The eighth-annual United Nations Global Colloquium of University Presidents will congregate at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on 12-13 April to discuss threats to cultural heritage sites, which include warfare, climate change, development, theft and neglect. The invitation-only meeting brings together university presidents and faculty from international institutions to discuss topics of immediate concern to the United Nations and the global community.
“At this moment, [various threats] are eroding our cultural heritage”, Stefan Simon, the director of Yale’s Institutions for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPHC) said in a press statement. “Militant groups are invested in cultural cleansing and destruction, [and], at the same time, cutting-edge research at the crossroads of science and the humanities provides us with unprecedented tools to study and preserve cultural heritage.”
The colloquium is sponsored by six US institutions: Brown University, Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. It is additionally supported by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Participants will include presidents and faculty from universities from around 20 nations, including India, Ghana the United Kingdom and the US, including representatives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
From 6 April, Yale and its partners will also host a series of public satellite workshops, panels, tours and exhibitions. Among the programmes is a workshop on 11 April at the Victoria & Albert Museum addressing the humanitarian impact of the destruction of cultural sites. For a full list of the programmes, see Yale’s event calendar.