Commencement ceremonies at New York University this year will not feature a staple at graduations: a live speech from one or more of the graduates.
Instead, these speeches will be pre-recorded, prompting one person objecting to the policy to remark on Bluesky, “The ruling class seems very aware that if you give the smartest person in the room a microphone, they’re probably going to say Free Palestine.”
The change was first reported by the NYU student newspaper Washington Square News, which obtained emails between a student selected to make a speech and school administrators, who told her the speech would be “professionally recorded.”
After the student, senior Maddy van der Linden, pushed back, Washington Square News said she was told by a dean that “the school must create a ‘respectful experience’ at the ceremony, and that in the past, attendees have ‘left events feeling disappointed or disrespected.’”
Last year, NYU’s commencement ceremony made headlines internationally after a student speaker, Logan Rozos, used his speech to talk about Israel and Palestine.
“The genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months,” Rozos said.
According to the student newspaper coverage of the event, “During his three-minute speech, most graduates in the Beacon Theatre cheered while other guests booed him and yelled ‘Go to Palestine’ when he mentioned the word ‘genocide.’” NYU later condemned the speech, saying Rozos “abused a privilege that was conferred upon him” and reportedly withheld his diploma.
It wasn’t the first time that NYU’s graduating seniors disrupted commencement. The previous year, someone in the crowd yelled “Free Palestine” during the ceremony, and some graduates walked across the stage carrying banners and Palestinian flags.
That same year, students at Duke University walked out during Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech because of his support of Israel. At graduation ceremonies at Emerson College in Boston, The New York Times reported, “As the more than 1,000 students entered in a procession, about one in every five students had a fist raised or some kind of pro-Palestinian paraphernalia accompanying their cap and gown: a keffiyeh, a decorated mortarboard with a Palestinian flag, and, in one case, a Palestinian flag worn as a cape.” (Mercifully, Kermit the Frog, speaking at the University of Maryland commencement last year, avoided politics.)
The risk of such protests has prompted groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League to issue guidance to universities on how to prevent disruption at graduation ceremonies, using techniques like cutting the sound to microphones if speakers deviate from their prepared remarks.
The idea of ending live speeches altogether, however, has been met with criticism, from The Washington Post to The New York Post.
Writing for the website Literary Hub, journalist and professor Steven W. Thrasher mocked NYU’s recorded speeches as being akin to “hostage videos” and said the change amounts to silencing students. He also shared his own experience of going off script as an NYU speaker in 2019, in remarks that also involved Palestine.
“NYU is an example of how the American university has transformed into one of the more fascist institutional spaces in the United States,” Thrasher wrote for Literary Hub. “Students are not supposed to engage in any ‘unapproved’ protests, or veer off script; they are not even to be trusted to speak at their own graduation ceremonies, lest they say something true from the heart, something they probably learned from their studies about the American war machine.”
That’s hyperbole that is demonstrably untrue; universities have long tolerated students crossing the stage making political statements on their caps or other attire. (In 2009, some students at Notre Dame’s commencement had pictures of babies on their caps to protest then-President Barack Obama’s commencement speech.) Even as many universities have made changes at the request of the Trump administration in order to keep federal funding, it’s quite a stretch to call them fascist.
The question is, in times of heightened political tension — say, over Israel’s actions in 2024 and Israel’s action, in conjunction with the U.S., in 2026 — does a university have the right and even the responsibility to take unprecedented measures in order to prevent precedented disruption? Can Gen Z, whose opinions and values depart sharply from their elders, especially when it comes to Israel, be trusted with a microphone?
With pomp and circumstance right around the corner, we’ll soon have more evidence with which to have this debate.