Our Stories, Our Stage condemns NYU’s escalating effort to control who gets to speak, who gets to celebrate, and whose voice is allowed to count at graduation. 

 

NYU has chosen to platform Jonathan Haidt — an NYU professor and outspoken critic of DEI — as commencement speaker at the same time it is silencing student voices by removing live remarks from graduation ceremonies. These are not separate decisions. They are part of the same throughline of suppression: NYU silences student speech while platforming those whose public rhetoric stands in direct opposition to the values of diversity, inclusion, and free expression.

 

This did not begin with commencement. NYU previously attempted to cancel affinity celebrations, telling students these ceremonies could continue only if they were not named graduations, did not allow alumni speakers, and did not allow seniors to walk. The university did not merely attempt to try the format of celebration, but strip these ceremonies of their meaning, their visibility, and their power.

 

NYU expanded restrictions on our student speakers, replacing live student remarks with professionally recorded videos and defending the move as a way to create a “more varied and engaging” ceremony. But students recognized what that language really meant. A staged video is not the same as a live voice. A pre-approved recording is not the same as student expression. And a commencement that removes live speakers after months of political backlash is not neutral — it is oppressive silence.

 

That contradiction has already been called out publicly by professors and students across this campus, including at NYU’s APIDA celebration, where CAS professor Michael Salgarolo criticized the university’s suspension of live graduation speeches and its treatment of pro-Palestinian student protest. His remarks made clear what many students already knew: “Perhaps these are the things that NYU really fears — it fears recognizing that students created, on their own, a space of creative and intellectual exchange where they felt freer than they did in their own NYU classrooms.”

 

That fear is exactly why Jonathan Haidt’s selection is so offensive. Haidt has built a career attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion, framing DEI as divisive and portraying students, especially young people, as overly sensitive and surveilling one another. He has dismissed anti-racism as intellectually shallow and morally offensive, and he has repeatedly used his platform to defend the rollback of DEI across higher education. At the same time, graduating student speakers remain prohibited from delivering live remarks, making NYU’s choice to elevate Haidt even more hypocritical and insulting. NYU has chosen to platform a figure who has repeatedly dismissed DEI, criticized student activism, and built a public reputation around attacking the very frameworks that make marginalized students visible in higher education.

 

This is not the speaker NYU’s students deserve. It is not a reflection of our community, our values, or our future. Haidt’s views are alienating, exclusionary, and fundamentally out of step with the student body he has been chosen to address. NYU cannot claim to honor diversity while silencing student speech and platforming anti-DEI rhetoric at commencement. 

 

We won the affinity graduations back with our voice. That return was not granted freely; it was reclaimed through student organizing, community pressure, and collective refusal. Now we ask our community to use that same voice again — for the student speakers whose voices were silenced, and against the anti-woke agenda NYU is choosing to platform through Johnathan Haidt as speaker. As we know, celebration is not ornamental, belonging is not negotiable, and students deserve recognition for their labor, survival, and leadership. That principle still holds, and these new attacks on it must continue to be challenged.  

 

NYU almost erased our ceremony. It has censored our speech. And now it is making clear with the selection of Johnathan Haidt as Commencement Speaker, that their administrative comfort is more important than our students' right to both. 

We refuse to have our commencement speaker be someone like Jonathan Haidt. We refuse the censorship of our live student speakers at graduation ceremonies. 

 

We call for his removal as commencement speaker and for his replacement with someone who reflects the student body, not the narrow politics of the university’s leadership. We call for the reinstatement of live student speakers at our graduation ceremonies. 

 

We reject the idea that our graduation should become a stage for censorship disguised as a ceremony. We reject the blatant insult and obvious suppression of silencing student speakers while rewarding anti-DEI rhetoric at our largest celebratory stage. And we reject a university that asks us to continue under conditions that erase the very people whose stories built this institution. 

 

Our Stories, Our Stage. 

Never conditional. Never censored.