Keith David Watenpaugh begins his UC Davis class on genocide by writing a simple statement on the board:
“Only monsters commit genocide.”
He then asks who believes this is true. After a brief silence, students start to share their thoughts. Everyone soon agrees on a fundamental idea about this most extreme type of suffering:
Human beings — not monsters — commit genocide, and human beings can also end it.
“It's a very simple proposition that sits at the center of our work in Human Rights Studies,” said Watenpaugh, a professor and founding director (2015-2025) of Human Rights Studies in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Watenpaugh, who received this year’s Academic Senate and Federation Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, guides undergraduate and graduate students through the modern world’s greatest tragedies, some of them ongoing, with a focus on empowerment and solutions. Learning this human rights perspective prepares students to lead and promote the good wherever life leads them.
“Human rights studies is so important because it's not just the study of pain and grievance and violence and atrocity,” said Watenpaugh. “It is linked to a framework for solutions. I consider it ethically dubious to introduce some of these really hard subjects without providing a framework for thinking about solutions, because all that does is increase cynicism and detachment.”
How students learn to address injustice
Watenpaugh’s first-year class on human rights, “Human Wrongs/Human Rights,” the largest undergraduate class he teaches, begins with slavery. From pre-history, through ancient civilizations and up to about 150 years ago, slavery was an accepted fact of life everywhere in the world. While modern slavery does exist, it’s illegal in every country.
“You should feel empowered by this fact,” he tells his students. “If human beings could end something as terrible as slavery well maybe we have a chance with other seemingly intractable problems, too.”
But a feeling of empowerment or a sense of hope is not enough. The solutions that ended slavery and other forms of suffering also matter. Watenpaugh teaches about the global effort to end Apartheid, the system of legalized racial discrimination that dominated South Africa for nearly 50 years. Students learn about the end of the Dirty Wars of political repression in South American countries that killed tens of thousands, and also the political and cultural forces that brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Watenpaugh also created a way for students to take action. With support from the Ford Foundation, he created Article 26 Backpack, a UC Davis student-driven initiative that gives their peers anywhere in the world a way to safely store and share transcripts, work histories and other vital documents put at risk by war and other threats.
The emotional toll of teaching genocide and human rights
Teaching this material does take a toll, however, both for students and for Watenpaugh. He teaches his course on human rights in the Middle East only every other year, and only to 35 students at a time. It’s emotionally difficult, especially when the material covers people he knows.
For example, he teaches about the circumstances of Osman Kavala, a friend and activist who worked to reconcile Turks, Armenians and Kurds through culture and dialogue. In 2014, Kavala helped Watenpaugh with a major Syrian refugee student project in southern Türkiye. Eight years ago, Kavala was arrested by the Turkish government on false charges of sedition. The European Court of Human Rights has demanded his release, but the government refuses.
Emotions in the class can also run hot. Students are much more aware of the issues behind conflict in the Middle East than they have been in the past.
In one class, while reading personal stories written by imprisoned and persecuted Egyptian human rights advocates from 18 to 22 years old, they had to stop. It just became too much in that moment for the students.
“You’ve got to pace yourself,” said Watenpaugh. “You're no good to anyone if you have this emotional collapse. It’s the reality of secondary trauma in my line of work.”
There is also room for circumspection, because sometimes solutions fail. For example, international law has few enforcement mechanisms, and powerful countries frequently disregard it. The United Nations has repeatedly failed to stop mass violence and other atrocities since it was established after World War II.
But, Watenpaugh asks, can you imagine a world without the United Nations?
Why human rights education matters beyond the classroom
The idea of human rights, said Watenpaugh, creates a baseline of what it means to be human as well as the basic rights everyone should have. But thinking from a human rights perspective isn’t limited to world-scale problems of war or genocide. It’s a way of seeing the world that students take with them into any future they choose, whether the Peace Corps or the corporate world.
“You want them to think about solutions, how to solve problems, centered on fundamental human rights, and then you want them to then take that knowledge and those skills out into their lives and be able to apply them,” said Watenpaugh.
His students have received some of the university’s highest recognitions. In 2023, Emma Tolliver won the Leon H. Mayhew Award, the College of Letters and Science’s highest undergraduate award in the humanities, and now studies law at the University of Washington. Brooke Morey won the 2024 University Medal, the highest UC Davis honor for a graduating senior, and is studying Egyptology at Yale University.
“One of the purposes of higher education,” said Watenpaugh, “is to make better humans who are ready to lead and to promote the good.”
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