Campus protests collide with graduation season

College commencement season is off to a rough start.

After a weekend full of student protests, Columbia University, the face of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, canceled its main graduation ceremony, becoming the second major school to do so this year.

Shira Goodman, vice president of advocacy for the Anti-Defamation League, said colleges’ weak responses to the disruptions and the move to cancel some commencements will only “embolden further violations” of school policies.

Goodman said universities can “hold big sporting events, big concerts. They understand how to do crowd control; they understand time, place and manner restrictions for protests. And they should be doing everything they can to protect” graduation.

The University of Southern California (USC) was the first to cancel its main commencement after first taking away the speaking opportunity of its valedictorian following the discovery she had pro-Palestinian views. The school cited safety concerns as the reason for canceling her speech and the ceremony.

Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech group, said while it is difficult to get records from private universities such as Columbia and USC, her group has found in the past that schools’ security concerns do not always hold water.

The school played the “Let’s just say [the valedictorian] can’t speak for ‘safety reasons,’ which is one of the oldest tricks in the book. When schools want to censor speech without doing it outright, at least they want to have plausible deniability,” Morey said.

“We have very frequently filed public records requests with schools that have said safety reasons” for canceling speakers and found out from police reports that there were “no actual threats,” or nothing more than angry phone calls, she added.

Other schools are projecting confidence ahead of their commencement ceremonies.

The University of Texas in Austin, which was one of the first schools to aggressively shut down its pro-Palestinian protests, told The Hill, “Commencement is a full go.”

“We cannot comment on police tactics, but we routinely have an extensive safety and security plan in place for all large-scale events, like our main graduation ceremony held in Royal-Memorial Stadium,” a university spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for the University of New Mexico said they have heard concerns about the ceremony getting cancelled or interrupted.

“While there are no indications at this point that anyone would diminish this milestone experience that our class of 2024 has worked so hard to achieve, we join those students and families in the expectation that this day belongs to them,” the spokesperson said.

A Harvard University spokesperson pointed to a statement the school made Tuesday saying thousands of individuals will come to the campus to celebrate commencement but did not have further comment.

The Hill has reached out to Palestine Legal, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voice for Peace for comment.

The Columbia cancellation came after the first big weekend of commencement season saw multiple protests during ceremonies at other schools.

“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” protesters chanted at the University of Michigan. “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!”

One person reportedly yelled back, “You’re ruining our graduation!”

Two planes also flew over the stadium, one with a pro-Palestinian message and another pro-Israel one.

A spokesperson for the school said there were no arrests, and the protesters were moved to the back of the stadium but not kicked out.

“It sounds like it was smart on Michigan’s part,” Morey said, adding that anything more aggressive would “just look bad, because all these schools are cracking down on protesters.”

“If you can tolerate them, that seems to be the path of least resistance right now in many schools rather than having the police come in and all that,” she added.

A plane also went over Indiana University Bloomington’s graduation with a message that read, “Let Gaza Live.”

Some are concerned that allowing students to do these types of actions with no repercussions will encourage others to do the same.

Morey said schools have broad authority in how commencement is run and that this is a time to demonstrate free speech principles.

Schools need to be “modeling the best way to speak and to listen” instead of teaching students that if they complain enough, they don’t have to hear speech that is uncomfortable, she said.

“We want students going out into the world, graduating with agency and confidence around their expressive and associational freedoms,” Morey said.

—Updated at 10:49 a.m.

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