore with an MA in sociology from the University of Leeds. She joined Shirat Gah a few years later and has contributed greatly to its development over the decades.

In 1981, she was among the dozens of feisty women, including my mentor the human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, who kickstarted the Pakistan women’s movement, catalysed by the oppressive military regime of Gen. Ziaul Haq.

Farida chronicled that struggle in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (Zed Books, London, 1987), the groundbreaking book coauthered with her longtime friend and colleague Khawar Mumtaz, a founder member of the Southasia Peace Action Network, Sapan, which we started together in 2021.

This background may seem removed from the focus of Farida Shaheed’s talk at this year’s prestigious Rama S. Mehta Lecture at the Radcliff Institute, Harvard University, titled ‘Indispensable: The Right to Academic Freedom, Human Creativity, Learning, and Teaching.’

However, as she noted, “all rights are interrelated and universal… The right to education is an empowering right, a pathway to many other rights.” And so she has over the years added the linked fields of cultural rights and education to her repertoire, serving as the first U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, 2009 to 2015.

She acknowledged that the U.N. may not always be as efficient or as effective as we’d like, but it’s “necessary.”

Continuing a legacy

About 100 students, academics and community members came together for the hybrid event at Radcliffe’s Knafel Center, with another 150 online on Zoom, said Mac Daniel, associate director of communications at Radcliffe.

Those present in-person included Wasim Gohar from Peshawar, a public policy practitioner with extensive experience in Parliamentary oversight in Pakistan, and this year’s Benazir Bhutto Leadership Program Fellow at Harvard.

The Fellowship is the largest project administered by ClassACT HR73, a nonprofit founded in 2014 by members of the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1973, to which the late Benazir Bhutto belonged.

The BBLP ClassACT HR73 also supports the Rama S. Mehta Lecture series, established in 1981 in memory of sociologist Rama S. Mehta (1923–1978), one of the first women appointed to India’s Foreign Service, which she served from 1949-51.

Mehta, who died of a heart attack at 54, was a two-time Bunting (later renamed Radcliffe) Fellow at Harvard, 1964-65, and 1967-68. During this time, she and her husband, Jagat Singh Mehta, also an Indian diplomat and later Foreign Secretary, became close to the author Catherine Atwater Galbraith and diplomat and Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith. Rama Mehta and Catherine Galbraith collaborated on the book India: Now and Through Time (1972).

After her passing, the Galbraith family, together with the Mehta family, set up an endowed lecture in Rama’s name to focus on “Third World Women’s Problems”. The language has evolved over the decades, but the series continues to bring distinguished women from “developing countries” to Radcliffe, from various fields, public affairs, the sciences, or the arts.

Catherine and John’s son Peter Galbraith, a diplomat and author and Benazir Bhutto’s classmate and friend at Harvard, helps administer the BBLP. He was also instrumental in inviting the late Pakistani prime minister to deliver the Rama Mehta lecture in 1985-86. Her talk was titled “Politics and the Muslim Women”.

Farida Shaheed may be the second Pakistani woman to be invited to give this talk (the Radcliffe Institute was unable to provide Global Southasia with a list of all the speakers). Speakers from the region have included filmmakers Deepa Mehta (2012) and Mira Nair (1993), perhaps now more famous as the mother of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Restorative measures

The morning after her talk, Farida flew to New York to present her report at he UN’s Third Committee on the need to “rehaul the financial architecture that impedes the ability of states to fulfil their obligations towards the right to education”, as she later explained to Global Southasia.

This impediment may not happen directly, but through measures mandated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, like privatisation and cuts to public spending and wages, all of which impacts health and education.

At the Rama Mehta talk, Farida emphasised that “the right to education is not limited to schooling. There are many ways of knowing, learning, and teaching. It would be a tragic mistake to discard the richness of diversity and what it brings. The right is to education, not schooling.”

She also reminded the audience of the U.N. Secretary-General’s 2021 report “Our Common Agenda” which called for a renewed social contract for education, anchored within a human rights framework.

She also referred to the report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education led by UNESCO, the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization. The report  emphasised that this new social contract must be firmly grounded on two foundational principles — an expanded vision of the “right to education throughout life” and “a commitment to education as a public societal endeavour and a common good.”

“As one UNESCO person put it, education is about having one foot in the past and one foot in the future.”

Farida Shaheed had begun her talk by providing context for her work with the United Nations, explaining that the special rapporteurs are the U.N.’s “eyes and ears” as volunteers, not paid staff.

“But I have to say that sometimes, it feels like they need hearing aids,” she quipped, drawing laughter.

She also prefaced her lecture by acknowledging the student protests that are shaking up politics “everywhere” – France, Bangladesh, India, Argentina, Albania, Brazil.

Afterwards, she sat down for an in-depth conversation with the Mumbai-born human rights lawyer Jacqueline Bhabha. Dr. Bhabha is also a professor of practice in health and human rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, and is director of research, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University.

Their intense discussion left no time for questions from audience members in-person or online. Students and community members thronged her afterwards, seeking her views on matters ranging from how to enter the field to book recommendations, before the event manager whisked her away for a dinner reception.

“It was an extraordinary session,” ClassACT HR73 cofounder and chair Marion Dry told Global Southasia later. “There couldn’t have been a better choice for this important lecture. Academic freedom and rights should be at the top of everyone’s agenda.”

Beena Sarwar is a journalist, artist and filmmaker, founder editor of Global Southasia, living and teaching in Boston and Karachi. Email: beena@sapannews.com. On social media @beenasarwar.

This is a Global Southasia syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com

*Why do we write ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. This is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

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