JAMES M. HESTER I have been invited to tell you how we got the UNU started twenty-five years ago. I am delighted to do so because it was an exceptional experience.

One day in November 1974 1 received a telephone call in my office at New York University from Secretary General Waldheim of the United Nations inviting me to become rector of the United Nations University. I was not completely surprised because I had previously had discussions with a friend, Roger Gaudry, chairman of the Council of the United Nations University, who said the Council was nominating me among others to be the first rector of the new institution. Therefore I had had several weeks to think about the possible invitation and was able to tell the Secretary General that I was favourably inclined toward accepting his offer. I had be n president of New York University for thirteen years and was ready for a change. I was deeply interested in international academic collaboration and I had been trained in the Japanese language, had worked in Japan thirty years earlier and ha developed a strong interest in and attraction to Japan. The prospect of organizing a new international academic enterprise under the sponsorship of the United Nations and UNESCO and strongly supported by the Government of Japan plus the opportunity to live in Japan with my family for five years Was very appealing to me.

As soon as the telephone conversation with the Secretary General ended, one of the most demanding experiences of my life began. I could not leave the presidency of New York University on short notice, but the UNU was ready to get started. At the time of my appointment, C. V. Narasimhan, former Under Secretary General and Chef de Cabinet to Secretary General U Thant who had proposed the UNU to the General Assembly, was the UN official responsible for the UNU. He was very ably assisted by Mr. Yasushi Akashi and Mrs. Momoyo Ise. Narasimhan worked out an arrangement whereby I could officially conduct UNU business while remaining president of New York University until the following August. A UNU office was set up near my NYU office and another UNU office was set up in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to start organizing the future UNU Centre in Tokyo.

Early on I was able to persuade Dr. Ichiro Kato, former president of the University of Tokyo, to become vice rector for administration and head the office in the Imperial Hotel to oversee the planning and organization of the UNU Centre. The Centre was scheduled to open the following September on the 29th floor of the Toho Semei Building, a new skyscraper in Shibuya, not far from the building in which we are meeting. I also sent an assistant, Roy Lockheimer, who had been working for the Japan Society in New York and spoke Japanese, to assist Dr. Kato in planning the Centre. I visited Tokyo several times that winter, and in early September 1975 my family and I arrived in Tokyo to live and work for five extraordinary years.

Much was accomplished in planning and organizing the UNU before we went to Japan while I was still president of New York University. In January 1975 1 met with the Council for the first time in Tokyo and participated in discussions about which "pressing global problems of human survival, development and welfare" the university should tackle first. The Council had already met several times and had previously discussed possible program directions. In my meeting with the Council in Tokyo, the discussions centered on three broad topics that were at the top of the international agenda of global concerns at that time: world hunger; human and social development; and the use and management of natural resources. I suggested to the Council that those three topics would give the young institution an adequate but prudently limited set of initial programs, and the Council approved my recommendation.

With that decision made, my attention was focused on recruiting an international staff. Luckily I had been the American member of the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities, and for five years I had met twice a year with university heads from many countries. That is how I knew Dr. Roger Gaudry who, in addition to chairing the UNU Council, had also been president of the International Association of Universities. Dr. Gaudry, rector of the University of Montreal, was a charming gentleman with extensive contacts throughout the world and a natural chairman of any group to which he belonged. As first chairman of the Council of the UNU, he gave my colleagues and me the kind of support a fledgling administration needs in launching a complicated, new institution.

Two other major figures in organizing the UNU came from the International Association of Universities: Dr. Kato, who I have mentioned, and Dr. Alexander A. Kwapong, who became the first vice rector for planning and development. Dr. Kato, a man of great intelligence, dignity, and charm, made considerable sacrifices to devote time and energy to planning the headquarters and building the initial administration of the UNU. As former president of the most prestigious university in Japan and a distinguished professor of law, he was much in demand for consultancies, committee work and other appointments of many kinds. He nonetheless postponed that activity to fulfill a responsibility he felt to the role Japan had played in sponsoring the UNU and to his friends from the International Association of Universities who were organizing the UNU in Tokyo. Dr. Kato was particularly helpful in establishing good relations between the UNU and the agencies of the Government of Japan with which we worked in setting up the headquarters and working out financial matters. After he stepped down as vice rector for administration, he became senior advisor to the rector on relations with the host country and performed that responsibility very successfully. The UNU has long enjoyed good relations with the Japanese government, which has been important to maintaining a productive working environment for the University, and much credit for that goes to the foundation laid by Dr. Kato.

