DAVIE, Fla. – An internal investigation is underway into the hate wall project at Nova Southeastern University that caused an uproar in South Florida, according to an NSU spokesperson.
The makeshift wall at the NSU campus in Davie was taken down Monday, hours after pictures of the violent and unsettling messages written across it started making rounds on social media.
NSU’s Diversity Student Council created the wall meant to give students a place to write hate messages they have endured - and then participate in the wall’s demise.
But without communicating information or context, what was meant as an anti-hate project was perceived as a gut punch of anti-Semitism.
“The timing of it is off,” said Victoria Sagasti, a sophomore at NSU. “I don’t think they should have written that on the wall.”
The “Hate Wall” project has been done before at NSU and also at other universities.
Below are images from a hate wall that was put up and taken down at the University of Missouri in 2015.
A NSU internal investigation is focusing on one or more unidentified faculty members who supervised it all.
Near the wall location on campus, NSU hosts Florida’s only Holocaust museum on the grounds of a university.
The founder of the Craig & Barbara Weiner Holocaust Museum of South Florida said he was flooded with phone calls and emails about the wall.
“The project itself, to me, made very little sense at this time with what’s going on in the world,” he said.
The museum’s growing collection of artifacts makes the horrors of the Holocaust very real and very relevant for the hundreds of students who visit the school every week.
“I’d rather have a wall of kindness rather than a wall of hate and let students write on the wall things that are kind and teaching people to stand up against the hate,” said Weiner.
No one from the school’s administration was available for comment on Tuesday, but the head of the USchool K-12 next door emailed his community to emphasize " …there is no place for hate in any context” and apologized for any hurt feelings.
“We’re all humans so we all should just live in peace and love each other,” said Avery Jackson, a freshman at NSU.