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Attacks on ‘Political’ Graduation Speakers Are Craven Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
All students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
May 20, 2025
Last week New York University announced that it was withholding the diploma of a graduating senior named Logan Rozos, and commencing disciplinary proceedings against him. His academic “crime?” As a featured graduation speaker, Rozos described the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and expressed moral outrage that the attacks were supported by U.S. tax dollars and university investments.
These sentiments, of course, are not universally shared. They, predictably, provoked and offended those present who do not like it when Israel is criticized in this way. More importantly, their expression violates what is quickly becoming an 11th Commandment of Academic Life in the United States: Thou Shall Not Criticize Israel.
And so NYU official spokesperson John Beckman, a true inspiration to his increasingly craven profession, immediately vaulted into action to denounce the student and the speech:
NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views. He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.
Apparently, those who “lead” NYU believe that graduation speakers—typically selected because of their academic distinction or other exemplary accomplishments—should not express themselves honestly or say anything controversial, should clear their remarks with university censors in advance, and then say only things that will make everyone happy. To challenge an audience on a campus is thus forbidden. Most importantly, invited speakers must never violate the new 11th Commandment.
If this strikes you as anti-intellectual, censorious, and absurdly patronizing, consider the perhaps even more outrageous controversy surrounding Harvard’s 2024 Commencement Address, given by Maria Ressa, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defense of press freedom, and civil liberties, in her native Philippines and in the world at large.
While this controversy unfolded at Harvard last year, it was brought to national attention only weeks ago, with the April 29 publication of Harvard’s Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which cited Ressa’s speech as an example of the “bias” that the report is charged with countering.
According to the report’s Executive Summary, “Ressa chose not to deliver prepared remarks that were meant to urge pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students to reconcile. Instead, she substituted new remarks praising the student protestors and delivered off-the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” The authors then ask: “Why did a renowned humanitarian ad-lib seemingly antisemitic remarks against her Jewish critics at a highly scripted Harvard graduation ceremony?”
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness.
When I read these words, on page 12 of the 311-page report, I was shocked and in disbelief. For I have long admired Ressa, have followed her closely, and consider her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, to be one of the very best books I’ve read in recent years. The report’s question struck a chord. Maria Ressa is an antisemite? How can this be?
The first thing I did was search for her commencement speech to see for myself what offensive things she said. I quickly found both a transcript and a video, read the first and watched the second, and remained confused about the “seemingly antisemitic remarks.” The speech seemed fine to me; and as I watched it, I wished my own university were willing and able to invite such a fine person to give a commencement address.
Only then did I turn to the more elaborate explanation of the problem, on pages 116-17 of the report. Apparently Ressa had shared her prepared remarks in advance (with whom? does Harvard exercise prior restraint on its speakers?), but then deviated from these remarks in her speech, in two ways that troubled the report’s authors and thus merited commentary.
First, while in her prepared remarks she very generally alluded to the many different ways that she has been attacked on social media, in her speech she said this: “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money. While the other side was already attacking me because I had been on stage with Hillary Clinton. Hard to win, right?”
These, apparently, were the “off the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.”
What????
In the offending brief paragraph, Ressa clearly references attacks from both “sides” of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine controversy. She says that those labeling her an antisemite—a scurrilous charge without a shred of evidence, I might add—have “power and money.” She does not say her attackers are Jews. She says they are rich and powerful. Because they are rich and powerful. The coverage of the event by the Texas Jewish Post—hardly an antisemitic publication—is instructive. After noting that billionaire “Bill Ackman [had] led a revolt of large donors,” the reporter offered this background:
Right-wing media and lawmakers had sought to paint Ressa as antisemitic prior to commencement, pointing to a Filipino-language editorial published in November in her media outlet, Rappler, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, and to her signing of an open letter calling on Israel to protect journalists in Gaza. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, claimed that the Rappler piece compared Israel to Hitler. That claim was amplified on the social network X by New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has gained attention for her combative questioning of university leaders, including Gay, at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. “Harvard chose an antisemitic commencement speaker,” Stefanik wrote earlier this month, sharing a link to the Free Beacon article. “The university has failed to stand up for Jewish students at every turn, revealing the depths of its moral delinquency.”