One of the early appointments he made that was of great benefit to the University was of Shigeo Minowa, former director of the Tokyo University press, as the first chief of academic services, responsible for the library, publications, and computer services. Shigeo is a man of great intelligence, humor and energy who had to launch a library without any books, a publications program before there was anything to publish, and a computer program before computers were very highly developed. He persisted in his assignment with great determination and eventual success, and was succeeded by Amadeo Arboleda, a similarly energetic and creative professional who carried the publications program forward vigorously.

As I mentioned, the second leader to be recruited from the, International Association of Universities Administrative Board was Dr. Kwapong as vice rector for planning and development. Fund raising was crucial to the growth of the university, but it was not easy. Japan had pledged $100 million to the endowment in five annual installments of $20 million. A hundred million dollars sounded like a lot of money and many people did not realize that it was endowment from which we could spend only the income and that the first year we had only the income from an endowment installment of $20 million to fund a headquarters and launch a worldwide program. Japan was admired and envied throughout the world for its economic miracle, and that gave the impression to some that the UNU could get lots of money from Japan and did not need support from other countries. Moreover, the format of the University as a research and advanced training institution calling itself a university but lacking a campus and degree students confused many people.

Being in charge of fund raising under those circumstances took a lot of courage and personality. Fortunately, Alex Kwapong had both. He had risen from a small village in Ghana to earn a distinguished doctorate in classics at Cambridge University and to become vice chancellor of the University of Ghana and a leading spokesman for higher education in the British Commonwealth. He made friends easily and won many supporters for the UNU. He found an able assistant in S. Chidambaranathan, who had participated as an observer in the founding committee that drew up the Charter of the UNU and who continues to serve the University in New York today as special advisor to the rector.

During the late winter, spring, and summer of 1975, while I was still at New York University, I worked up a table of organization for the university and met with experts from many countries, the UN, UNESCO, and foundations to get advice about staffing the programs. I wanted to appoint a vice rector for each program who would be expert in the subject matter and have wide international contacts. Through a famous professor at MIT, Carol Wilson, I learned about Nevin Scrimshaw, an Institute Professor at MIT.

Scrimshaw was one of the leading experts on food and nutrition in the world and an advisor to the World Health Organization. He not only understood the problems we were to study through his WHO and other associations, he knew the people and institutions throughout the world with whom we should collaborate. He is a man of enormous energy, powerful intelligence, and an endless capacity for work. Using those attributes and his extensive network of colleagues, he was able quickly to launch a program that was eventually recognized by the World Food Prize, considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in that field. Two of the main initial thrusts of his program were post-harvest food conservation and human nutritional requirements under conditions prevailing in developing countries. Finding someone to head the Human and Social Development Program was more difficult and did not occur until the following year. The social sciences are complex, contain many schools of thought, conflicting ideologies and opinions, and not a few prima donnas. We experienced all these characteristics in the expert meeting for the human and social development program we held in Tokyo in the fall of 1975. And then a candidate was suggested who proved to be the right choice. He was Kinhide Mushakoji, director of the Institute of International Relations at Sophia University in Tokyo, a scholar with experience in Europe and America and a wide network of friends and associates throughout the world. He quickly organized a program that explored many of the leading issues in development studies and brought scholars of great distinction and fame to the work of the University. Among the initial topics in his program were goals, processes, and indicators of development, technology transfer, and the lessons to be learned from Japan's adoption of Western technology. The social scientists in his program challenged some of the premises of the World Hunger Program as not sufficiently reflecting the social conditions affecting the problems of hunger, and, after some interprogrammatic debate, helped to broaden the perspectives of the food scientists. This was very useful multidisciplinarity at work - a quality we hoped the University, unencumbered by departmental traditions, would achieve.

