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Nanette Shaw
Carnegie, Rockefeller, British, and Dutch Contribute Nearly $2,000,000 Landmark Project Headed by Presidential Professor Thomas G. Weiss The City University Graduate Center has received nearly $2 million from four different sources to produce a landmark intellectual history of the United Nations in the world economy. The multi-year, multinational project will be launched in April and headed by Thomas G. Weiss, who was recently named the Graduate Center's first Presidential Professor. The Carnegie Corporation of New York is contributing $500,000, the Rockefeller Foundation $300,000, the Dutch government $525,000 (G1,000,000), and the British government $500,000 (£300,000). The project will examine the UN's contributions to economic and social discourse since 1945, keeping in mind those with most relevance for the challenges of the 21st century. Such a record has never been compiled and is particularly imperative at this time when many of the key participants who helped create or nurture path-breaking ideas are still alive to contribute to the oral history that is an integral component of the project's research. Aimed at informing new approaches to international collaboration, it will review those ideas and concepts that have emerged from the last half-century of UN deliberations and that continue to energize international public policy. Such areas as trade and finance, preferential access, the gender revolution, poverty elimination, human rights, sustainability, and responses to international economic crises will be featured. The project will be guided by an International Advisory Council and managed by an independent secretariat, which will be the hub for a worldwide network of authors and advisers. Weiss will be joining forces with two co-directors, Richard Jolly and Louis Emmerij, who themselves have played major roles in international development thinking in the last three decades. The project will be based at the Graduate Center, with its highly ranked doctoral programs, the state-of-the-art conference and communications facilities at its new campus on Fifth Avenue, proximity to the UN, and relevant centers such as the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Doctoral students will provide the project with a pool of qualified researchers while, symbiotically, the project will provide the students with significant research opportunities. It is estimated that the project will take a minimum of five years to complete. "At a time when the world is undergoing a profound change in the structure of international economic relations, there is amove to rethink issues of global governance and question the 'Washington consensus' favoring open markets, free trade,and capital flows," said Professor Weiss. "An accurate look at the past should provide an antidote to contemporary ahistoricism — helping to put an end to 'the end of history' — as well as generate better informed partnerships and new approaches to international collaboration. The World Bank and the IMF have their histories, and it is frankly scandalous that the UN's role in the world of ideas and action has not been documented. The world organization frequently is criticized as a useless talk shop. This project concerns the UN as a creator and nurturer of concepts that have penetrated the policy lexicon and often been eminently practical." The project will generate 12 to 15 monographs on well-defined economic or social areas of UN activity, drawn from three overarching studies that will be published in book form: The UN's Role in Responding to Global Crisis; Intellectual Giants of the United Nations; and The UN and the Ideas of Economic and Social Development. The project will also produce tapes and transcripts of interviews with 50 prominent individuals, including Nobel laureates in economics, who have played key roles in the UN's intellectual history. Weiss joined the faculty of the Graduate School's Ph.D. Program in Political Science in the fall of 1998 and was appointed Presidential Professor in February 1999. Previously at Brown University as a research professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies (1990-98), he also held a number of administrative assignments (including director of the Global Security Program and associate dean of the faculty), was executive director of the Academic Council on the UN System,and co-directed the Humanitarianism and War Project. Previously he held several senior posts within the UN system (at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Commission for Namibia, the UN Institute for Training and Research,and the International Labour Organisation) and was executive director of the International Peace Academy. He currently sits on the editorial boards of Global Governance and The Third World Quarterly. His most recent book is Military Civilian Interactions: Intervening in Humanitarian Crises (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). The author or editor of some 25 books, he has written extensively about international peace and security, humanitarian action, and development, including the second edition of a textbook, The United Nations and Changing World Politics, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), with David P. Forsythe and Roger A. Coate. Jolly is special adviser to the administrator of the UN Development Programme and architect of the widely acclaimedHuman Development Report; he previously was deputy executive director of UNICEF and the director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Emmerij recently retired as special advisor to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank; he previously had been the president of the OECD Development Centre in Paris, the rector of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and the director of the world Employment Programme of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. The Graduate School and University Center (GSUC) is the doctorate-granting institution of the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, GSUC draws its faculty of more than 1,700 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, GSUC has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. GSUC also houses 23 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate School's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. |