Thai Higher Education towards 2020

Phasina Tangchuang and Alain Mounier, 2002

ABSTRACT
The paper stresses that today the role given to education tends to circumscribe higher education to a mere and reduced economic function. Globalisation serves as a legitimisation of this role. At a world level, a growing number of higher education institutions define their goals and criteria of efficiency in this perspective. The paper scrutinises the past and future of Thai higher education in the light of the history of western universities.
The paper contends that the comprehensive educational reform enacted in 1999, may whether improves the quality of public higher education institutions, or confine them within this too narrow and impoverished economic ambition. The paper claims that this danger has to be urgently assessed and action taken in order to keep it at bay.
The paper concludes that, by giving the primacy to microeconomic concerns, that is to individual and corporate interests, universities would let unattended more important social and political concerns. Universities would abandon their historical missions, that of contributing to the improvement of human life by developing human knowledge and that of helping to solve the millenary problem of the relationships between the individual and the society.

บทคัดย่อ
ดูเหมือนว่าอิทธิพลทางเศรษฐกิจจะตีกรอบให้การอุดมศึกษามีไว้เพียงเพื่อจัดการกับปัญหาด้านเศรษฐกิจเป็นหลัก ซึ่งอิทธิพลของโลกาภิวัตน์ได้สร้างความชอบธรรมดังกล่าว ดังนั้นในปัจจุบันสถาบันอุดมศึกษาส่วนใหญ่จึงกำหนดเป้าหมายและมาตรการเพื่อให้บรรลุภารกิจอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ ประเทศไทยเป็นประเทศที่ให้ความสำคัญด้านการศึกษากับบทบาทดังกล่าวจึงได้มีการปฏิรูปการศึกษาขึ้นภายใต้ข้อกำหนดใน พ.ร.บ.การศึกษา พ.ศ. 2542 ให้เกิดการพัฒนาคุณภาพการศึกษาขึ้น แต่ภายใต้ขาดความชัดเจนของบทบาทของสถาบันอุดมศึกษาที่พึงจะเป็นในปี 2020 การปฏิรูปการศึกษาอาจเป็นหนทางนำไปสู่จุดเพียงเพื่อพัฒนาด้านเศรษฐกิจเท่านั้น บทความนี้จึงได้ทบทวน ย้อนไปถึงประวัติศาสตร์ ที่มาที่ไปในบทบาทของสถาบันอุดมศึกษาว่ามีสิ่งที่พึงระลึกมากกว่า เช่น ความสำคัญที่มีต่อสังคมและการเมือง เนื่องจากสถาบันอุดมศึกษาในอดีตจะเน้นการพัฒนาองค์ความรู้และหาวิธีการแก้ปัญหาให้บุคคลและสังคมอยู่ร่วมกันอย่างสันติภาพ

Introduction
In this paper, our standpoint stresses that, compared to preceding periods, the economic role recently given to education dramatically changed. Higher education tends to be given a limited and circumscribed function to respond to economic demands[1]. In the world, a majority of higher education institutions, whether under social and political pressures or by conviction, are currently defining their goals and criteria along this framework.
In order to understand this recent change, it is necessary to analyse it in a historical perspective. As the history of Thai universities has been deeply shaped by Western models and as its current evolution still borrows from them, a comparative approach of Western and Thai histories is needed that may help to investigate the future of Thai higher education. Thai higher education is now at a crossroad where different paths are still open. The comprehensive educational reform enacted in1999 did not really choose one of these paths. This lack of a clear-cut choice may let the evolution of higher education spontaneously determined by social forces and restricted to and animated by a narrow and impoverished economic ambition.
In a world historical sequence that stretches from the 12th century to the 21st century, universities, influenced by Western experiences, were successively designed to serve churches, nation states and eventually businesses. They end up in putting unprecedented emphasis on the individual as an ultimate and extreme consequence of rationalism. We contend that, today, by giving the primacy to individual and corporate interests, universities may let unattended more important social and political concerns. In Thailand, Universities, following Western models, could take the same orientations and take the same risks of neglecting and even abandoning their historical mission to serve the society as a whole.

I . Higher Education and the Nation State in Thailand
Universities in Thailand have a short history that started in a modern form at the beginning of the 20th century. Western models were used to shape their role and organisations.