The last of three program vice rectors to be selected, Walther Manshard, was brought to-my attention by the member of the Council from the Federal Republic of Germany, Dr. Reimut Jochimsen. Walther was director of the Institute of Geography at the University of Freiburg and had been principal director of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resources Research at UNESCO. Dr. Manshard had many of the same qualities as the other program vice rectors: high intelligence, professional expertise, driving energy, and many contacts throughout the world. His initial program focused on such problems as desertification, destruction of tropical forests, upland-lowland interactive-systems, and alternative sources of energy.

During the spring and summer of 1975, a lot of attention was given to three expert meetings to be held in Tokyo that fall to plan details of the programs. This was a tremendous undertaking for a fledgling institution, but we carried it off, and on the basis of the recommendations we received at those meetings, I made program recommendations which were approved by the Council a few months later at a meeting in Caracas in January 1976. Within six months of our official opening in September 1975, outlines of the programs were in place and a small international program staff was being assembled in Tokyo. We felt a strong need to maintain contact with the experts we had consulted. We therefore established an advisory committee for each program.

Starting in 1976 the program advisory committees met in Tokyo at least once each year. This enabled us to maintain contact with leading work in each area and to obtain critical evaluations of our efforts. We eventually scheduled the three advisory committees to meet simultaneously in Tokyo so the program officers and advisors in different disciplines could interact with each other. Many members of these distinguished groups began to take personal interest in the advancement of the UNU and behave like loyal faculty members of a well-established university. We were beginning to create the "international community of scholars" foreseen in the Charter. Those advisors did much to spread the word about our institution and to lead us to important opportunities for institutional collaboration.

We also felt a need to make the University better known throughout the world and therefore organized a series of what we called consultative meetings. The first of these was held in London in October, 1976, at the Royal Society and included leaders from academic, research, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Similar meetings were held over the next several years in Paris, Bonn, Stockholm, Madrid, Warsaw, Moscow, Athens, Bagdad, Kuala Lumpur, Caracas, Washington, Ottawa, Doha, Shanghai, Tokyo, New Delhi, Nairobi, Accra, and Mexico City. We also held meetings with the Association of African Universities and the Association of Arab Universities. At these meetings usually the three program vice rectors, Alex Kwapong and I explained the nature of the University, described what we were doing and planning and invited questions, comments, and suggestions. organizing the consultative meetings consumed a lot of time, energy, and money, but they were extremely useful in publicizing the existence of the UNU, obtaining new ideas for our work, and in obtaining institutional collaboration. They also helped in obtaining governmental financial pledges and contributions.

The Charter indicated that the University could operate through free-standing, "incorporated" institutions as well as through existing institutions that became associated with the University. Because we were under such pressure to produce results quickly, we decided to concentrate at the outset on establishing networks of collaborating associated institutions and individual scholars rather than try to set up satellite incorporated institutions. During the first five years, we established no "incorporated" institutions but more than twenty networks with twenty-four associated institutions and 131 research and training units in some sixty countries. We also financed the training of several hundred UNU fellows at associated institutions who returned to their home countries often to use their greater expertise in positions of public responsibility in food policy, natural resource use, and various aspects of development strategy. We were also publishing two highly regarded scientific journals, The Food and Nutrition Bulletin and Abstracts of Selected Solar Energy Technology, and a growing number of books and monographs.

Fund-raising was a continuous activity from the time that I took office. As early as December 1974, a few weeks after my appointment, Roger Gaudry and I accepted an invitation from the Iranian member of the Council, Dr. Majid Rahnema, to call on the Shah of Iran to solicit a contribution. We were not successful. I was later told it was because the Shah did not understand that the UNU would not have students. He had apparently become unenthusiastic about university students. In between expert meetings in the fall of 1975, Alex Kwapong and I went to Europe on a fund-raising trip and were successful in several countries. For the next five years, Alex organized a series of trips we took between meetings in Tokyo so that we could acquaint as many governments as possible with the existence of the University, its purposes and programs, and its need for support. By the end of the first five years, we had raised almost $45 million from thirty-six countries.

