The Struggle to Articulate and Uphold Human Rights

Second Quarter 1998

PRINCETON, New Jersey—Speaking as the visiting Stone Lecturer at Princeton Theological Seminary in late February, Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff argued that people do have "natural human rights." Certain universal rights can and should be recognized as part of a trio that includes goods and obligations. Wolterstorff's five lectures over four days were set in the context of a larger conference, cosponsored by the Center for Public justice, commemorating the Stone Lectures given 100 years earlier by Abraham Kuyper, whose inspiration and influence Wolterstorff acknowledged.

Rights are everywhere, said Wolterstorff, and when one has a right to something, one may claim it. The good to which one has a right is not, then, a charitable gift, but something owed. A student who does A work, for example, has a right to claim an A. The good grade is not a gift from the professor.

Subsequent to Wolterstorff's lecture, Case Hoogendoorn, an attorney and trustee of the Center for Public justice, responded that doing A work at a university certainly merits an A for the student. But that merit does not yet amount to a right. The problem with using rights language in this instance is that there is difficulty in asserting a right without enforcement mechanisms. Analysis of this situation in terms of rights places the student and professor on a horizontal plane and places on the student the need to assert her right and seek enforcement mechanisms. I would prefer, said Hoogendoorn, to speak of the professor-student relationship as a vertical one and emphasize the professor's obligation to the student, an obligation that derives from the professor's office of teaching authority in the university.

The point of possible contention between Wolterstorff and Hoogendoorn has to do with the variety of social contexts or institutional settings in which humans find themselves and particularly with the question of what distinguishes rights upheld by the state from what we sometimes call "rights" belonging to people within universities or other institutions. The language of rights can have unequivocal, unambiguous meaning only within the political/legal sphere where the purpose of government and the courts is to uphold civil rights and to do justice to citizens. The reason why the professor's obligation rather than the student's right should guide discussion of life in a university is that the purpose of a university is to educate, not to adjudicate rights. Professors and students enter a university with obligations, respectively, to teach and to learn. Academic merit and desert flow from educational performance and responsibility.

The situation is different in the political/legal arena. There the very purpose of government and courts is to do justice to citizens and the various non-government institutions that constitute their lives. People living in a state have civil rights and may appeal to the state for the enforcement of those rights. Of course, within a university an adjudicating and enforcement process may be established to allow for the redress of educational injustice suffered by various members of the academic community. But those processes will themselves have to do justice to the unique obligations of teaching and learning or they will undermine the university.

A student who would seek to sue her professor in civil court because she did not receive a deserved A should be told by the court that this is a case for the university to handle within its own educational processes. On the other hand, if a student contracted with a university for a course of study, paid the tuition, and was then told that the course of study was no longer available but that no tuition payments would be returned, the student may have a case for a civil suit. The right to enter such a contract is a civil right. The university and the student, in this contractual relationship, are on a horizontal plane before the law. The university, just as any business or nonprofit organization has a public-legal obligation to perform what it promises to the public, some members of which will become part of the university by becoming its students and professors. By contrast, a student has no civil right to receive an A or a B or a C at a university. Obligations and merits within the university are not first of all legal; they are educational in nature.

If, in order to emphasize the universal validity of human rights, one fails to distinguish the different kinds of organizations and relationships that humans create and in which they bear different types of responsibility, one is likely to confuse and undermine the very meaning of rights. If every kind of merit is defined as a right without distinguishing civil rights from what is owed people in non-political institutions and relations, then the tendency will be to politicize or legalize every point of contention between human beings. In the end this will undermine the very institutions which, for example, are essential to the education and nurturing of children and young people.

In law and in politics we need to emphasize that the juridical or legal aspect of life is indeed universal in its embrace, but only a politically organized community of citizens exists for the purpose of upholding and adjudicating rights. Parents should treat their children fairly, professors should do justice to their students, and businesses should do right by their employees, but families, universities, and businesses do not exist for the purpose of upholding and adjudicating rights. And states do not uphold the rights of citizens if they allow every form of obligation within the nongovernmental sector to be politicized as a civil right.