What our students learned at Auschwitz could help end hate in higher education
Some of the most important lessons universities can teach are not on any syllabus.This past June, each of us sent students to Poland as part of a joint program.In a small shop in Warsaw, a Polish clerk refused to place change directly into the hand of a young Wilberforce University student.
She had traveled four thousand miles to study the machinery of hatred at Auschwitz, but she did not need the field trip for bias and hatred to find her.It met her at the cash register.What happened next is the reason the trip was organized in the first place.
This young woman’s peers, consisting of Black students from the nation’s oldest private historically Black university and Jewish students from the largest university under Jewish auspices in America, closed ranks around her.For the rest of the trip, they walked as one group.
They got looks.They kept walking.THE GREAT BETRAYAL: HOW RADICAL PROGRESSIVES ARE DYNAMITING THE BLACK-JEWISH ALLIANCEWhat we learned, and what we believe every university in America needs to hear, is that the answer to hatred and division on campus is not another statement, task force or training.
It is to give students the opportunity to encounter obstacles and learn how to overcome them.Students from Wilberforce University and Touro University touring the Auschwitz concentration camp.(Michael Katayev, recent graduate at Touro University)Students who live history together, who grieve, eat and walk through it side by side, build the kind of understanding that no seminar can teach and no demagogue can easily undo.
Universities have always had the power to create those encounters.Too few choose to.The problem we set out to address is one every campus leader recognizes.
American campuses are fractured.Students increasingly sort themselves into groups that share their identity, their background and their grievances.
Meanwhile, antisemitism has surged, racism persists and students of different backgrounds can pass four years on the same campus wit...