US students blast cancellation of commencements: ‘A slap in the face’

Spare a thought for the class of 2024. Some graduating seniors, many of whom did not receive proper high school send-offs due to early Covid lockdowns, once again face muted celebrations.

Though the majority of commencement ceremonies across the US are going ahead as planned, a handful of universities have pared down or outright cancelled festivities on the big day. Columbia University administrators announced plans to cancel its university-wide ceremony, citing security concerns, while Emory University will move its commencement off campus. The University of Southern California (USC) cancelled its main ceremony in favor of smaller receptions for different schools. Ditto for California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, in northern California, which has closed its campus entirely and will host smaller celebrations arranged off campus. Some students believe the move is intended to squash dissent by those protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza.

“It’s a slap in the face to the student body,” said Ione Dellos, a journalism major at Cal Poly Humboldt who covered the protests for college radio station KRFH.

Dellos was thrilled to have a normal ceremony after a “drive-through” high school graduation in 2020, where they jumped out of their car at a podium to get their diploma. “I’ve been waiting four years to finally walk across that stage, hear my name pronounced incorrectly, and get my degree while my family watches,” they said. They’ll still have the opportunity to celebrate somehow at a school-specific graduation, but it just doesn’t feel like a worthy cap to the end of their schooling.

Last week, Cal Poly Humboldt called in police to arrest students who had occupied buildings demanding divestment from Israel, and shut the campus down. Campus will remain closed through commencement on Saturday.

“It feels like [the administration is] punishing the student body because they are displeased with our actions, and they’re robbing so many students of the graduation they rightfully deserved. They’re trying to drive a wedge between the students who are protesting and the students who are not,” Dellos said. (Cal Poly Humboldt cited clean-up work, building security, and continuing investigations into “campus conduct” as reasons for cancelling its main campus commencement.)

Dellos’s classmate and station manager at KRFH, Kianna Znika, is an older college senior – the 26-year-old had a regular high school graduation. She was looking forward to having her family on campus, as it will be their first time visiting. “I can’t show them where I went to school or the radio station,” she said.

One student group, Humboldt for Palestine, plans to hold a “protest graduation” on the same day as the smaller ceremonies. “Everyone graduates in honor of a Palestinian child, and they receive a rose instead of a diploma,” Znika said. Znika herself plans to walk in a ceremony for Latinx students so that her family – especially her Mexican grandmother, who only speaks Spanish – can share the moment. But the season does not feel festive.

“Being out in some field and waiting for my name to be called just doesn’t matter that much to me any more,” Znika said. “I don’t feel comfortable being at a ceremony where members of the administration who called the cops on students will be. As an institution, it feels so fake. They’re going to say that they’re celebrating us, but all of their actions make me think that they don’t really care about their students … they just like appearing to care.”

College graduation ceremonies held during the first weekend in May became the scenes of protests. At the University of Michigan, students waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Israel bombs, U of M pays, how many kids have you killed today?” in an attempt to disrupt the festivities. Dozens of pro-Palestinian graduates walked out of Indiana University’s commencement while a plane circled outside towing a banner that read “Let Gaza Live”. After students at the University of Vermont protested against the planned commencement speaker – the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who vetoed resolutions calling for a ceasefire – the university announced she would no longer speak.

USC is tightly controlling access to campus before Friday’s smaller, school-specific commencements, citing security concerns, the New York Times reports. In recent weeks, the administration canceled an address from its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, whose support of the Palestinian cause on social media angered pro-Israeli groups, and called in police to break up an encampment and arrest protesters.

One USC senior told CNN the decision to cancel the main ceremony seemed “retaliatory” and intended to “turn people against the protesters”. Another described it as “heartbreaking”, while a third told the Times that the USC leadership’s handling of graduation was a “joke”.

At the City University of New York’s law school, past student commencement speakers have called for Palestinian rights in their remarks. Last year’s pick, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, decried Israel’s “murdering” of Palestinian citizens months before the 7 October attack and was accused of engaging in hate speech by pro-Israeli activists.

Ahead of its 23 May commencement, Cuny School of Law decided to not allow any student speakers, Truthout reported. Nusayba Hammad, a graduating student, called this reversal “shameful”.

Related: Why have student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza gone global?

“What that means to me is that my identity as a Palestinian, my right to life and my right to freedom, my family’s right to life and freedom, my people’s right to life and freedom is somehow controversial to Cuny,” Hammad said. “I’ve had to survive my last year of law school watching a livestream genocide of my people. I’m trying to figure out how to support the people I love who are having their families blown up.”

Hammad and seven other grads are suing Cuny School of Law for discrimination and infringement on their first amendment rights. Two non-student speakers, the ACLU president, Deborah Archer, and the dean’s medal recipient Muhammad Faridi, declined invitations to speak at commencement, in solidarity with students. (A representative for Cuny did not respond to a request for comment.) The students’ lawsuit, according to Hammad, “is our small way of challenging the dehumanization that’s made the genocide possible”.

Commencement is more than a ceremony to Hammad: “It’s acknowledging that we made it this far, that we overcame obstacles and odds to get here.” At the same time, she says it’s difficult to think of feeling joyful or celebratory in New York when Israeli forces have killed over 34,000 people in Gaza, and destroyed every university. “How many [of the dead] were university students? How many of them were children who never got to be university students?” she said.