In today’s Martin Center article, Christopher Schilling explains that, though North Carolina “requires Holocaust education for public school students,” there is no such requirement for the state’s public colleges and universities. It is not standard for students in the University of North Carolina system to “engage with Holocaust history, the study of antisemitism, or the ideological and political conditions that allowed the twentieth century’s greatest crime to unfold” and “can graduate having never opened a book on the subject at all.”
After several years of rising antisemitism on college campuses, often combined with disinformation about Israel and the Holocaust, it’s time for further action, Schilling argues:
Universities occupy an outsized place in shaping civic culture. They train the teachers, journalists, lawyers, and policymakers who will run the next generation of American institutions. Yet a student can spend four years in North Carolina higher education without ever seriously confronting the mechanics of state-sponsored hatred, ideological fanaticism, and the slow normalization of dehumanization that made the Holocaust possible. That is not a small omission.