Former President Bill Clinton was at the University of Connecticut on Thursday to accept Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights from the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Clinton was honored along with a human rights group based in Senegal.
The non-profit is called Tostan. It creates education programs in small West African villages to encourage things like literacy, access to health care, and equal rights for women. The group is supported by the Clinton Global Initiative, a foundation started by the former president.
Clinton said human rights are more important than ever in an increasingly linked world in which positive and negative forces bump up against one another.
“And every one of us, in some way or another, has a personal obligation to do what we can, in our own communities or around the world, to build the positive and reduce the negative forces of our interdependence,” he said.
Kathryn Dooley, a student at the University of Connecticut, said Clinton’s message applies to the work she wants to do in her life.
“For me, I want to be an elementary school teacher," she said. So I think that’s something we can bring into our classrooms and show our kids from the earliest. The things about treating everyone as a person, those are things that kids can easily grasp. And they understand that more than a lot of adults do.”
UConn also celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. It was named after the former U.S. senator from Connecticut and lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Clinton also spoke at the dedication ceremony for the Dodd Center in 1995.