But not all news was good. Our greatest failure was in Washington, DC. Each year Alex and I would spend time there building a case with the White House, the State Department, and Congress. Congress had put a limit on the amount of UN-related appropriations the United States could make. To get a contribution for the UNU meant.cutting contributions for such agencies as UNDP or UNICEF. Since the US had always taken responsibility for those agencies, it was not feasible to cut their budgets. The administration backed us, but after presenting my case to the Director of the office of Management and Budget, James Lynn, for an hour, he advised me: "There are two things wrong with your story, Dr. Hester, United Nations and University; neither is a popular subject in Congress at this time." The popularity of universities in the US had declined as a result of student unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. American foundations have supported UNU programs, but support for new UN initiatives as well as for the UN itself still encounters serious problems in the US Congress, and therefore the big endowment contribution from the US Government for which we worked has yet to come.

Needless to say, it took some courage on our part to race out into the world to solicit cooperation with and contributions for an institution that was just getting started and was called a university but was not like a traditional university. Our courage was strengthened by the imprimatur of being the official university of the United Nations, and by the very generous support of the Government of Japan. For that we could thank several thoughtful Japanese leaders who had advocated the creation of the university, had sought to have its headquarters located in Japan, and who had encouraged the Government of Japan to provide major financial support. Two important names stand out among those Japanese leaders. The first is Michio Nagai, whose editorials in the Asahi Shimbun and leadership as Minister of Education, had a tremendous impact in advancing the cause of the UNU. After Dr. Kato stepped down as senior advisor to the rector, and a brief service in that role by Dr. Saburo Okita (who became Japan's Foreign Minister), Dr. Nagai served as an extremely effective senior advisor to the rector for many years.

The second name that stands out among the major Japanese supporters of the UNU is that of Hiroshi Kida, Vice Minister in the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. It was he who was persuaded by Mrs. Rose that there should be a UNU in Japan and who ever after has been one of the University's most faithful and enthusiastic friends.

The University was able to go into action quickly because it drew upon the resources of existing organizations. I have mentioned the role of the International Association of Universities in whose meetings for five years before 1975 Dr. Gaudry, Dr. Kato, Dr. Kwapong and I became friends. I should also mention the United Nations Development Program, from which we recruited several leading members of our administrative staff thanks to suggestions from an early advisor, John McDearmid, a veteran UNDP officer. Louis Lessard and Douglas Manson, who served as directors of administration, and Rabinder M. Malick, chief of conferences and general services, came to us with great useful experience from the UNDP. We did not have to invent administration. We borrowed it.

We also drew upon the UN itself. Our excellent legal counsel, Zednick Seiner, came from UN headquarters. We stole from the Ford Foundation. Jose V. Abueva-, a very thoughtful man, who had worked for the foundation in his native Philippines, became the secretary of the University and later the president of the University of the Philippines. We stole from the British Government. Ray Fleming, who became a very effective director of information, came from the British Information Agency. And we stole from the Japan Development Bank. Akio Komatsuki, who came from that bank, became an outstanding finance officer and now director of the administrative management division. And from the beginning we were able to recruit an excellent administrative, technical and secretarial staff, both from Japan and from other countries.

While we were getting started, we were made aware of various potential dangers that could jeopardize the crucial independence and academic freedom of the new institution. Some observers considered many UN organizations highly politicized and warned that the UNU might feel pressure to adopt one ideology or another. There was once a suggestion made to the Council that the UNU accept The New International Economic Order as its theme. That was the name of a position that, as I recall, and to oversimplify, advocated radical transfer of economic resources from industrialized to developing countries. No one else on the Council supported that suggestion, but since most of the pressing global problems on which our programs focused had their worst manifestations in developing countries, most of the work of the UNU was devoted to improving conditions in the developing world.