1.1 Higher Education in the West: from church to welfare state, 1150 to 1980
Throughout history, most universities have been organised to fulfil two purposes. One is the collection and development of the knowledge geared to the service of the interests they were supposed to serve, that is a purpose of expertise. The other one is disseminating this knowledge towards a larger population, this is a purpose of teaching.
For drawing very briefly the history of universities in western countries, we mainly borrow from Marcus Ford (forthcoming) quoted by John B Cobb (2002) and from Phillip Brown and alii (1997).

The Paris model : serving the church (1150)
The university of Paris (La Sorbonne) was founded between 1150 and 1170. It is one the earliest of the great universities that were established in Western medieval Europe. During its time, the Paris university exerted a major influence all over Europe.
The university of Paris aimed at serving the society primarily by serving the church. Its purpose was to strengthen Christianity and Christian faith by scholarly means. By collecting and transmitting existing knowledge, by studying its foundations and legitimacy, Christian tenet and faith could be better enounced and articulated. Also, the moral and political authority of ministers of the churches over the people resulted strengthened. The central assumption of the Paris model, as John Cobb says, is that Christian faith and broad learning were mutually supportive.
The curriculum and the organisation of the university in four Faculties reflect its missions. One faculty is the college of liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, and geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy) that delivers basic knowledge for further development and forge attitudes. This faculty also prepares students to enter one of the other three faculties conceived as graduate professional schools, namely medicine, canon law and theology. Not surprisingly, this latter was given the primacy.
Numerous European universities followed the Paris model. They were whether catholic, such as Bologna in Italy, Salamanca in Spain, whether Lutheran as Freiburg in a German state, or Anglican as Oxford and Cambridge in England. The Paris model still inspired the Harvard college in Boston that was founded in the mid-seventeenth century.
The influence of La Sorbonne in Europe declined with the development of nation-states.

The Halle model : serving the nation-state. (1697)
With the end of the religious wars and the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the primacy of Christian faith and the churches gave way to the primacy of the nation state. Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican started to call themselves French, Prussian or English.
The rise of the nation-state and of rationalism inherited from the Renaissance gave birth to a new university geared to the service of the nation-state rather than the church. Latin was abandoned and national languages became languages of instructions as levers for building of a national identity.
The new Halle university, established in 1967 in Brandeburg, was designed to prepare people and leaders to the service of the state. The university was built for a practical concern of delivering specific economic, technical and administrative skills fitted to strengthen the nation state, economically, politically and militarily. Law, public administration and military sciences, as well as economics, forestry, agriculture and mechanics constituted the core curriculum.
The Halle model became the major model of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In France, the ”great schools” (advanced studies of engineering; national school of administration, military school) established by Napoleon at the turn of the 19th century systematised the Halle model. French Great Schools were exclusively geared to training leaders of the army, public administration and state enterprises. They still exist for that same purpose today. In the United States, the Morrill Land Grand Act 1862 allowed each state to establish a state college, where primacy was given to agricultural, mechanics and military fields of study (they are often known today by their acronym: A&M universities)

The Berlin Model (1810): serving the development of knowledge
Within German speaking countries, appeared strong reactions against turning universities into practical economic and military goals and grounds for political concerns. Many intellectual felt that universities should mainly contribute to research for the development of knowledge. IN their view, as knowledge is a never solved problem, universities should stay at this task. For practical applications of knowledge, universities should give the baton to other institutions.
In 1810, after the Napoleonic wars, the university of Berlin was founded and based on principles of a true research university. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant was influential in shaping this vision. The world can be known by human experience of natural and social phenomena and not by faith or beliefs. Moreover, the world is ordered by human mind and spirit; by the “geist”. Thus, the inquiry of the world has to be organised into studies belonging to two sets of scientific disciplines: sciences (naturwissenschaften) inquiring the Nature, and humanities (giestewissenschaften) inquiring the works of human spirit.
The Berlin model was based on accurately defined organisational and scientific principles.
The organisation of the university must deliver the conditions of objectivity of research and of unbiased results. Hence, it must promote and protect an unconditional freedom of researchers. Specifically, researchers have to be intellectually and financially independent from vested interests and from economic and political pressures. They also have to be protected from financial contingencies. Moreover, in a true research university, professors have to be exempted from teaching, except for training future researchers.
Regardless of much of its initial intention of avoiding practical goals for the sake of genuine research, much of research results proved to have practical effects, in particular in the fields of technological, institutional and organisational changes.
The Berlin university exerted a very strong influence all over the world, and still do today. Its followers embraced its vision whether by adhesion to its principles, or by interests motivated by the powerful, positive and practical effects of sciences on the natural and social world. In the 19th century in United States, John Hopkins and Chicago universities were created on the principles of the Berlin model. After WWII in France, academic research has been organised in specific national research institutes, independent from universities in charge of teaching. These national research institutes were and still are an accurate replication of the Berlin model: freedom of researchers, exemption from teaching, and organisation in scientific disciplines.
Since the creation of the university of Berlin, the prestige of universities in the world has been mostly connected to the prestige of their research activity.

