NYU’s identity-based graduation events, meant to celebrate the achievements of certain student communities, elevate a flawed and dishonest assumption behind the appearance of progress: After four years of intellectual discovery, the most important thing about you is not what you studied or who you became, but the color of your skin or your sexuality. 

No serious academic institution should organize its students by cultural demographic at the pinnacle of their academic achievement. Per NYU’s logic, that masquerade has no stopping point. Why not organize ceremonies by city of origin? ZIP code? If self-segregating by surface-level characteristics is inherently affirming, the best thing NYU could do is hold thousands of individual graduation ceremonies, one per student. 

An ideal university education teaches students to find common ground across their differences. At NYU, separating students by skin tone is repackaged as enlightenment. Arriving at Yankee Stadium draped in symbols of ethnic or national identity makes the same claim as affinity graduation ceremonies: Your identity matters more than your degree. Your ethnic identity did not attend your classes, go to office hours or write your thesis. You did, and the ceremony ought to reflect that.

Both affinity ceremonies — which NYU recently reinstated under a new name after canceling them in February — and political speeches at graduation proceedings rest on the same arrogant premise: the hijacking of a shared occasion by those convinced their identity politics supersede it. Political preaching is a performative, virtue signaling act of self-aggrandizement which allows one truth to become paramount — all while demanding the attention of the thousands of people who came for an entirely different reason, simply unlucky enough to be in the room.

Sixty years before Logan Rozos gave last year’s student address at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study’s commencement, writer and philosopher Ayn Rand had already described exactly what he would do. In “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” she identified the pressure group playbook: Undercut, demoralize, intimidate and be louder and more provocative than everyone else, until the university, exhausted and conflict-averse, yields. 

Rozos did exactly that when he departed from his prepared remarks to instead condemn the “atrocities currently happening in Palestine.” Meanwhile, the families in that room had no recourse. They had come from across the country and world to watch someone they loved graduate, and were forced to listen to a speaker who decided that his convictions were more important than his peers’ achievements.

One might be willing to grant Rozos the sincerity of moral conviction were it not for several damning omissions: If his deviation from the script was truly motivated by a compulsion to bring light to atrocities, he should have spotlighted several others. By the time of his speech, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had produced one of the largest refugee crises in European history since World War II. Rozos also failed to mention the Sudanese civil war or mass displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

There is no shortage of human suffering in the world, but Rozos used his platform to preach about whose suffering was worth discussing. Allowing students to hijack school events does not bring peace, but an escalating series of demands further into the future. When universities capitulate on disruption, they produce a race to the bottom that erodes the civility society depends on. Instead, Rozos could have easily taken his views into the streets or onto op-ed pages.

Given that NYU also recently announced that live school graduation speeches will now be prerecorded, it’s clear that the administration does not trust students to uphold its standards. When the university grovels to students demanding segregated ceremonies and political platforms at graduation, it abandons a core obligation of higher education. NYU’s mission, in part, should be to model for its students the values of civility and integration — not sorting students by skin tone nor letting agitators set the terms of campus life without consequence, because every student watching is learning what NYU believes civil conduct looks like. The university must stand its ground to preserve the sanctity of its events, before the cost of having neglected them becomes an embarrassing headline. 

In a city of 8 million people drawn from all over the world, students must learn to recognize that not every occasion is a political one, and that responsible citizens are expected to share space with those whose views they find mistaken. All students should be capable of standing at a podium and looking back on a shared experience, reflecting on what we learned and what we owe to our classmates and professors. Graduation ceremonies that hinge on identity politics take away from the spirit of the occasion, and students who co-opt the event mistake the greatest privilege of their academic career for a soapbox.

WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.

Contact Becky Flanagan at [email protected].