Was it antisemitic for Ressa to say that “money and power” had denounced her? Hardly. Indeed, the report itself elsewhere comments on the efforts of at least three extremely wealthy donors—Ackman, Len Blavatnik, and Ken Griffin—to use promised donations to influence Harvard in the midst of its crisis, though it does not mention that Ackman himself had called Ressa “antisemitic” in a May 3 X post, three weeks before Ressa’s commencement address. Perhaps this is why the report claims that her “offending” words “appeared to echo” antisemitic tropes, and not that they did in fact echo them? For it is hard to see how alluding to a man who is rich, powerful, and censorious as rich, powerful, and censorious echoes antisemitic tropes.
Ressa’s second “offense”: She apparently omitted a brief section of her prepared remarks challenging keffiyah-wearing pro-Palestinian protesters (the report doesn’t say whether her prepared remarks also included a comment challenging pro-Israeli protesters, but it seems likely that it did and this too was omitted), and instead delivered add-libbed praise of “student speakers who had addressed the topic of Palestine.”
Here, again, are the offending words, worth quoting at length:
I loved the speeches of the students today. They were incredible. Because these times will hopefully teach you the same lesson I learned. You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in. Because that defines who you are.
But you’re Harvard. You better get your facts right, because now you are being tested. The chilling effect means that many are choosing to stay silent because there are consequences to speaking out.
I’m shocked at the fear and anger, the paranoia splitting open the major fracture lines of society, the inability to listen. What happened to us in the Philippines, it’s here.
The campus protests are testing everyone in America. Protests are healthy. They shouldn’t be violent. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced.
These words are evidence of “antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias”?
The report proceeds to devote an entire paragraph to the fact that Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi was offended by Ressa’s speech, “quietly requested clarification” of her on the stage, and then walked off stage when she did not respond (apparently, the clarification requested involved her retaking the microphone and revising the speech she had just finished giving to Zarchi’s specifications; are such requests for “clarification” by clergy a regular practice at Harvard commencements? It is one I have never experienced at the many commencements I’ve attended.)
The report’s account of commencement says nothing about the fact that Chabad Rabbi Zarchi was embroiled in controversy back on November 7, 2023, for giving a speech in which he seemed to call both Hamas terrorists and Hamas supporters not a “human” but “an animal... below an animal.” The precise intended reference and meaning of his words notwithstanding—the subject of much semantic discussion, they seem pretty nasty to me—in this speech and elsewhere he made very clear that Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was “antisemitic” and should be decertified by the university, with its protests banned from campus. (Note: Zarchi’s comment and his anti-PSC advocacy was noted earlier in the report, on p. 110; but its obvious connection to his defensive reaction to Ressa’s speech is never drawn.) That many Jewish leaders on campus disagree strongly with Zarchi—who has collaborated extensively with Bill Ackman’s crusade against Harvard, and who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July of 2024—was also unmentioned in this narrative.
Perhaps most important, the report says nothing about the fact that the overall frame of Ressa’s entire speech was the responsibility of all students to be their “best selves” and to work together, with compassion and understanding, to make the world a better place. To reduce that speech to the identity-obsessed concerns of its critics is to engage in exactly the kind of small-mindedness that the report elsewhere decries.
Obviously, the report is about much more than this one commencement episode, and should not be judged by its treatment this one episode. But what it says about Ressa’s Commencement Address is so strikingly tendentious and misleading, that you have to wonder how this account ever made its way into a report claiming to be so very academic and serious, and what this means for the other narratives recounted in the report.
Maria Ressa is a world-renowned journalist and human rights activist. While she has suffered persecution in her own country, and while she surely is hated and even targeted by authoritarians the world over, she is not likely to be materially harmed by the denunciations of Harvard’s Chabad rabbi or the displeasure of Harvard’s top donors and administrators.
