Ex-vice-director of and retired professor from the UNB, the author was, for over 17 years (1981-1999), the director of the UNESCO Higher Education Division. He thus supervised the elaboration of the UNESCO higher education policy documents and coordinated the organization of this organization's World Conference on Higher Education, in 1998. He considers that there is no neutrality in that matter, most particularly in his case, because of the responsibilities he assumed during almost two decades at UNESCO. He remembers that, ten years ago, two documents concerning higher education policies were issued at the international level by the World Bank and by the UNESCO. Both were based on similar diagnoses, but came to totally diverse conclusions, since they were the produce of radically different visions of society. One side considered higher education as a tool to consolidate the market, while the other saw it as a collective entity that should be taken into account according to its cultural and social specificities. Nowadays, with the interference of new actors, such as the wto for example, the officials from these two organizations are getting closer in their positions, and one cannot predict which thrust the academic community and the States members of these organizations will adopt in the future.
Higher education policy document; Commoditization of education; Public good; Public service