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Like other universities, New York University often chooses speakers noted for their outspokenness. In 2010, the actor Alec Baldwin told graduates and their parents that capitalism and democracy are in conflict and that the “myth of a risk-free life is just that — myth.” Take chances, in other words, don’t play it safe.
In 2015, Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, warned NYU’s graduates that these were times that try men’s souls. Instead of running away from their discomfort with the world, she said, students should sit with it. Discomfort was the first step toward good citizenship. She encouraged students to start with the two million people rotting in America’s jails. That, she said, was “shameful,” a “sign of American failure, not American success.”
Two million, as it happens, is just about the number of Palestinians who are currently being destroyed in Gaza. Following in the footsteps of Baldwin and Ifill, Logan Rozos, a graduating senior and one of NYU’s commencement speakers this year, dedicated four sentences of his two-and-a-half-minute speech to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine.” He stated, “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 last 18 months.” He condemned “this genocide and complicity in this genocide.”
Instead of celebrating him, NYU is refusing to grant Rozos his diploma while it pursues an investigation of him and his remarks. In a statement that could have been issued by any mildly accomplished bureaucrat of the Brezhnev years, John Beckman, an NYU spokesperson, declared that the university “strongly denounces the choice by a student … to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views.” One wonders whose views other than his own Rozos was supposed to express. Beckman added that the university was “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.”
At moments like these, and there will be more in the future, it’s easy to think that actions like NYU’s and statements like Beckman’s are unremarkable, the way any university with a concern for its reputation and retaliation from a tetchy president might respond. But these actions and statements are in fact quite remarkable. No matter how accommodating universities may be of the powers that be — and they are accommodating — graduations and their speakers belong to a different order of things. They’re supposed to make the audience squirm in their seats. That’s how parents and students know they’re at a university, not a ball game.
That’s why, in 1978, on the precipice of what would be called the Second Cold War, Harvard invited the Soviet exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn to speak at its commencement. Solzhenitsyn didn’t take the invitation as an opportunity to condemn the Soviet Union; that he had already done, and it’s why he was no longer allowed to live there. Like all good guests, he turned on his hosts. It was the United States, the people at Harvard, that he criticized.
If you were in Harvard Yard on that day in June, you knew by the third sentence — “Harvard’s motto is ‘Veritas’” — what was coming.
Truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of bitter truth is included in my speech today.
As he proceeded, Solzhenitsyn explained:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite.
In 1996, still in the flush of his fatwa, Salman Rushdie was invited to speak at Bard College. Rushdie reminded the students and parents assembled that freedom was inevitably and essentially a form of “defiance.” Ever insouciant, he added, “I thought I might commend it to you.”
Like Solzhenitsyn, Rushdie didn’t take the obvious pot shots at his most immediate or obvious enemies. Instead, like his Russian counterpart, he extended the circle of his critique, including, without naming them, the not-so-impoverished parents of the students.
For in the years to come you will find yourselves up against gods of all sorts, big and little gods, corporate and incorporeal gods, all of them demanding to be worshipped and obeyed — the myriad deities of money and power, of convention and custom, that will seek to limit and control your thoughts and lives. Defy them; that’s my advice to you. Thumb your noses; cock your snooks. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.
Seven years later, Vassar College took a step of no small courage when it invited Susan Sontag to deliver its commencement address. This was not long after Sontag had scandalized the American establishment with what she wrote about the United States, its government and citizenry, in the wake of 9/11.
At Vassar, Sontag toned it down, but her reproving was clear. And severe: “Try to imagine at least once a day that you’re not an American,” she said. “Despise violence. Despise national vanity and self-love.”
“It’s hard not to be afraid,” she added. “Be less afraid.”
Sontag told the students that life was not about being happy. Or being in love. It was about being responsive, paying attention to what is going on around you. She talked about a recent instance of intolerance on campus, where a speaker, the journalist Chris Hedges, was punished for his speech. Back then, it was the students trying not to hear bad things about their government and its allies, and the college president who was begging them to listen. Times change.
But not as much as we think. Somehow or another the students and parents who were listening to Logan Rozos at NYU the other day understood that it wasn’t the job of a commencement speaker to flatter the feelings of the powerful. Instead of shouting him down, they cheered.
