A Legacy of Learning, Advocacy and Action: SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program Celebrates 20 Years

On July 1, 2006, SMU officially launched a program that would become one of the nation’s leading centers for undergraduate human rights education. Twenty years later, the Human Rights Program at SMU is celebrating a legacy of transformative learning, global engagement and student leadership rooted in a simple but powerful idea: every person is entitled to dignity and rights.

The program’s origins trace back to an experience that changed the course of its future. In the fall of 2005, Lauren Embrey, then a Master of Liberal Arts student at SMU, joined an educational trip to Poland led by Professor Rick Halperin. Visiting Holocaust sites left a profound impression on Embrey and her family.

A few months later, Lauren Embrey and her sister, Gayle, met with Halperin with a vision. They wanted to establish a Human Rights Program at SMU and asked him to serve as its director.

“I enthusiastically agreed,” Halperin recalled, and with the sisters’ gift, the program officially began on July 1, 2006.

The founders wanted current and future students to have opportunities to learn firsthand about the Holocaust and other human rights issues through travel and immersive education. In many ways, Halperin says, one of the lasting legacies of the Holocaust is the creation of SMU’s Human Rights Program.

At the time of its founding, the program was only the fifth undergraduate human rights program in the United States and remains the only one of its kind in the South. Today, there are still only nine undergraduate human rights programs nationwide.

Its growth was swift. Between 2007 and 2012, it was the fastest-growing program on campus. In 2012, the SMU Board of Trustees approved it as a major, and the program graduated its first two students later that year.

Over the past two decades, the program has brought internationally recognized voices to campus, including New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Sister Helen Prejean, Bryan Stevenson, Holocaust author Edwin Black, and renowned Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

The program has also made its mark beyond the university. In 2012, it commemorated the 50th anniversary of James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi by hosting an event that brought together individuals who had integrated universities across the former Confederate South. The program also published the first extensive list documenting those pioneering students.

A year later, the Human Rights Program helped lead efforts that resulted in the City of Dallas formally apologizing to the family of Santos Rodriguez, the 12-year-old boy killed by a Dallas police officer in 1973. The tragedy sparked the only race riot in Dallas history.

Travel has remained one of the program’s defining features. Nearly 1,000 participants have traveled with the program to locations that illuminate both historical atrocities and ongoing human rights struggles, including Cambodia’s killing fields, Rwanda, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, El Mozote in El Salvador, Native American sites across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and death row facilities throughout the American South.

The impact of those experiences can be seen in the lives of the program’s graduates.

“We have students at SMU because of the Human Rights Program,” Halperin said.

Among them was one of the program’s first graduates, Shirin Tavakoli, a torture survivor from Iran who went on to work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Alumni have become attorneys advocating for women’s rights, children’s rights and immigrant rights, as well as capital defense lawyers, physicians, educators and nonprofit leaders.

Others have remained close to home while creating change in their communities. Human Rights graduate Peter Wetherbee now serves as assistant to the director of Human Rights Watch, while John Kalkanli, a blind alumnus, serves as the City of Dallas’ commissioner for disability rights.

For Halperin, the importance of human rights education has only grown more urgent.

“People cannot demand their rights if they do not even know what their rights are,” he said.

Grounded in the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted after World War II in 1948, the program emphasizes that human rights are not a partisan issue but a human one. Its mission is to prepare students to become informed leaders who recognize injustice and act to address it.

As the program enters its third decade, Halperin hopes to secure an endowment that will ensure future generations can continue learning through travel, engagement and firsthand encounters with history.

“I hope the university can successfully get the program endowed so that we can continue to take our students into this country and into this world, to face past bad human behavior, to understand its consequences and legacies,” he said.

His vision is ambitious but clear: that SMU becomes synonymous with human rights education and recognized as the national leader in the field.

For all the program has accomplished over the past 20 years, Halperin believes its greatest legacy may be the awareness it creates.

“There are still people both in Dallas and even at SMU who are unaware that the university has this unique program,” he said. “Our greatest legacy would be to help people stop saying, ‘I didn’t know,’ so they can use their own interests and passions to help bring about a more peaceful world committed to dignity and rights for everyone.”

Twenty years after its founding, the SMU Human Rights Program continues to challenge students to learn from the past, engage with the present and help shape a more just future.