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.
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What 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 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 without ever truly encountering one another.
We lead two universities that, on paper, have little in common: one founded to strengthen Jewish heritage, the other founded in 1856 to educate Black Americans a decade before slavery’s end. Yet both institutions educate diverse student bodies and share a commitment to serving humanity.
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This summer, we brought our students together through the RISE Leadership Initiative, conceived by Jack Simony, president of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. They met first in New York, where they sat with Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn, and then in Poland. They traveled to Warsaw, where they shared a Sabbath dinner within hours of landing; to Treblinka, where none of the machinery of death remains; and to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where so much still does: 80,000 pairs of shoes, the luggage and the ashes that guides say still surface when the wind blows.
This experiment suggests a different path, and the evidence from that week speaks for itself.
On that first Friday night, our students were strangers seated at a common table: Jewish students explaining the Kiddush and the challah to peers who had never attended a Sabbath meal. Seven days later, at a final dinner in Kraków, those same students sat together in tears, unwilling to let the evening end. What happened in between was not simply a program. It was an encounter.
A young woman realized that the metal strips she had been scootering across in the sidewalk traced the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. She had been gliding, unknowingly, in and out of a graveyard of sorts where 400,000 Jews had been forced to live in squalor within 1.3 square miles.
In Kraków, students shared lunch with a survivor, so the journey that began in the presence of living memory in Brooklyn ended in it, too. At Birkenau, walking through the barracks after the crematorium, one Wilberforce student turned to the Jewish classmates beside her and said simply, “I know this is personal to you. Now I too have seen and felt it and can bear witness.”
The learning ran in both directions. Our Jewish students, who grew up with the Holocaust as a family legacy, included two grandchildren of survivors. They heard their Black peers describe a different kind of erasure: Enslaved Africans were deliberately stripped of their histories, their lineages and their very names.
One group carries the memory of everything that was lost, while the other carries the loss of memory itself. Standing together in Poland, our students understood viscerally what no seminar could teach: although their histories are different, they rhyme.
This should not be a novel idea. Black and Jewish Americans built one of the great alliances of the 20th century, marching together, organizing together and standing together in the struggle for civil rights. That alliance has frayed in recent decades, picked apart by those who profit from division. Rebuilding it will not happen through joint statements. It will happen the way it happened the first time: through shared experience, shoulder to shoulder.
To be sure, one trip does not solve campus division, and we do not pretend a few dozen students constitute a movement. But the elements that made it work — shared history, honest conversation over a meal, difficult places and time spent together — cost far less than the crisis-management apparatus universities have built instead. What is missing is not simply money. It is the willingness to build programs that foster authentic human connection.
That is why the exchange cannot run in only one direction. The next chapter will take these same students to Ghana, where they will encounter the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Jewish students who invited their classmates into the history of the Holocaust will become guests in another people’s historical memory. That reciprocity is not an addition to the model. It is central to it.
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We invite our fellow presidents from Jewish institutions, historically Black colleges or universities and every university in between to build their own versions. Pair your students. Take them to the places where history happened. Let them grieve together, eat together and walk together through streets where they may be challenged together.
Because our students learned something in Warsaw that no task force will ever produce: when prejudice refused to put change into one student’s hand, every hand in the group reached out.
Dr. Vann R. Newkirk, Sr., is president of Wilberforce University, the first private historically Black college and university (HBCU) in the United States.
Source – https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/students-learned-auschwitz-help-end-hate-higher-education
