At MIT and Yale, 'Graduation's Ruined' - WSJ oped
The same university administrators who allowed extremists to infiltrate their campuses also welcomed them to commencement. For two years the class of 2025 has been subjected to bullying by Hamas supporters. Did they—and their families—also have to suffer while collecting their diplomas?
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, kaffiyeh-clad student speaker Megha Vemuri claimed MIT had suppressed campus activists even as she railed against “genocidal” Israeli soldiers attempting “to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth.” Administrators let her speak knowing that an antisemitic rant was likely. Ms. Vemuri, the 2025 class president, has an extremist record. She ran a self-described “revolutionary” student publication that published an homage to Aaron Bushnell, who in 2024 committed suicide by self-immolation outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington while shouting “Free Palestine.”
Administrators had promised concerned faculty and students that they had a plan in place to handle potential disruptions. But they took no action to interrupt Ms. Vemuri’s rant or remove those in the crowd waving Palestinian flags and shouting, “MIT has blood on its hands.” The most President Sally Kornbluth could muster was a weak call for forbearance from the podium: “Folks, at MIT we value free expression, but today’s about the graduates.”
(snip)
Yale’s administration evidently approved Class Day speaker Molly Smith’s speech comparing this year’s anti-Israel encampment to a 1980s campus protest against apartheid in South Africa. As she spoke, large video screens displayed photos of the earlier protests. Ms. Smith lamented “Yale’s investment in weapons used in the Israel-Hamas war” and the arrest of classmates “for protesting on their own campus.”
Ms. Smith didn’t mention the harassment and assault of Jewish students (including me) during the campus encampment. She failed to note that her peers called for a “global intifada” and the genocide of Jews as they tore down and tried to burn an American flag flying over Yale’s war memorial.
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