The university of the welfare state: the combination of Halle and Berlin models (1945 – 1980).
Actually, economic nationalism (Brown and alii 1997), - that characterised European economies and societies when they undertook their reconstruction after World War II -, imposed the alliance and combination of both Halle and Paris models of universities. The rationale of this alliance is firstly economic and secondarily political.
At an economic level, governments, relying on economic theories, were convinced that the best way to strengthen the nation-state in a peaceful and non communist world was to put into practice three related principles as pillars of the welfare state. These principles were prosperity, solidarity and opportunity. The principle of prosperity meant in practice the acceleration of economic growth through the development of scientific knowledge and technological change. The principle of solidarity assumed that economic growth actually nurtures social progress and economic security for all. Policies and new institutions warranted full employment, fair income distribution, and social protection, what could not be spontaneously achieved by a competitive and unregulated labour market.. The principle of opportunity meant that social positions should be acquired by merit and not by ascription. Social justice was the thread that linked these three principles, as equal opportunity for all to get better positions and income in life supposed economic growth and institutions of social solidarity. In that respect, equal access to education was seen as a crucial lever of efficiency and equity.
At a political level, the concern was to deliver an adequate education to all citizens in view of consolidating democracy. Preserving peace and preventing from totalitarian regimes were at stake. More importantly, by promoting social justice and social stability, and by enhancing individual capacity of judgement and opinion, education was seen as a key device of enhancing democracy. For Western culture, democracy can be protected by the rule of public law (the “state of rights”), but even more efficiently by individual attachment to freedom. In particular, by forging individual abilities to analyse, judge, criticise and voice, education actually prepare citizens for definitively keeping dictatorship at bay.
In this context, education as a whole and higher education in particular became a major instrument of economic nationalism and of consolidation of the welfare state (Avis and alii 2000). Borrowing from the Halle model, universities were geared to the training of an increasing number of political and public administration leaders required by the management of economic and social institutions of the welfare state. They also had to train an increasing number of teachers mobilised to deliver a longer scientific and democratic education to all children of the nation. Borrowing from the Berlin model, they all developed genuine research for practical concerns of technological improvements geared to stimulating economic growth and related social well being. During this period of rapid economic growth and social transformations, a majority of Universities in the world actually combined these two models.

