On the very same day in which Harvard’s president received a standing ovation during the university’s graduation ceremony in Harvard Yard and emphasized verbally that students from all around the world come to Harvard to study—U.S. President Trump having recently ordered Harvard’s international students either to transfer from Harvard or be sent home—MIT’s president barred the 2025 class president from attending her graduation ceremony on the next day because of her speech denouncing Israel’s decimation of Gaza in violation of international human-rights law. Whether extermination or genocide, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s sitting prime minister and a former defense minister should be enough for MIT’s senior officials to recognize that speaking on behalf of human rights and against mass carnage and intentional starvation is laudatory rather than horrendous. Even with the political pressure that must have been coming the federal president, it was possible to resist such pressure, which is why Harvard’s graduates gave the president of Harvard a standing ovation of support. Sometimes international affairs really are simple. Opposing Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza is not only morally good; doing so is a duty. After all (but sadly not after all), Israel’s military actions over 1.5 years had already resulted in whole cities being leveled and 1.2 million residents facing starvation. The policy of U.S. Government and the money of the American military-industrial companies, both of which were still aiding Israel’s military, was also ripe for moral criticism. In effect, MIT’s “academic” officials felt justified in taking the draconian step of barring the graduating-class student-president from the campus on the day of graduation because she had spoken out for human rights. There surely are tough decisions in life given how subjective and even multivariate human judgment is, but condemning and even bypassing MIT in the wake of that institution’s highest officials barring the student from even receiving her diploma in the graduation ceremony even though her family had come to see it is not a difficult decision to reach. While dwarfed by the coldness of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, “heartless” is not an adjective that a university’s top officials want applied to them or a university itself, especially in regard to students on the cusp of being alumni with great earning, and thus donating, potential.
A university worth being praised even educationally encourages rather than disempowers students to embrace and even preach moral ideals. A great university goes on to teach its students that even a moral ideal is not perfect, or the whole of goodness, and thus academic freedom appropriately entails the expression of different ideas. To be sure, that no ethical ideal is tantamount to ultimate reality does not justify enabling human-rights abuses committed by officials in governments. Such officials (and governments) should indeed be “called on the carpet” on societal and global stages, even (and especially) if the government is one’s own. Autocratic rule is thus inherently unethical. Such rule is not limited to governments; universities too can also be ruled with an iron fist, even at the expense of human rights. Any equivalence of an autocratic government and an autocratic university is repudiated by the fact that any government is based on force, which can so easily be used in violation of human rights, whereas any institution of higher education is based on freedom, most significantly of ideas. A university administration that is acting as a government would, even as by having a university police department, thus undermines the educational mission with that of governments at their most basic level.
It is with such a macro perspective that the actions of MIT’s cadre of officials can and should be viewed. While Harvard’s university and schools’ graduation ceremonies were underway, Megha Vemuri, MIT’s graduating-class president, spoke at the OneMIT Commencement ceremony, also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was wearing a keffiyeh, “a symbol of pro-Palestinian solidarity,” on her graduation robe.[1] “She praised her peers for protesting the war in Gaza and criticized the university’s ties to Israel.”[2] With students, families thereof, university staff, and even Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts in attendance, Vemuri said to the other students, “You showed the world that MIT wants a free Palestine.”[3] As at other universities, there had been visible protests on MIT’s campus during the spring term of 2024. Given the decimation of houses, towns and even entire cities in Gaza then and since, the slogan “Free Palestine” had become as much or even more of a moral imperative as a political recognition of a Palestinian state.
According to Vemuri, “after her speech, the university’s senior leadership informed her she was not allowed to attend” the commencement ceremony, which would take place on the next day.[4] She was even “barred from campus until the event concluded.”[5] Astonishingly, MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth addressed the crowd “immediately following Vemuri’s speech,”saying in part, “At MIT, we value freedom of expression, but today’s about the graduates.”[6] Going to such lengths not only of blocking Vemuri from being able to accept her diploma in front of her friends and family, but also banning her from the campus speaks volumes about just how much MIT valued freedom of expression. Admittedly, Vemuri’s speech did not match the one that the university had required her to submit beforehand, but freedom of expression does not countenance university censorship. If indeed the day was really “about the graduates,” then the day should presumably have included expressions by the students unmediated by constraints on the freedom thereof. It is not as though the senior-class student president were a U.S. diplomat giving a speech at the UN.
