MIT Commencement Speaker Banned From Graduation Ceremony After Giving Pro-Palestine Speech

Int'l Business Times

2 days ago

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT's) 2025 class president and her family were banned from attending Saturday's graduation ceremony after she gave a pro-Palestine speech.
On Thursday, Megha Vemuri praised her fellow students for protesting in support of Palestinians and criticized the university's connections to Israel during a campuswide commencement event, prompting several Jewish students to abruptly walk out of the ceremony.
Vemuri said during her speech that she and her fellow graduates will carry "the stamp of the MIT name, the same name that is directly complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, so we carry with us the obligation to do everything we can to stop it." MIT received $2.8 million in grants, gifts, and contracts from Israeli entities between 2020 and 2024, based on data from the U.S. Department of Education, according to reporting by the Boston Globe.
MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles sent an email to Vemuri on Friday, informing her that she and her family were prohibited from attending the graduation ceremony.
"You deliberately and repeatedly misled Commencement organizers," Nobles wrote, according to reporting by the Globe. "While we acknowledge your right to free expression, your decision to lead a protest from the stage, disrupting an important institute ceremony, was a violation of MIT's time, place and manner rules for campus expression."
"I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide," Vemuri wrote in a statement in response to the school's decision, adding that the administration "massively overstepped their roles to punish me without merit or due process."
Vemuri, who double majored in computation and cognition and linguistics, will receive her diploma via mail, according to The New York Times.
She is the latest in a string of college graduates who have been persecuted for speaking out against Israel's war on Gaza. Most recently, New York University chose to withhold Logan Rozos's diploma after he condemned Israel's actions in Gaza and the U.S.' complicity in it during a commencement ceremony on May 14.
"The genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months. And that I do not wish to speak only to my own politics today, but to speak for all people of conscience, and all people who feel the moral injury of this atrocity," Rozos stated during his speech, per The Guardian.
Originally published on Latin Times