Ximena Solorzano, Contributing Photographer

Human Rights Studies is returning to Yale College — as a certificate program.

Starting in spring 2025, students will be able to take courses to count toward a Human Rights Studies Certificate, the details of which will be available by December, according to Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis. The certificate will be hosted jointly through Yale College and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. 

“We’re hoping to get the list of courses by December,” Lewis told the News. “It’s just not ready this week for the opening of registration, unfortunately, because we’re still figuring out which courses are going to count for the certificate.”

Lewis added that because the spring course registration period for Yale College will close late in December, students may have the opportunity to switch into courses for the human rights certificate before the Dec. 19 registration deadline or during the add/drop period from Jan. 6 to Jan. 22.

Professor Bonnie Weir, assistant dean for undergraduate education at the Jackson School, will be in charge of determining the program’s specifics until the University can hire an instructor for a potential core seminar in the certificate, per Lewis.

“There’s a little bit of a question about the course seminar — whether you take it in sophomore or junior year, how big it is, whether it’s a requirement or only recommended,” Lewis said. “So there are some details that are all related to the courses that will be worked out, like the exact requirements.”

The new certificate is a departure from the original format of the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights Studies, which was hosted through the Schell Center for International Human Rights. The original program followed an intensive format in which a selective cohort of 15 students would complete a senior capstone project and attend social events, workshops and symposia in addition to four elective courses and a requisite introductory course. 

Following the retirement of professor emeritus James Silk, who founded and directed the human rights program, the program suspended applications in fall 2023 due to a lack of funding and low administrative capacity at the Schell Center. 

In a previous interview with the News, Silk said that the human rights program’s reinstatement as a certificate program is in line with a broader push in Yale College for its multidisciplinary academic programs — or MAPs — to be converted to certificate models. Each of Yale’s original MAPs in Education Studies, Energy Studies, Global Health Studies and Human Rights is now offered as a certificate, with Education Studies also offering a Scholars Intensive Certificate in addition to a standard certificate. 

According to Lewis, the main difference between MAPs and certificates is the requirement of a senior research project. Currently, only the Education Studies Scholars Intensive Certificate includes a mandatory senior project, though the University is reviewing this requirement. 

“If a certificate or program requires a senior research project, it means that the student is doing at least two senior research projects, and conceivably three,” Lewis told the News. “It’s nice to be ambitious, but we also worry that it’s overstretching the students. We’re trying to aim for just the right amount, where we know you’ve studied the subject enough that we can give you a certificate for it, but we’re not requiring you to make it almost like a major.”

The University is also reviewing its certificate programs more broadly and considering a decrease in certificate requirements, per Lewis.

Lewis said that if “certificates get too big,” students may have no room for electives on top of distributional and major requirements.

“My philosophy about the certificates is that it’s better if they don’t take up too big a fraction of your studies,” Lewis told the News. 

However, Silk previously emphasized that the key qualities of the original human rights program lay in its intensive format, which allowed students to form a “very close learning community” and to participate in a “coherent and interdisciplinary” course of study. 

“The certificate program won’t have the features that the human rights program has had, but the idea is that this is something we’ll do for now, with the hope of still regaining the ability to run the more intensive program,” Silk told the News.

While it is unclear whether and when the intensive program can be reinstated, David Simon, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, has been working with Silk to preserve aspects of the original human rights program through offerings at the Jackson School.

“Faculty connected with the previous Human Rights Program have been working to find a way to revive the essence of that program in a way that demonstrates an enduring, university-wide commitment to human rights education,” Simon wrote to the News. “One of the most important features of the old program was the way it fostered discussion and community outside of the classroom, so we are striving to ensure that the new version will promote those elements as well.”

The last cohort from the original Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights Studies will graduate in spring 2025.