I am honored to join you for the 75th anniversary of United Nations Day. With all its political complexities and imperfections, the founding of the United Nations (UN) remains a towering example of global collaboration — living proof that humans can come together and find peaceful ways to solve conflict and support human development.

Five years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted a new framework for global development structured around 17 so-called Sustainable Development Goals. These global goals represent the most consequential challenges we face as a species: from health and hunger to gender equality and biodiversity. They are not nice-to-haves; they are essential for humans to thrive and even survive on our planet. 

Think of the goals as a strategic plan for the world. A set of priorities that affect all of us. All countries. All religions and ethnicities. Rich and poor. Men and women. And a set of challenges to be addressed by all actors: government, business, civil society, and, of course, academia.

Research universities like Georgia Tech develop the talent and ideas needed to solve these challenges. At Georgia Tech, we recognize our responsibility in our mission statement: to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The SDGs signal the areas where our ideas, talent, and actions can have the biggest impact in improving the human condition. That’s why we’re committed to supporting them.

The good news is that we are not alone in this.

In spring 2019, I chaired a task force of university leaders in Bellagio, Italy, that proposed the creation of what is now the University Global Coalition, a platform of collaboration and collective action to mobilize the efforts of universities around the world. In September 2019, we announced the Coalition at the Rockefeller Foundation in NYC, coinciding with the gathering of the UN General Assembly. We held a working session with colleagues from around the world, to begin translating our goals into concrete action.

On my way to New York for these meetings, I spent the night in Washington, D.C., and went for an early run to my favorite spot in the nation’s capital: the monument to Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I wondered what Dr. King would have advised us to do. It was written on the wall:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

If we are to have peace on Earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

I felt Dr. King was speaking directly to us.

I realize 2020 is a year most of us would rather forget — a global pandemic, a national reckoning with systemic racism, growing economic inequality and unemployment, and a digital divide that is accentuating the differences between the haves and have-nots. I suggest that we don’t forget 2020, but rather turn it into a year of transformative learning.

I hope we learn that, no matter how hard we may try, we cannot isolate ourselves from the perils others face. Viruses don’t care about human borders. Your carbon emissions heat my climate as much as yours. My economic well-being affects yours. We are in this together.

I hope we learn that while, in the long run, we all suffer the consequences of the existential challenges we face, in the short run — to paraphrase George Orwell — some of us are more equal than others. Lower-income people get hit harder by Covid-19, and their children get hit harder when their schools close and send them home. Marginalized communities get hit harder by poor air quality, rising sea levels, and natural disasters. Whatever solutions we put in place need to be informed by the disparate impact the problems — and solutions — have on different people.

Let’s hope that 2020 also teaches us just how crucial science is. That we need to support science and listen to it when we make decisions. Charlatans and miracle cures quickly lose their appeal. But when Covid-19 hits my family, when the hurricane threatens my town, when climate and air quality threaten my life and my children’s future, the systematic, collaborative, rational, cumulative, testable, disciplined search for truth that we call science is all we can trust. As Georgia Tech’s new battle cry says, “Science works, y’all.”

Finally, let 2020 be a reminder that all voices need to be at the table when we work on solutions. As the old adage goes, “If you want to go far, go together.” Big problems demand data and perspectives from multiple disciplines, specialists and multidisciplinary interpreters, technical expertise and skillful leadership, scientific analysis and moral judgment. Because no one entity, nation, or person has all the pieces of the puzzle, collaboration, diversity of perspectives, and partnerships are essential to find viable, effective, and fair solutions.

Since I returned to Georgia Tech a year ago, I have been delighted to see how natural this way of thinking is to us. I have been inspired by the work that is already happening across disciplines: from inventing a new toilet that can help reduce child mortality around the world due to infectious disease, to reducing the cost of renewable energies, to producing new diagnostics and therapeutics for Covid-19. We have the talent and the resources to make a difference.

After a year-long inclusive process, the global goals now appear by name in Georgia Tech’s new strategic plan as a lodestar to help guide our teaching, research, operations, and service.

And while our solutions will have global relevance, we know we can play a unique and vital role to lead our campus, city, and state in finding solutions that matter locally — like improving access to higher education, closing gender disparities and racial inequities, reducing carbon emissions, and driving inclusive innovation and economic opportunity.

Our commitment is not only to share what we know, but to partner and learn from others, exchange ideas, take responsibility, and build vital connections — on campus, in Atlanta, and among institutions — so we can all accomplish even more.

On Oct. 24, 1945, the UN officially came into existence. I can only imagine the challenges people throughout the world experienced 75 years ago, less than two months after the end of the devastation of World War II.

Humankind proved then how, when we act together, change can happen. Let’s not waste this opportunity to come together and build a better world. Indeed, we can do that.