At a university, which is not the same thing as a government, freedom of expression includes as if by definition the freedom to go with a different speech on the day of and even not to have to clear a speech in advance as if a 22-year-old class president were a Cabinet Secretary needing to clear an upcoming speech with the White House so the administration speaks with one voice. In enforcing severe, deterrent limits on freedom of expression, which, we should remember, Vemuri used in defense of human rights (oh no!) rather than of autocrats, by even barring her from the campus as if she were a criminal because she had not cleared her speech with the MIT administration, that university’s president failed utterly to grasp the vital ways in which a university differs in kind (i.e. qualitatively) from a government.
The advent of university police forces should have been a wake-up call for the American electorate. That Yale’s police force had arrested 48 students in the spring of 2024 and turned that campus into locked-down police state should be a red flag. That MIT’s graduation day could very easily have come to university police accosting and hauling the class president off campus as if she had just done something violent is just one sign of the trend wherein constant shows of force by university police and even security guards undercut the academic atmosphere that naturally and uniquely inheres on a university campus wherein ideas need wide-open fresh air rather than surveillance by university employees in uniform (and, if university police officers, with guns). The power of hostile force that can quickly boil down to a show of force (as in a physical altercation between a university policeman and a young student) is so unlike, and even antithetical to, the power of ideas that universities stand to lose a lot of intangible value when their respective officials think of a university as a government. Governmental power can warp even intelligent minds, as evinced by the outlandish statement by MIT’s president right after the student’s “shocking” speech in defense of human rights in Gaza. Free expression by the graduates is indeed consistent with the day being “about the graduates.” When a statement by the president of an elite university cannot survive the onslaught of reason, something is wrong with that university’s administration. I drove by MIT on the day of its graduation and saw many MIT police cars huddled. At the time, I thought the show of urgency and energy was excessive in that several of the parked police cars had their respective blue lights flashing on the car-roofs. To treat a graduation as if it were a major police incident/emergency requiring such a visible show of imminent force is not only a mark of government, but also an indication that universities make bad governments. Not being well suited to government, and ultimately, not being of the sort of force that a government is all too quick to resort to when it is threatened, university officials are likely to display warped pathological judgment when it comes to using that type of force, even in trying to incessantly intimidate students and even faculty by using the excessive, out-in-front presence of university security guards and police as deterrence. Students and faculty do not deserve to feel uncomfortable on an academic campus on a daily basis. Furthermore, using presence as a deterrent to political protest may even be unconstitutional, and it can backfire, especially if enough students and faculty visibly protest the police-state on campus. Even if deterrence-by-intimidation works, which I doubt, the ethics of subjecting innocent people to the passive-aggressive motive evinced visually in excessive presence are troubling.
Maybe schools should be ranked on passive-aggression so prospective students could “vote with their wallets.” Perhaps from a financial shortfall MIT’s administration might have sufficient incentive to reevaluate and revalue its real values. Hardly noticed would still be the opportunity costs in terms of the foregone benefits of academic force, which is so easily eclipsed and even squashed by the other, exogenous type of force that security guards and police relish. Has the modern American university, public or private, been reduced to being a city-state with an economic product? MIT’s graduating-class student-president was treated as if she were a defendant sentenced to a temporarily exile or as a customer banned from entering a store for the duration of a sale, even though she was actually a college graduate who was already putting her education to use for the betterment of humanity.
Academic administrators, who are essentially scholars, meaning people who hold a doctoral degree (i.e., Ph.D, Th.D., JSD., D.Sci.M., DBA, Ed.D), are not equipped to direct an institutional police unit and security personnel to apply hard force to students and faculty as if violating a university policy were a criminal offence. University policies are not passed by governmental legislatures and signed into law, and so policies do not have the force of law, and yet too many university police employees make arrests on the basis of organizational policy rather than law. A university is neither a government nor a fortress, and thus should not have a police unit. Neither should academic administrators conflate their own academic legitimacy with that of an elected representative under whom a state's police are accountable, at least in theory. To conflate this basis of authority with that of a theoratician who runs a university is to make a category mistake that invites the exploitation of both personal and institutional conflicts of interest.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
