Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies

Welcome to Lehman's Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies

The Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies advances social justice and human dignity in an interdisciplinary fashion through active involvement of faculty, students, and community in research and teaching. The Center builds on the College’s unique history: the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights began at Lehman College when the United Nations met at the College. Lehman College students, often immigrants and the first in their families to access higher education, engender a broad understanding of human rights. The Center unites student and faculty engagement on local and global rights issues in New York and the greater world community. The Center now offers an interdisciplinary minor in Human Rights and Peace Studies.

- Michael Buckley, Director of the Center

Linda Thomas-Greenfield recognizes the Lehman campus contribution to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, addressed the Lehman community in recorded remarks commemorating the 75^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As the Ambassador notes, Lehman College has a special relationship to the UDHR. Lehman’s campus hosted several foundational meetings of the United Nations in 1946. In addition, Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights began work on the Declaration of Human Rights on campus.

Lehman’s Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies and faculty in the Library and History departments invited the Ambassador to address the Lehman Community because of her distinguished diplomatic career and longstanding commitment to inclusion, health equity, and the rights of women, children, and marginalized communities.

“As a first-generation college graduate and role model for minority women working in diplomacy, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield represents our students’ best aspirations,” said Associate Professor Michael Buckley, Director of Lehman’s Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies.

Nearly sixty percent of Lehman students are first-generation college students, and nearly seventy percent are female. Lehman ranks No. 1 on Degree Choices’ list of best Hispanic-Serving Institutions and No. 4 on U.S. News & World Report’s list of colleges with the highest mobility rate in the nation. In the tradition of Herbert H. Lehman, our distinguished namesake, the College has consistently celebrated its connection to the United Nations and its core values.

Advising

If you would like to talk about the minor in Human Rights and Peace Studies, please email the Director of the Center, Michael Buckley, at michael.buckley@lehman.cuny.edu.

News

Lehman's Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies was awarded the 2022 Flowers Foundation Grant for work in human rights education. Every year, the Flowers Fund, a project of Human Rights Educators USA, provides small grants to support innovation and mentorship in human rights education. The fund aims to encourage new philosophic and theoretical thinking, new pedagogies, and new outreach methods for HRE, as well as emerging leadership in the field. The Center, together with Lehman College's Department of Middle and High School Education, aims to help high schools around New York City establish student-led human rights clubs. The goal is to create service-learning opportunities for students to reflect on and contribute to remedying local human rights injustices. Service-learning is a form of experiential learning in which students acquire and apply the skills needed to identify urgent community needs. Students learn leadership skills, develop cultural and racial understandings, and practice civic engagement, and their work alerts teachers, scholars, and grassroots organizers to emerging injustices. Lehman College has, through conferences and educational programs, created a loose network of restorative justice practitioners and educators. Lehman's Department of Middle and High School Education and the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies aim to strengthen this network and collaborate with human rights clubs and their respective schools to address ongoing and emerging educational injustices in NYC.

Does your school need funding to start a human rights club?

Lehman College has funding available for New York City middle and high schools to establish human rights clubs. These clubs teach students human rights advocacy and use a human rights lens to analyze and address injustices they have experienced.

Possible Club Missions

Create service-learning opportunities for students to help remedy the human rights injustices they face
Offer students leadership and communication skills, develop cultural and racial understandings, and let them practice social responsibility and citizenship engagement

For more information:

Contact Tashika McBride at tashika.mcbride@lehman.cuny.edu or 718-960-8440

This program is supported with a grant from The Flowers Fund, a project of Human Rights Educators, USA and is sponsored by Lecturer Tashika McBride and Professor Michael Buckley at Lehman College. Info to join and create a human rights club

CONTACT

Michael Buckley
Associate Professor
Email
718-960-8160
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