For decades, graduating students have used the university’s most visible ceremonies to voice dissent toward those in power, from walking out during the Vietnam War to denouncing “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” last year.

 

The class of 1966 staged a walkout during their commencement when the university awarded an honorary degree to then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a military strategist and key architect in the Vietnam War. At least 200 faculty and graduates quietly left the ceremony in staunch opposition to U.S. military bombardment and picketed outside holding signs that read messages like “NO HONORS FOR WAR CRIMINALS,” while around 2,700 graduates who stayed in their seats cheered his name. McNamara, who oversaw the deployment of nearly half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam, wrote in his 1995 memoir that important decisions he made were “wrong, terribly wrong.” 

 

NYU students later joined a nationwide wave of campus unrest at universities to resist U.S. military action in Cambodia, with demonstrations reaching their breaking point on May 4, 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops fired at student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and injuring nine. That same month, police and highway patrol in Mississippi killed two and injured 12 after spraying hundreds of bullets toward student demonstrators at Jackson State College. 

 

The incidents prompted outrage across the country, with NYU students and faculty going on strike. Protests paralyzed the university with sit-ins, in which students occupied multiple buildings, including Kimball Hall and the Loeb Student Center — now the Kimmel Center for University Life. The strike eventually resulted in the abrupt end to the semester — including halted classes — mirroring several other schools that temporarily closed to limit disruption. Students and faculty members also created an initiative that corrected “biased reporting” surrounding the youth movement against the war. 

 

In 1996, then-GSAS Dean Philip Furnanski encouraged graduating students at Carnegie Hall to serve their community instead of being “another ass with a degree.” Amid the solidification of South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, faculty members frequently quoted Nelson Mandela and other popular figures like drag artist RuPaul in graduation speeches. 

 

“What sets us apart is not academic indifference, but awareness,” then-GSAS Associate Dean Juan Corradi said. “We have a responsibility to use our voices, our skills and our knowledge to contribute to society in the coming century.” 

 

A year into the Iraq War, graduates from the class of 2004 held signs including “MAKE PEACE. NOT WAR” at the universitywide commencement ceremony, which at the time took place in Washington Square Park. In October 2005, around 80 students and community members held a vigil in the park on the fourth anniversary of the Patriot Act’s passage. 

 

“I was disturbed by not only the military casualties, but the nearly 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths,” a student organizer told WSN at the time.

 

In 2024, attention at NYU’s graduation ceremonies once again turned toward international conflict — this time in Gaza. Student organizers called on the university to divest from companies linked to Israel and denounced the arrests of dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters, which had been authorized by NYU leadership.

 

Graduates walked out of the Yankee Stadium commencement holding protest signs and displaying hands painted red. At NYU’s degree-granting campus in Abu Dhabi — where students faced policies restricting their graduation attire — one doctoral student was allegedly deported after waving a keffiyeh and yelling “free Palestine” on stage. 

 

Jacqueline Hennecke, the commencement’s banner bearer, said that most students refused to shake hands with former NYU Abu Dhabi vice chancellor Mariët Westermann and that security instructed graduates to remove their gowns before entering the ceremony. 

 

Last year, NYU announced that it withheld the diploma of Gallatin student speaker Logan Rozos, who said his “moral and political commitments” led him to condemn Israel’s ongoing siege in Gaza during the school’s ceremony. The university faced backlash from local civil rights groups and — for the second year in a row — dozens of students booed President Linda Mills as she began her speech at all-university commencement. 

 

During the Tisch ceremony, eight faculty members stood on stage with white cloth tied around their mouths — representing censorship of speech on campus — during a speech by department chair Naomi Clark.

 

“If you speak out and express yourselves, you’ll be targeted for censure and retribution by a government — or even by your own university,” Clark said in her speech. “That’s unacceptable. Please know that your teachers have your backs and that we always strive to grow braver together.”

 

NYU briefly canceled affinity graduations in February. Days later, it revealed that graduation speakers will no longer present live speeches at school-based ceremonies and instead must record statements for a video that complies with university policy. Several students reportedly asked administrators to reconsider the decision — to which they responded that the school must maintain a “respectful experience.” 

 

“This is not an isolated incident,” Steinhardt speaker Maddy van der Linden told WSN. “It is an overall censorship of students. They’ve really turned our graduations into their own political playgrounds.”