Date:
Event location: RUDN, Moscow
Type: Special Events
‘Living Values of the University in a Globalising World’ was the title of the international conference staged on the 60th anniversary of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN). The Chairman of the MCO’s Governing Council, Dr. Sijbolt Noorda and Secretary General, David Lock, were both invited to speak.
RUDN was one of the first wave of pilot universities for the MCO’s Living Values project. In addition to embracing the project themselves, in May 2019 they had organised a workshop for 70 leaders and stakeholders from universities across Russia and had translated the Living Values materials into Russian.
Sijbolt Noorda spoke in the opening ceremony stressing how the careful identification and adoption of values enabled a university to become what it wanted to be. To achieve this universities had to focus on individuals and inclusiveness but by so doing they could operate with integrity, fairly and achieve trustworthiness.
David Lock described the Living Values project and shared the findings from the pilot universities.
Several of the other speakers also addressed the importance of values and at the end of the final plenary session Sijbolt Noorda was invited to share his reflections on the conference. These included how the adoption of strong and clear values enabled international students to know what they could expect from the university. This greatly diminished the risks which students faced when studying abroad and enabled those values to spread around the world.
The proceedings were followed by a ceremony in the Kremlin, attended by 5000 alumni and others related to RUDN, at which presentations were made and an impressive international performance was given by students.
More information about RUDN can be found at http://eng.rudn.ru and more information about the Living Values project, including the Russian translation
DJL
11-2-20
