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Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.
After studying engineering at Rutgers, Rami Elghandour began chasing a problem that has haunted medicine for decades — how to teach the body to kill cancer cells without destroying itself in the process. This spring, his biotechnology company, Arcellx, unveiled a treatment that moves the science closer to that goal than ever before. In conference halls and investor calls, the reaction bordered on astonishment. Last month, Gilead Sciences bought Arcellx in a deal valued at $7.8 billion.
So it was no surprise when Rutgers invited Elghandour to give the engineering school’s graduation speech this year. But the speech was promptly canceled after students (about five of them, Elghandour estimates) complained about remarks he’d made on social media.
The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
University commencement ceremonies occupy a distinctive place in academic life. At once celebratory, ceremonial, aspirational, and institutional, they mark the culmination of years of study and the transition of students to the next stage of citizenship and professional life. At institutional events — organized, sponsored, and symbolically endorsed by schools and universities — speakers chosen to address graduates at commencements should respect the purpose of these events by not politicizing them.
New York University’s Jonathan Haidt checks a number of boxes for an in-house commencement speaker: best-selling author, public intellectual, and high-profile campus figure. A social psychologist teaching “ethical leadership” at NYU’s school of business, his books like The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation show up on airport bookshelves and the Obama end-of-year-list. He has been a fixture on the liberal-nerd podcast circuit and in the TED Talk world, best known for advocating for free speech and limited screen time. Despite that résumé — or because of it — some NYU students donning violet gowns today at Yankee Stadium would prefer it wasn’t Haidt delivering their final undergrad address.
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency. When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.
That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.
