Page 46 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

Dr Choltis Dhirathiti: ASEAN universities need ethics for ASEAN
Thinking about the larger project, it became clear to me
that the most important contributor to a forum for ASEAN
ethics is higher education. Not only are universities present
in all ASEAN countries but they provide ethics courses.
They also do research and foster thought leadership.
Fortunately, ASEAN had the ideal organisation. The
ASEAN University Network (AUN) is an arrangement for
linking 30 leading universities in all ten ASEAN countries.
The governance of the ASEAN University Network (AUN) is
made up of one Representative from each of the ASEAN
Member States working with the Secretary-General of
Dr Choltis Dhirathiti, Executive ASEAN, the Chairman of the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting
Director of the ASEAN University on Education (SOM-ED), the Director of Southeast Asian
Network (AUN)
Ministers of Education (SEAMEO), the Chairman of the AUN
Board of Trustees, and the AUN Executive Director.
I agreed to float the idea of an ethics forum to the AUN Executive Director, Choltis
Dhirathiti. Knowing the workload of the secretariat in dealing with the many projects
among its member and associated universities, I was not optimistic about the AUN’s
willingness to take on a new initiative that was still largely aspirational and risked being
politically sensitive.
Dr Choltis surprised me by immediately understanding the idea and agreeing to
consider it. He got back to me later saying that he would like to contribute. He set up a
team to work on organising ethics webinars since there was no option for in-presence
meetings during the Covid pandemic.
The team that Dr Choltis brought together ended up making the webinars successful
beyond our expectations. They contributed essentially to this book by writing up the
ECAAR dialogues in part two of this book and researching ASEAN sources.

ASEAN Institutions responsible for ethics

The three founding organisations represented human development, human rights and
higher education. But we were still far from covering the whole scope of ASEAN ethical
portfolio. So Marzuki, Choltis and I reached out to other ASEAN organisations to contribute
to our ethics dialogues.
We started with the ASEAN Secretariat, communicating this statement about how an
ethics forum is needed for ASEAN: 2

With the speed of innovation and social change, the ASEAN
Secretariat would benefit from input concerning issues, as well

2 The text is from an internal note to promote the benefits of our enterprise in informal conversations with
various contacts at the ASEAN Secretariat

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