NYU cut live graduation speeches, apparently to prevent unexpected political messages
Graduation fields have become political soapboxes — and New York University has a terrible solution.
For the big day class of 2026, the school is allowing students to pre-record their commencement addresses to prevent anyone from using the commencement stage as a platform for controversial political beliefs — something that has often happened at colleges across the country in recent years.
Speakers will remain silent on stage as their pre-recorded voices play on the screen.
It’s a sad picture of how divided campuses are – and a very sad time for free speech.
The Washington Square News, NYU’s student newspaper, reported that the senior executive who will deliver the speech this year was reportedly told by a lecturer that his speech would be “professionally recorded” in an effort to create a “respectful experience.”
Last May, NYU student Logan Rozos used his graduation speech as a completely inappropriate platform to criticize “the atrocities that are happening in Palestine” and accused the United States of being “involved in this genocide.”
Similar events have occurred at George Washington University, Harvard University, and MIT in recent years.
In the end, NYU withheld Rozos’ diploma and issued a statement that he had “abused his role” to express “personal and one-sided political views.”
Understandably, they want to start a repeat performance this year. But does anyone really feel privileged because an administrator censored student comments for offensive content?
“It really has nothing to do with families paying thousands of dollars to see a staged, fake video,” Maddy van der Linden, a student who was asked to pre-record her speech, told the student newspaper. “We all know it’s because of politics.”
An NYU spokeswoman emphasized that the university’s commencement will still feature a live speaker and that the new policy applies to the graduation of each of the university’s schools such as Tisch and Stern. They also told The Post that many Jewish advocacy groups have expressed support for the policy.
“Graduation is a special rite of passage,” the spokesperson said. “The speakers we invite to events are there to speak for everyone, not just them. In the past, students and families have felt robbed of their time, and we owe them better.”
All this debate is a result of the state of our universities. Young people are more activists than students, and they seem unable to get along with other students with different backgrounds and views.
No one is saying you can’t support Palestine, but it’s worth considering whether graduating from a Jewish-majority school is an appropriate condition to make that known. Their graduation, too.
The whole point of giving a graduation speech is to speak for your classmates as a representative of the group. But shutting down Rozos and all other future speakers will only make things worse for NYU.
If schools try to police student opinions, student advocates will be emboldened. What better proof that you speak truth to power than bosses descending on your head?
NYU is caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to maintain peace among thousands of young people with radical ideas and an activist streak. But erasing the tradition of live debuts allows the sharpest wheels to set the rules.
The school should return to its existing policy: students must apply for the speech they plan to give. There’s no eliminating the risk that one kid might stray, but colleges need to trust their students, even if there are a few bad eggs.
The biggest solution is for schools to work harder, it’s harder to foster a place for respectful speech, not static speech without thinking about the place and the audience. Colleges have failed for decades to foster an environment where diverse opinions can be expressed in society.
Because intellectual dialogue has been greatly reduced, those ideas are now spilling out into inappropriate places, such as commencement ceremonies. Higher education must emphasize civility as much, if not more, than activism.
Instead, schools responded to student activism in ways that harmed everyone’s experience.
At Columbia, for example, students and faculty have spent years swiping their IDs and proving their identities to enter what was once an open campus center occupied by a camp of pro-Palestinian student protesters. The school recently started to slowly open the campus in December after more than two years.
Just a few kids were allowed to make the iconic campus feel like a closed prison – and all the students were in a bad mood for it.
All of these are the results of schools failing to produce intellectually humble students.
NYU made a huge mistake. Abandoning culture in response to student activism is an admission. Continuously evaluating students will make their purpose feel more urgent.
