It’s not often that you meet a truly selfless person.
What’s rarer, though, is when that person shares their passions with a university community – and that’s exactly what SMU has with Rick Halperin, Ed Board’s pick for No. 2 Person of the Year.
Halperin is nothing short of a dynamo. He’s the chair of Amnesty International USA, a group dedicated to helping victims of human rights abuses. He’s the director of the Embrey Human Rights Education Pilot at SMU, one of the only academic programs in the country focusing on human rights education. He makes annual pilgrimages to Poland each year to visit sites where hundreds of thousands of Jews were victims to the Holocaust. He’s been to Rwanda and seen where the Tutsis were murdered en masse.
He takes students with him to teach them about the horrors humanity is capable of in an effort to break the cycle of apathy that’s all too entrenched here at SMU.
He’s helped the Amnesty International student group bring human rights debates to campus, like the recent events that featured New York Times columnist and human rights activist Nicholas Kristoff.
Above all, Halperin is a great teacher. Unlike your run-of-the-mill calculus or business course, his is one that stays with you for the rest of your life.
And it should. Ed Board isn’t saying that everyone should plaster reminders of genocide all around their offices, as Halperin has. But as residents in one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, it’s ridiculous to think that we can just sit by and do nothing while genocide is happening every day.
Halperin serves as a constant reminder that we aren’t helpless. Not only can we do something, but it’s wrong not to.
A new human rights program is a great start. We have no doubt that it will be wildly successful in the future.
And while we wholeheartedly applaud Halperin’s efforts, the student body of SMU shouldn’t let him (and the students in SBS and Amnesty International) do all the work. Even if only a tenth of our students put the verve and vigor into human rights aid that Halperin does, the world would be a much better place.
It’s a sad thing that the cries of “never again” after the Holocaust went unheeded. If more people were like Rick Halperin, maybe we could make that a reality.
