Humanities in Action

It was late in the afternoon on the last day of the trip, and Lyn Boyd-Judson and Mary Cate Hickman were sitting in the back of a cab. Frustrated and a little riled up, they wound through the ancient, impossibly narrow streets of Córdoba, Spain, talking about the meeting they had just left.

“Despite the fact that it’s a mosque and a cathedral and a UNESCO World Heritage site, Muslims still aren’t allowed to pray there,” Hickman said, utterly perplexed.

She was referring to the historic Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, a marvel of Moorish architecture built in the 8th century, that she had visited two days earlier. The junior, who is majoring in religion as well as cinema and media studies, was in Europe as part of the Oxford Consortium Seminar — a human rights-oriented educational collaboration between the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics and the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford in England.

Led by Boyd-Judson, director of the USC Levan Institute and lecturer in the School of Religion, the summer course brought 15 USC undergraduates to Oxford, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and finally Córdoba, to attend lectures and meetings on human rights and conflict, humanitarian action and peacemaking.

Hickman had accompanied Boyd-Judson to a meeting with a Muslim rights organization that has been trying to secure permission for Muslims to pray at the mosque, which was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral in the 13th century. Unfortunately, 15 years of grassroots efforts have been rejected both by the church authorities in Spain and the Vatican under the former pope.

It was in the cab that the lightbulb went on.

“As someone who is a religious minority, or maybe just as someone who’s interested in human rights, it makes me physically uncomfortable that this is happening,” said Hickman, who is Mormon. “I think that this is something worth spending time on fixing.”

Boyd-Judson agreed. The grassroots approach was not working. They needed to go through the United Nations.

Boyd-Judson has directed the USC Levan Institute, housed at USC Dornsife, for the past 10 years. The late USC alumnus Norman Levan — professor emeritus and former chief of dermatology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC — contributed a major gift that inaugurated the institute in 2007.

Levan’s original vision for the institute was to promote engagement and multidisciplinary dialogue surrounding the common humanity of USC students, and to create a forum in which students could explore different modes of thinking and responding to the world.

“We are devoted to building a thriving student community that is interested in applying humanities and ethics to their academic work as well as engaging with civic and global ethical issues,” explained Boyd-Judson, who is also executive director of the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights and was recently named UNESCO Chair in Global Humanities and Ethics.

She aims to carry the USC Levan Institute’s vision even further as it enters its second decade. She is creating more opportunities for students across the university to engage with ethical issues through curricular expansion and new initiatives.

The institute will affirm its global partnerships with the University of Oxford, RAND Corporation and Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. For students searching for value and meaning in their educational experience, such collaborations will create new platforms for scholarship of consequence through the global humanities.

“My goal is to create more opportunities for students from the humanities and beyond to see that they can make a difference in their world,” Boyd-Judson said. “I think it’s something that’s very important for this generation.”

Hickman appreciates the opportunities the institute provides for enacting positive change.

“With the mosque-cathedral, it seemed like there was a very clear goal,” said Hickman. “The humanities has an unwarranted reputation of people just discussing stuff without anything ever happening. But when we left that meeting, we started coming up with a plan.”

Hickman partnered with fellow Oxford Consortium Seminar attendee Mazen Loan, who is Muslim, to address the issue.

“There was a time when [Córdoba] served as a nexus for Muslims, Christians and Jews, and for centuries they lived together peacefully,” said Loan, a philosophy major. “The current global political climate is one that is extremely conducive to Islamophobia, and in my opinion undertaking projects such as this one is the first step toward demonstrating that it is possible for people of different backgrounds to live together peacefully — as they did in medieval Córdoba.”

Hickman and Loan spent their winter break writing a research paper they hope to publish in an academic journal. Backed by Boyd-Judson’s influence as a UNESCO chair, they want to eventually present their work to U.N. officials — and even Pope Francis.

“[The students] are trying to come up with a strategic way to take this issue back to the Vatican now that there’s a new pope who might be more open,” Boyd-Judson said.

This is exactly the kind of global impact she is committed to helping students bring about.

“We couldn’t do anything if LBJ [Boyd-Judson] wasn’t a UNESCO chair,” Hickman said. “But because it seems like we have a path to actually make a change, we have to take it.”

Hickman said Boyd-Judson has played a big role in inspiring her to take action.

“I honestly think [the inspiration came from] meeting a professor who wanted to do something and is so supportive. LBJ is a nurturing mentor — she wants you to succeed and she wants to make a difference. She’s so tough and so kind.”

According to Hickman, Boyd-Judson is all about getting students out in the world, doing on-the-ground work. Boyd-Judson concurs.

“A critical part of my mission has been not just having a place where we celebrate the humanities here at USC,” she said, “but where we take the humanities and all the big questions, the love of truth and beauty, and everything that’s in our core mission for the university, and we suffuse it outward.”

Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2017 issue