Another potential danger of which we were warned was that the host country, Japan, might seek to influence the affairs of the UNU. Considering the size of the Japanese investment in the University, there was surprisingly little evidence of such an effort. Instead, the Government of Japan backed our efforts solidly and respected our academic autonomy and institutional independence.

An interesting example of the institutional independence we were afforded was the right we were given to select the site for the permanent headquarters in Tokyo which Japan had pledged to provide. Early on I was shown as a possible site a former military base on the outskirts of Tokyo that would have provided a spacious campus. I was also shown a former college of education in a more crowded section of Tokyo as well as other sites. My principal concerns were that the UNU headquarters be in a prominent location so t hat as many Japanese residents and foreign visitors as possible would know of its existence and that the building itself be an example of fine architecture that would symbolize the ambitious purpose of the UNU. The Governments of Japan and of the City of Tokyo apparently accepted those arguments. The site and design of this building were chosen during the rectorships of my successors, but I am pleased by the fact that they.reflect the position I took many years before.

The governance of the University during my rectorship washandled by a committee of the vice rectors and principal administrators that met once a week when we were in Tokyo. We made decisions by consensus, and it was my duty to divine the consensus. I tried to be fair to all perspectives, and everyone was called on to express his opinion. We knew we were making decisions that could affect the integrity, quality, and success of this important institution for years to come, and many issues were hotly debated.

Discussions such as these are difficult when conducted within a single country and culture. When you add to the inevitable differences of opinion and style that arise among intellectuals the differences that arise from totally different cultural backgrounds, complexity is compounded. In those officers meetings, at one time we had the combination of a very experienced, confident, and articulate American food scientist, Nevin Scrimshaw; an equally confident, matter-of-fact German geographer, Walther Manshard; a very charming and sophisticated Japanese social scientist, Kinhide Mushakoji; a very voluble, humorous and sometimes teasing Ghanian classics scholar, Alex Kwapong; a thoughtful, earnest and sometimes passionate Filipino educator, Pepe Abueva; a terse, precise and careful English public information officer, Ray Fleming; and a Scottish administrative officer with a military background and years of experience with UNDP, decisive, opinionated, and practical, Douglas Manson. Not all of these participants found it easy to share their work in the open forum through which I sought to create collegial governance. However, it seemed to work. We understood each other, and we initiated, supervised, and evaluated a tremendous amount of research and advanced training activity in many parts of the world. Much of the time many of us were in deep jet lag from the long flights back to Tokyo from Europe, America, Africa and other parts of the world. Jet lag tends to make many people irritable. That we got on so well was all the more remarkable.

When I think back through the years to my UNU experience, it is those meetings that first come to mind. We held myriad gatherings during those five years: expert meetings, advisory committee meetings, Council meetings, consultative meetings, many large staff meetings of everyone working at the Tokyo Centre, but no meetings were as substantive, demanding, and influential for the future of the UNU as those multinational, multicultural, multidisciplinary, multi-personality engagements in which the most important practical decisions about making the UNU Charter real were thrashed out. The potential importance of our work for the UN, for the global academic community, for the possible beneficiaries of our research and training, and for the host country that had invested so heavily in our success weighed heavily on us and inspired the goodwill we felt toward one another.

I am deeply grateful to the rector for inviting me to participate in this seminar. My experience as first rector was a major event in my life, for which I am most thankful. I am proud of what we achieved and of what the University has accomplished since I completed my term in 1980. The establishment of incorporated institutions spanning the globe has given the UNU a worldwide physical presence we could not attempt in those early years. Fortunately, the Charter of the University is a rich and flexible document that enables the UNU to evolve in many ways in response to new conditions and opportunities. The Charter will remain a challenge to succeeding generations of UNU leaders to realize all that might be done to build a growing international community of scholars working together to solve "pressing global problems of human survival, development, and welfare that are the concern of the United Nations and its agencies." Those are the words that inspired us twenty-five years ago and will continue to inspire those with responsibility for shaping this timely institution. They express the UNU's role as a means to employ worldwide academic.resources to add ress new problems of a global society. As we look back we see how prescient those who drew up the Charter were to design a new kind of university for a new kind of world.