1.2 The Halle model in Thailand: building the nation state
In the light of this rough history of western universities, the recent history of Thai higher education and perspectives for 2020 can be drawn.
At the dawn of 1916, higher educational institutions under the Education Department ( Normal school, Medical King’ s college sixth form and midwives’ school), numbered 11 with about 1600 students (in 1910). Other specific colleges where under the authority of the corresponding ministries (Royal military college, Royal naval college, Royal Survey college, College of agriculture, Civil service college, Post and telegraph school, gendarmerie school). They were necessary to train managers of Royal Administration of the Kingdom.
The first University, Chulalongkorn University, was created in 1916 by King Rama VI, and clearly established along the Halle model. Humanities, law and economics were the core subject matters aiming at preparing dedicated and efficient civil servants. Serving the royal project of consolidating and expanding the nation state, it was orientated at concentrating and improving public higher education.
With the same spirit of strengthening the nation state in the aftermath of the 1932 revolution, four prestigious universities were founded Thammassat in 1933, Kasetsart and Mae Jo in 1933, Mahidol in 1943.
A new and continuous wave of creation of new universities, build under the same Halle model, started in 1960 and lasted until the beginning of the 80ies. During this same period, old and new universities borrow some features of the Berlin model, adding research to their teaching activities. However, Thai universities have not entirely adopted the university model of the welfare state and rather have applied the Halle model. This probably can be explained by the fact that the development of a welfare state remained embryonic and uncompleted until today. When the State wanted to develop research activities, it set up specific national institutions outside the domain of public universities.
Numerous new public universities were created from 1985 until the end of the 90ies. They were more diverse in their goals. A shift of universities purposes occurred due to the decline of economic nationalism and the rise of globalisation (see below part II).
The number of Thai Higher education institutions doubled nationwide during the period 1985-1999. Under the Ministry of University Affairs, public universities amounted to 11 in 1985, corresponding to a number of 83,148 students. In 1999, public universities were 23, corresponding up to 759,297 students. Private universities also dramatically increased during the same period. We will return to this point below in Part II.
Public universities were mainly focused on delivering knowledge in the fields of social sciences and humanities (SSH) rather than in the field of sciences and technology (S&T). Even if the ratio between SSH and S&T enrolments declined from 2.5 in 1966 to 1.7 in 1971 (see Table 3), SSH remains the dominant fields of higher studies, compelling educational authorities to reverse this trend by a policy of quota of admissions by disciplines (see table 5).
However this evolution cannot be analyzed in the framework of serving the welfare state. The current context is precisely dismantling regulations and institutions of the welfare era, as it is generally believed that competitive markets, and particularly world market, would do better the job. The changing nature of university models is rather explained by the rise of private and individual concerns.

II. The university of globalisation in Thailand
As we stated in the introduction above, Thai universities are at a crossroad, and their foreseeable future relies much on well informed decisions whether by national authorities and university bodies. Ignorance of current trends could reveal to be lethal for balanced societies all over the world. This particularly true in Thailand where traditionally modern education has been deeply influenced by western educational models and by their current evolution towards a market driven higher education. Without a clear conscience of spontaneous trends triggered and fed by social actors, relevant public decisions regarding higher education could not be made. At the end of the day, Thai authorities might discover that the landscape of Thai universities would not fulfil fundamental functions needed by a developed and cohesive Thai society.

2.1 Old Anglo-Saxon values and private university: the Phoenix model
A new model of university is spreading out all over the world from an American origin. It is a university that serves individual and corporate interests. Phoenix university, California, is where a complete model of that sort can be found.
This new model takes its roots from two main origins. One is the dramatic economic crisis which started with the decrease of corporate profits at the end of the 1960s, and results in a long depression of Western economies. This depression ended about the end of the 1980s, leading to dismantling welfare states, convicted to be responsible for the crisis. The rationale of these policies actually relies on a deep rooted cultural trait of Anglo-Saxon cultures, that has been inherited from the 17th century English revolution. The State is viewed as encroaching on freedom and responsibility of individuals and businesses. It is hold for a source of economic inefficiency. This conception of freedom inspired political and economic reactions to the crisis, particularly in the United States with Ronald Reagan, and in the United Kingdom with Margaret Thatcher, and more recently in Australia with John Howard. Economic, institutional, and political restructuring has been thought as limiting State powers and actions in the economy and the society. This of course paid the way for rethinking the role of education and of universities.
In this view, as opposed to the era of the nation sate and the welfare state, education is not a public matter but a private one. Therefore, market mechanisms fit better than state policies to organise and guide higher education. Individuals and businesses have to take the baton of the defunct welfare State in educational issues. The same could be said concerning labour.
Higher education in the first instance, as the key of educational systems, has to be geared to serve individual and corporate interests through market-like mechanisms.
The Phoenix model offers a quite advanced version of a market driven higher education model, that responds to these ideals.
In this model, the university is a business as any other and has to be organised accordingly. The university is considered and structured as a profit-making private company which core craft is to produce and to sell educational goods.
University customers are its students. Therefore, the kind of educational services offered are determined by the demand of customers. The learner-centred or student- centred option solves this problem. Courses, branches and curricula are defined according to the explicit demand of students. Deriving from some once useful insights of the philosophy of education known as progressivism (Dewey 1916), needs and interests of students are what matters. Those needs are measured by the amount of fees students are ready to pay for getting educational services. This leads to a logic where the quality of education is not evaluated in term of acquisition of knowledge. Quality of education is evaluated in term of the quality of the job that acquired credentials allow to obtain, therefore in term of expected income and social positions. The best way to attract rich and numerous customers is to involve providers of jobs, that is employers, in the definition of curricula, so that employers’ labour and skills requirements can be matched .
Human resources management reflects a dramatic change in the conception of professors. These are employees that can be hired on a temporary basis in order to adjust the skills of the university labour force to the fluctuations of the demand for changing curricula. Their fitness to the job of teaching is no more assessed by objective criteria of their academic knowledge and their pedagogical skills. It is now assessed by the degree of satisfaction of customers, that is by an evaluation of professors by students. As practical knowledge and know-how acquired on the job by engineers and managers of private companies tend to fit better to the practical curricula in demand than academic knowledge of professors, the university has to have the freedom of hiring business specialists and professionals instead of academics.
Research activities are undertaken less for the advancement of universal knowledge than for responding to immediate interests of existing businesses that fund it. In United States, academics’ expectations of setting a start up have also been a widespread motivation for research activities.