But NYU’s Logan Rozos, and many others like him, experience severe repercussions for saying similar things. U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz—a Democrat who has joined with Elise Stefanik and other Trumpists to attack so-called “antisemitism” on American campuses—was quite candid about Rozos: “He lied to the university... [and] everyone listening. There is no genocide going on in Israel... But at the end of the day, that’s up to the university whether they give him his diploma or not. You know, in fact, they can give him his diploma, it’s not going to matter. Good luck getting a job. That was a stupid, selfish thing, ruined the ceremony for a lot of families.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others who have spoken out for Palestinians and against Israel represent an even more serious form of intimidation and punishment for those who dare to violate the 11th Commandment. And make no mistake, while courts have recently ordered the release of many of these individuals pending resolution of their court cases, their cases are still being litigated, and the administration continues to pursue such deportations through every legal means available even as it pushes the boundaries of legality. In the first instance, it is foreign students and noncitizens more generally who are threatened by such efforts.
But in a broader sense, all students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
This intellectual virus is not circulating randomly. As The New York Times recently reported, The Heritage Foundation has been busy at work planning and then putting into effect its “Project Esther,” designed, as the Times puts it, “to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.” While “Esther” is largely, though not exclusively, the work of right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, it dovetails neatly with the post-October 7 efforts of the Anti-Defamation League to castigate all pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic” and to pressure campus leaders to crack down on such activity. Most importantly, these efforts have the full-throated backing of the Trump administration and its supporters in red states, like my own state of Indiana, all across the country.
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness, and contributes to the steady weakening of the freedom of expression and association that is at the heart of any decent, liberal democracy.
Such conduct is not academic leadership. It is craven submission to ideological small-mindedness and political pressure.
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An Open Letter to Mahmoud Khalil and Noor Abdalla’s Newborn Child
The miracle of this moment is that even genocide cannot exterminate our will to live, nor the love that endures through the pain.
May 12, 2025
Dear Little One,
I do not know your government name. But I know what my government wants to name you. Criminal. Terrorist. Problem. A threat to national security. Better off dead. Everything they’re naming your father: Mahmoud Khalil. Everything except a precious child of God, which you are.
When I heard two plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abducted your father for protesting the genocide in Gaza, I trembled. When I found out he was captured at Columbia University, where I teach, right in front of your mother, Noor, who had been carrying you in her womb for eight turbulent months, my chest sank into my stomach.
I have not stopped thinking of you since. Your heart has been beating on the door of my conscience.
I’m here to tell you, Little One, that the world is yours. All of it. Not because you have the right to own the Earth, but because you have a responsibility to steward its survival and splendor.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I was surprised your father was taken. I’m the child of persecuted people who were kidnapped, locked in chains, and ripped away from their families by the founders of this country. I know America became the most powerful nation on Earth by seizing the labor of Black folks and the land of Indigenous people. I also know that Columbia, where your father helped lead the student protests, was never an institution that values freedom—academic or otherwise. It is a gatekeeper of the U.S. empire and the largest real estate owner in New York City.
That’s why I won’t belabor what the circumstances of your birth already prove. Fascism is here. It is criminal to learn. Telling the truth can get you doxxed, locked up, or kicked out of the country. Nobody is safe.
I wish this were not the case. I wish I could write to you about the beauty of the Earth without the brutality of its inhabitants. I wish I could show you the majesty of the Amazon, the Earth’s largest rainforest, without the greedy CEOs that have remade it into a commodity. I wish I could describe the sound and smell of Baltimore, Miami, and St. Louis without the pop! of a cop’s gun or the stench of a homeless woman languishing on the street.
I wish I could paint you a picture of your people, the Palestinian people, without barren olive trees, countless checkpoints, shopping malls built atop graves, and a 25-miles-long open-air prison where over 50,000 Palestinians, including nearly 16,000 children, have been slaughtered by the Israeli military. I wish I could read you a story without the cries of a mother and her baby buried beneath rubble.
But I’m afraid that the writing is on the wall, Little One. And the wall—whether snaking through Palestine or enclosing the borders and prisons of America—is stained with blood and wrapped in barbed wire.
