When the News announced the human rights program’s official reinstatement last semester in November, I, alongside many of my fourteen peers in the only remaining cohort, read the article with eager excitement. I was hopeful that underclassmen would once again have access to a community and program that has been so formative to my Yale education. While there are many valid critiques of human rights, having a consistent, interdisciplinary space to discuss the possibilities and limits of this framework has been invaluable to shaping my worldview and better understanding the kind of impact I might want to have in my career. 

However, reading Dean Pericles Lewis’ comments on his vision for the future of the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights, or what seems to have been rebranded as the Human Rights Certificate, I was jarred to see how little he seemed to value the very aspects of this program that have made it so meaningful. I was left wondering if he bothered to consult with any current or past MAPHR students as he has gone about reimagining undergraduate human rights studies at Yale and I was unsurprised to discover the answer was no. 

Given Jim Silk’s retirement and the inability of the Law School to continue hosting an undergraduate human rights program, I understand that certain aspects of the program have to change. I am also aware that the restructuring of this program is in line with Yale College’s administrative effort to replace their Multidisciplinary Academic Programs, or MAPS, with less intensive certificate programs. However, I was surprised to read Lewis’ comments on the senior capstone project, the distinguishing difference between certificates and MAPS. Dean Lewis claims to worry that our final capstone projects are “overstretching the students” or “tak[ing] up too big a fraction of our studies.” 

My human rights capstone has been one of my most meaningful academic engagements at Yale. The interdisciplinary lens of the program, Jim’s patient guidance and the generous feedback of the cohort has given me the freedom and support to think about an issue that I truly care about and approach it more creatively than what the academic confines of a more formal thesis might have afforded me. However, Lewis’ claims almost seemed patronizing as he assumes that Yale students, especially by the time they are seniors, are unable to make decisions in their best interest about how to spend their academic energy in their final year. 

Many of my classmates are simultaneously working on senior theses and a human rights capstone and Jim Silk deliberately established expectations and an environment to ensure that balancing the two would not be overwhelming. I worry that not offering any iteration of a human rights certificate which includes a final capstone would truly diminish the value of the program, and deny students the opportunity to receive sustained guidance and feedback from a faculty member associated with the certificate program. 

By completing a senior capstone and learning from my peers’ work, I’ve come to see how interdisciplinary human rights work can be — it is not just about the United Nations or international law, but there is also space to consider topics like cultural restitution and the politics of museums in Mexico, which has been the topic of my senior capstone research. By imagining human rights in new and unique ways, we create more robust and dynamic possibilities for their application — and in turn, defend human rights frameworks against critiques of irrelevance and inapplicability. 

One of the biggest criticisms of the past program was its selectivity, which does feel antithetical to the spirit of human rights. The program fostered a tight-knit community over three years, but I acknowledge that this came at the expense of accessibility. So, while an open certificate program that allows more students to formally study human rights is good news, I do hope that Dean Lewis and the recently announced directors David Simon and Bonnie Weir at the Jackson School recognize the importance of and prioritize creating a sense of community and camaraderie within the program. 

This is something that my peers in the global health or education studies certificates have shared they lack; for some, it has led to a sense of apathy towards these programs and fields of study. One of the richest parts of the MAPHR program has been learning from my peers, whether that is by attending talks together to fulfill the events reflection requirements, our weekly sophomore and junior year dinners with various invited faculty members, or giving each other detailed feedback on our capstones in our senior fall semesters. I often left our senior colloquium classes in sincere gratitude, feeling inspired by my classmates’ passion and commitment to leveraging their educations to realize a better world.

It seems that many of the final details of the new program are still being reworked. As Dean Lewis and leadership at the Jackson School are making these decisions, I hope they will solicit and listen to the input of former and current students, who can attest to the program’s value beyond just the courses we are required to take. 

ESHA AKHTAR is a senior in Silliman College. She can be reached at esha.akhtar@yale.edu.