On this basis, knowledge produced and acquired at the university is more and more of a practical kind, close to training, and determined by practical concerns of businesses and individuals. It borrows more from the Halle model than from the Paris or the Berlin ones, as it is quite easy to shift from serving the nation state economy to serving private businesses’ and individuals’ economic concerns

2.2 Toward the Phoenix model in Thailand? A rapid appraisal
Higher education in Thailand is borrowing more and more features of the Phoenix model. This appeared more as a spontaneously trend than as a real political will of Thai society. In any case, our contention is that this evolution can be prejudicial for the Thai nation.
A first indicator, - the ratio of enrolment in public and private higher education institutions -, shows a rapid change in favour of private education. This ratio was 1.95 in 1985, indicating that enrolment in public higher education is about twice the enrolment in private higher education. It declines down to 1.3 in 1999 indicating that private institutions developed more rapidly than public institutions (excluding public universities with unlimited admission).
However, this evolution does not mean that governments did not endeavor for developing public higher education. From table 2, it appears that public budget allocated to higher education increased from about 16000 baht by student in 1980 to 23000 baht in 1991. When setting open universities (unrestricted admission), the average cost by student dropped to 15000 baht in 1992, and rose again up to 20000 baht in year 2000. Apparently this effort has not be enough to face an increasing demand of the population for tertiary education, following previous booms of primary and secondary levels of education
Moreover, higher education institutions have been recently under heavy criticism. They have been accused not preparing students to cope with rapid and permanent changing conditions of life and to enter in the globalization age, where the economy is supposed to produce efficient and equitable societies. The National Education Act 1999 and former National Economic and Social Development Plans (NESDP) have intended to address this question by introducing new orientations and a new organization of higher education, along with a more comprehensive reform of the national educational system. Numerous conferences and public hearings have been held to address this question and to bring their contribution to the elaboration of a new legal educational framework. National debates reached a particular intensity in 1996. The Thai Farmer Bank for example organized a forum on “Thai Education in the Globalization Era: Progress and strengthening the Nation in the next Century”. SEAMEO RIHED, SEAMES, UNESCO, PROAP and the Ministry of Education organized an international conference on “Reengineering Higher Education for the 21st Century”. The Nation Education Commission organized a forum discussion on “Facing the future of Thai society: higher education role”. From this national debate emerged a consensus that higher education should 1) play a leading role in strengthening the competitive edge of Thai economy, of promoting international cooperation and of protecting the natural environment; 2) be opened and accessible for all Thai citizens; 3) provide a curriculum more relevant to national development needs; 4) support democracy ; 5) be a think tank and train agents for improving the efficiency of the national administration and 6) be more autonomous and bureaucracy free (cited in NEC, 2001: 6, 1997: 107-108).
This advocate a very broad role of universities in the society. However, narrower interpretations focuse on an mere economic role of universities. For instance, Prachuab Chaiyasarn (1999), by that time Minister of University Affairs, delivered a speech in ASAIHL conference on 23 July, 1999 stating that Thai university should be either a “University for Industry” or a “University with Industry”. Kanok Wongtrangarn (1999: 10) stated that “It has become very clear that universities need to adapt themselves to a new role of supporting industry in the near future. Universities need to acquire a comprehensive understanding of business. University personnel should be encouraged to work with industry through incentive schemes which explicitly reward university staff that reach out to meet the needs of industry.” These statements could be interpreted in the framework of the Halle- Berlin model, where academic research could contribute to the strengthening of national economy necessary to develop the welfare state. In the actual setting of economic patterns and of higher education ideas and practices, it should rather be interpreted in the framework of the Phoenix model where universities are urged to be at the services not so much of industry but of businesses, industrial or otherwise.
It seems that an increasing number of public schools and universities are adopting the Phoenix model. Reengineering educational institutions is operated by downsizing staffs, adopting a learner- (or client) centered approach, curricula that satisfy narrowly defined economic concerns, by developing management techniques centered on cost-benefit analysis and on a profit making rationality. In this context, we claim that the privatization of higher education is under way, and that the situation is almost beyond the crossroad where other choices were still possible. Ambiguities of the Educational Reform that did not clearly choose its educational model opened the door for the expansion of the Phoenix model. Our contention is that in 2020, and without a prompt and strong reaction of the State and other conscious social actors; Thai higher education will be dominated by a business logic and a market driven functioning. This could be a very serious problem, if major social issues would be let unattended by higher education institutions.

