Opinion: The university claims to have the best academic and professional interests of its students at heart, but its promises are currently falling flat.
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The University of Oregon Students for Justice and Human Rights is a student-run organization fighting for the university to recognize the need for a larger emphasis on human rights on campus. Despite our progressive and liberal school identity, we don’t have a university-supported human rights organization.
For clarification, universities the size of Oregon commonly host these civil rights organizations and centers on campus. Within our own Pac-12 network, the University of Utah boasts a large center for human rights, as well as UC Berkeley and the University of Washington.
Katie Moreland, a UO law student and UOJHR member, said, “It’s really interesting how the university can profess all of this, you know, liberal and humanistic ideology, but not educationally and professionally equip students to do this type of work.”
UO’s lack of support for human rights education outside the classroom is a central problem UOJHR hopes to solve. Each year, select UO students attend workshop series hosted by The Oxford Consortium for Human Rights. According to the OCHR, these seminars teach human rights, humanitarian aid and peacebuilding with the goal of understanding and constructing solutions to today’s global issues.
The problem is the university won’t sponsor its students to attend these educational workshops. For the past few years, the group has struggled to find outside donors and funding to send students.
In January, the OCHR is hosting its “Human Rights, Activism, and Community Action” workshop in Sonoma, California, and UOJHR is requesting funds from the university to send five students. UOJHR has totaled its predicted trip expenses and asked the school to provide $1,300 per student to cover the cost.
These programs have been transformative and inspirational for past attendees. Current UOJHR president, Josephine Kim, attended the workshop as one of the select UO students in the past. “It is no exaggeration to say that this workshop has changed the course of my educational goals and pursuits. The workshop has really made me ponder upon the question of how I can contribute to the community and by extension, to the global world,” Kim said.
UO claims to have the best academic and professional interests of its students at heart, but its promises are currently falling flat. In its mission statement, the university says, “We are devoted to educating the whole person, and to fostering the next generation of transformational leaders and informed participants in the global community.”
Despite the message, the university has not provided these resources for students to attend educational opportunities that will help yield this supposed “next generation of transformational leaders.”
UO has willingly spent over 129 million dollars for its athletic program just this year, but the concept of forking up a couple of thousand dollars for an educational seminar on human rights is met with opposition. If this doesn’t blatantly demonstrate where our school’s priorities lie, I’m not sure what does.
The first and foremost purpose of universities should be to provide students with the best educational opportunities possible. And, if UO truly wants to prepare us as students to be “informed participants in the global community,” it will support and fund the needs of the UOJHR.
Human rights initiatives encompass all the work our “liberal” university claims it strives to accomplish. “Civil activism, civil rights, racial justice, climate justice, gender, sexuality, et cetera, et cetera. These are human rights… and really it’s the bare minimum,” Moreland said.
There are countless student organizations on campus fighting the good fight and working to combat these countless issues, from social justice to climate change and environmental activism. And the UOJHR hopes to create a place where all these groups could combine their causes and work in unison to combat these issues in addition to seeking school funding.
UOJHR member and global studies senior Krystal Rosas-Avelos said, “I want a hub. You can go to a Latinx thing, or you can go to an African American thing. But they don’t all talk to each other. There’s not that integral human rights communication.”
While student affinity groups are amazing for creating safe spaces and inclusivity, activism is most successful when it’s intersectional.
“If it’s a universal human right, we’re all involved, and we’re all responsible, and we all have to advocate,” Moreland said.
A space where UO students can come together to fight for an overall goal of achieving human rights and justice is necessary for creating true progress both on our campus and community.
This is what UOJHR ultimately hopes to accomplish in addition to funding, but it needs the university’s full support and recognition for this plan to become a reality. Because, as UOJHR president Kim said, “the university talks a lot about doing all this good stuff, but they aren’t actually doing it.”
