OUR MISSION
Logo designed by Wendy McNaughton

The Kemper Human Rights Education Foundation (KHREF) is a 501 (C) (3) non-profit corporation established in 2008 that seeks to motivate students to contribute to the effort to create a world where everyone’s human rights are realized.   Hence the Foundation sponsors human rights essay contests and other human rights oriented academic activities.

Richard M. Kemper, a lieutenant in the United States army, was killed in France during World War II.  Subsequently, his parents, Adolph and Helen Kemper, purchased land by the high school he attended and dedicated it to all those who fought and died defending human rights.

Human rights are entitlements to which individuals have a just claim. They include the right to be free from discrimination, torture, and arbitrary arrest; the right to obtain a minimum standard of living, be educated, own property, and express unpopular opinions; and the right to participate equally with others in determining the rules that govern the society they live in.

OUR BOARD

Penelope Andrews, LL.M., Professor of Law, Co-Director of New York Law School’s Racial Justice Project, former Dean of the University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Law, and author of From Cape Town to Kabul: Rethinking Strategies for Pursuing Women’s Human Rights; Paul Cantor, Ph.D., president of the board, professor of economics and Richard Kemper’s nephew was a Fulbright professor at the National University in Costa Rica for one year and a Civic Education Project professor at Comenius University in Slovakia for two years; Monojit Chatterji, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Cambridge University who in addition to publishing many refereed journal articles won the prestigious Economics Network prize for his undergraduate course in economics; Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University and the well-known author of works that have been translated into over fifty languages and plays that have been performed in over 100 countries; Kristina Eberbach, M.I.A., is a human rights consultant and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She served as Deputy Director at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights from 2019-2021 and as Director of Education from 2010-2019; Yvonne Lopaur, M.A., a retired high school science teacher; Richard Marsico, J.D., professor and director of New York Law School’s Wilf Impact Center for Public Interest Law and the author of Democratizing Capital: The History, Law, and Reform of the Community Reinvestment Act; Glenn Mitoma, Ph.D., director of the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research and author of Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power; Samuel Moyn, J.D., Ph.D., professor of Law at Yale University and the author of: Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War; Human Rights and the Uses of History; The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History; Christian Human Rights; and, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics; Sanjit Shah, J.D., a partner at Mound Cotton Wollan & Greengrass LLP; Roger Sparks, Ph.D., professor of economics at Mills College; Mary Templin, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in the Jesup Scott Honors College of the University of Toledo and author of Panic Fiction: Antebellum Women Writers and Economic Crisis.