New College of Florida announced Tuesday it has received a donation of one of the largest collections of Berlin Wall segments in the world.
The Berlin Wall stood between East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War. The collection’s surfaces were rarely touched or seen during the war, the college said. The wall segments were donated by philanthropist Jack Jawitz.
The pieces are 3 feet by 9 feet and comprise the largest collection outside of Germany, spokesperson Jamie Miller said in a text message. The largest public collection in the United States is eight pieces, he said, and the college’s collection is “significantly more.”
Every attendee at Tuesday’s news conference would receive a piece of the wall and a certificate of authenticity, Miller said.
The announcement came shortly beforePeter Robinson, the author of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 speech that called on former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” was scheduled to speak on campus Tuesday evening. Robinson is also a fellow at Stanford University’s conservative policy research center, the Hoover Institution.
New College plans to commemorate the donation through programming, public lectures and “campus dialogue centered on freedom, the lessons of history and the enduring responsibility to promote and defend free societies,” according to a news release. The college will mark the 39th anniversary of that speech in June, and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall in 2029.
Richard Corcoran, New College’s president, said in a statement that the wall’s segments are witnesses to the “horrors of communism.”
“May the Wall remind us what happens when speech is silenced, dissent is punished, and ideology is enforced by force,” he said. “New College is honored to steward this history and to ensure it serves as a permanent educational reminder of the triumph of freedom over oppression.”
In November, the Florida Board of Education adopted new standards teaching the “evils of communism” which drew criticism from parents and historians.
New College historian Mitchel Ruzek said in a statement that studying the Cold War examines how close the world came to destruction.
“Having these original segments of the Berlin Wall on campus transforms history from abstraction into experience,” he said. “Students will be able to engage directly with the physical reality of ideological division and apply those lessons to today’s global challenges.”
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