I do not mean to frighten you. Only to share what you need to know to survive. Not just your little limbs and endearing eyes, but your precious heart. For those who think they hate you will attack your inner life. Do not be complicit. We can only lose if we surrender the sword of truth and the shield of self-regard. So guard your heart. Reject bitterness and hatred. Heartbreak is better than having no heart at all.
The truth is: It is themselves they fail to love. And this is but one symptom of the sickness we bear today. The decay of moral life, the death of the human spirit.
But all is not lost. The miracle of this moment is that even genocide cannot exterminate our will to live, nor the love that endures through the pain. This is what makes you profoundly dangerous to the powers that be, although you have yet to take your first step or mumble your first word. For you are proof of irrepressible life.
A new world is not waiting to be born. It is here!
I caught a glimpse of its beauty at Columbia’s encampment. Sprawled between sleeping bags was a makeshift library, medical clinic, food stations, art murals, music circles, and signs that read “Stop Funding Genocide” and “Jews for Free Palestine.” Muslim students held Jummah while Jewish students observed Seder and Christians organized Sunday service. Professors and organizers co-led teach-ins on global politics and the history of student activism as kids flew kites and police helicopters hovered above.
There was no fee to learn or break bread or receive medical support. The only debt we accrued is the love and care we owe to one another. The encampment was education (and life!) at its best. Not because it was perfect. It wasn’t. But because it modeled what it means for a multiracial and multifaith community to learn how to live together and support each other.
Some will try to convince you that opponents of genocide are champions of hate. Don’t be fooled by their lies. Their efforts to defame your father and all those acting with moral courage reveal who they are, not you.
James Baldwin, who came of age not far from where your father was abducted, knew this better than any writer I’ve read. In 1963, just a few months before four Klu Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, brutally murdering four black girls during Sunday school, he penned a letter to his teenage nephew, James. “I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name.”
Little One, know this. The world will try to define you by your zip code, skin color, religious tradition, and native tongue. And some will try to make you feel small and worthless. But identity is a birthright, not a birthmark. Your right, and responsibility, is to decide who you will grow up to be.
I pray you grow strong and beautiful. I pray you grow to be curious and committed to something bigger than yourself. I pray you cherish life, even when it hurts. I pray you and your father laugh together beneath the shade of olive trees. I pray you and your mother dance until the stars shimmer. I pray you reap the fruits of their labor, and all of us who sow seeds of freedom on this wretched Earth. I pray you fight so that, one day, no child will become a martyr. I pray you always believe another world is possible. And that—even beneath the shadow of death—there is beauty in the struggle.
When I found out you were born, I felt a mixture of fury, relief, and joy. I hate that your father is trapped in a cage in Louisiana, over 1,400 miles away, as your mother brought you into this world in New York City. I hate that this government kept him from holding her hand and hearing your very first cry. I wept at the idea of you weeping without his tender touch and wonderstruck eyes.
And yet, I thank God you entered History’s gates at such a time as this. I know that may sound strange, even cruel. If we do not change course, by the time you’re able to read this letter, Miami might drown; the Amazon may be no more; and another generation of Palestinian children will have grown up beneath war-torn skies. This is not the world any child should inherit, or any adult should have to endure.
But, alas, here you are. And I’m here to tell you, Little One, that the world is yours. All of it. Not because you have the right to own the Earth, but because you have a responsibility to steward its survival and splendor.
The sunset is yours to cherish. The evergreen is yours to tend and explore. Children are yours to raise, teach, and protect. Elders are yours to learn from and look after. Walls are yours to tear down. Wars are yours to end. Secrets are yours to keep. Ancestors are yours to grieve, honor, and avenge. Your parents are yours to love. And you, you are ours to keep! We belong to each other.
Please know that you are loved. And that, with love, we will fight for your life, and for your father’s life, and for every and all life—to the death.
Sumud and Salām,
nyle
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In Latest Legal Loss for Trump, Federal Court Orders Rümeysa Öztürk's Return to Vermont
The ruling in Rümeysa Öztürk's case came less than 24 hours after courts ruled that Badar Khan Suri's case must be heard in Virginia and that Mahmoud Khalil's case must remain in New Jersey.