III. Conclusion: Problems ahead and anticipatory policy
The evolution of universities in the world towards the Phoenix model tends to give primacy to an individualistic society where individual and businesses matters more than the society itself. Globalisation and its effect on Higher Education purposes are getting to let unattended two major social problems that are emerging quite rapidly in contemporary societies.
The first problem is that of socialisation. The integration of the individual into one or various social groups, which is the form of controlling or eradicating reciprocal violence, is becoming problematic. Democratic regimes tried to solve this problem in their own ways. They are opposed to political forms that subordinate the individual to the society as it is the case of ancient societies and contemporary authoritarian regimes. Democratic regimes on the contrary trust the individual to understand, conceive by themselves and freely accept social concerns and social rules that eradicate reciprocal violence. Hence, democracy has permanently to find the ways of solving this tension between the individual and the society. Today, it seems that democracy are renouncing to handle this tension, by accepting the primacy of the individual over the society. Contemporary societies are dramatically transformed by the rise of individual and corporate selfishness, by the disappearance of principles and institutions of solidarity, and by the dismiss of welfare systems. The result is a dramatic increase of income and social inequalities. By accelerating this evolution, the expansion of the Phoenix model in Thai higher education may threat the viability and stability of our society and democracy [2].. It may contribute to an unbearable reciprocal violence, as it can be witnessed in Western countries. This problem will have to be tackled, whatever the principles and institutions of social life that will prevail in the next future, whether local, regional, national or global. Higher education has to be aware that adopting the Phoenix model becomes part of this problem ahead instead of being part of the solution.

The second problem let unattended by universities adopting the Phoenix model are the public and common goods of humanity. Problems ahead and impending catastrophes regarding strategic domains such as food, energy, water, poverty created by inequalities, technological and environmental risks have to be addressed and solved by leaders trained for that purpose by universities (John Cobb 2002).

Higher education would bear a great responsibility if it could not fulfil higher ideals than making money. The defence of peace and the well being of human beings should lead to more ambitious university models. These models will have to share, develop and transmit a common and universal scientific knowledge. They have to acknowledge and teach that the wealth of the planet is not its economic uniformity, - more akin with death-, but its diversity made of diverse, numerous, alive and valuable languages and cultures [3] .

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[1] In contemporary visions and theories, there is a general ambiguity that education would enhance economic growth through meeting the demand of vested interests. This is nothing but proved if we refer to political economy theories of economic growth. This ambiguity is maintained by recent economic theory, that states that education is an engine of economic growth (Denison 1962 and 1967, OECD 1974, Schultz 1961 and 1970, Becker 1962 and 1964, Lucas 1988, Romer 1990 and 1990). Despite opposite evidences (Fine 2000), this theory exerts an unprecedented influence in international and national spheres and inspires most educational policies (OECD 1998, 2001, World Bank 1998).
[2] It is easy to observe a rapid development of reciprocal violence in a majority of democratic countries. As showed by J. Galbraith (2000), economic inequalities are responsible for social unrest, crimes and social violence.

[3] Assertion proposed by the French philosopher Michel Serres: “L’humanisme universel qui revient” (“Universal humanism is coming back”), in Entretiens du XXI siècle, UNESCO , Paris, 21° séance, 18 juin 2002, Paris. Published in Le Monde 13 juillet 2002.