May 07, 2025
On Wednesday, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was the third detained international scholar in 24 hours to secure a victory in a case against the Trump administration when a federal appeals panel ordered the government to return Öztürk to Vermont from the crowded Louisiana detention center to which she was sent hours after plainclothes immigration agents arrested her in March.
The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down its ruling weeks after U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III in Vermont ordered the administration to return Öztürk to the New England state, where she had been located when her attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition on her behalf.
Sessions' ruling had demanded that Öztürk be returned to Vermont for a hearing by May 1, but she remained in Louisiana—where the Trump administration has sent numerous foreign students marked for deportation to ensure their cases would be handled by conservative judges—as the White House appealed the case to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That court said Wednesday that Öztürk must be sent back to Vermont by May 14, where a federal judge will hold a hearing on her habeas corpus petition on May 22. A bail hearing for Öztürk's release will also be held on May 9.
Öztürk's lawyers argue that the government is unconstitutionally retaliating against her for co-writing an op-ed in her school newspaper last year in which she called on Tufts to divest from companies tied to Israel and its bombardment of Gaza. She was detained in March by plainclothes immigration agents—some of whom wore masks—near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.
"No one should be arrested and locked up for their political views," said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which is helping to represent Öztürk. "Every day that Rümeysa Öztürk remains in detention is a day too long. We're grateful the court refused the government’s attempt to keep her isolated from her community and her legal counsel as she pursues her case for release."
Lawyers recently submitted new filings in Öztürk's case in Vermont, describing her living conditions for nearly two months in Louisiana.
In a cramped room with 23 other women, Öztürk has suffered progressively more severe asthma attacks and has been exposed to triggers for her asthma, including insect and rodent droppings and a lack of fresh air.
"Rümeysa has suffered six weeks in crowded confinement without adequate access to medical care and in conditions that doctors say risk exacerbating her asthma attacks. Her detention—over an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper—is as cruel as it is unconstitutional," said Jessie Rossman, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts. "Today, we moved one step closer to returning Rümeysa to her community and studies in Massachusetts."
With Öztürk expected to return to Vermont within days, the ACLU this week was also celebrating another "huge blow for the Trump administration" in the case of Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, who was also arrested in March by masked immigration agents before being secretly transported first to Louisiana and then to Texas.
A federal court ruled Suri's habeas corpus case should be heard in a court in Virginia, where he was living with his wife and young children when he was detained.
The Department of Homeland Security said Suri was "rendered deportable" under the Immigration and Nationality Act because he was found "spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media"—claims for which DHS offered no evidence.
His lawyers have argued he was being detained for constitutionally protected speech in support of Palestinian rights.
A federal court in Virginia is now set to hear Suri's case regarding his demand to be returned to Virginia and released on bond on May 14.
Eden Heilman, legal director for the ACLU of Virginia, said the court rejected the Trump administration's effort to "find a court it believed would be friendlier to its unlawful detention of people advocating for Palestinian rights."
"We are pleased the court saw through the Trump administration's attempts to manipulate the law, and we won't stop fighting until Dr. Khan Suri is reunited with his family," said Heilman.
Meanwhile, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration's effort to appeal the issue of where former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil's habeas corpus case should be heard, ensuring that a federal court in New Jersey—where Khalil was detained when the petition was filed—will remain the venue for the case.
The administration has been pushing for Khalil's case to be heard in Louisiana, where he has also been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention since March, when ICE agents accosted him and his pregnant wife and took him away in an unmarked vehicle—eventually sending him 1,400 miles away from his wife and his legal counsel, where he remained last month during the birth of his first child.
Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, expressed hope that Tuesday's ruling "sends a strong message to other courts around the country facing government attempts to shop for favorable jurisdictions by moving people detained on unconstitutional immigration charges around."
"It is the fundamental job of the judiciary," said Kaufman, "to stand up to this kind of government manipulation of our basic rights."
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