June 30, 2025
MIT recently found itself at the center of a
national controversy stemming from its recent commencement. After undergraduate class president Megha Vemuri veered from her approved remarks to deliver a speech condemning Israel and accusing MIT of complicity in a genocide of the Palestinian people at the all-university
OneMIT Commencement ceremony, MIT stripped her of her role in the next day’s undergraduate graduation ceremony and barred her from attending. This turn of events understandably raised questions about free speech and censorship. In the end, however, MIT was within its rights to take the action it did, albeit with some questions and considerations it should take into account in the future.
As has been widely reported, Vemuri’s remarks include declarations that “the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide” as well as charges that “[w]e are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off of the earth, and it’s a shame that MIT is a part of it.”
Speaking directly afterward, MIT President Sally Kornbluth mostly ignored the divisive nature of Vemuri’s remarks. Shortly following the ceremony, however, MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles informed Vemuri that she was barred from the next day’s undergraduate graduation exercises.
The Boston Globe wrote:
With Vemuri barred from the undergraduate ceremony, the remarks she was scheduled to deliver were instead delivered by the class’s vice president.
MIT’s response to Vemuri’s speech has provoked a range of reactions from the community, some
critical of the university,
others critical
of Vemuri, with yet others
calling for disciplinary action against the speaker. Vemuri, for her part, accepted the result (“I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide,”
CNN reports her saying) while criticizing the action as overkill.
There are certainly circumstances in which Vemuri’s charge would be correct. Had MIT approved her speech as delivered, or had MIT maintained a general practice of not vetting the text of student remarks, Vemuri would have quite strong grounds for complaint. Charges of hypocrisy against MIT would be warranted, and the Institute would have no one to blame but itself for any backlash.
That’s not the case at MIT, however, and likely not at most institutions. Commencement exercises are in significant part the university’s own expression, and they are tightly stage managed as such, hence Chancellor Nobles’ criticism that Vemuri “deliberately and repeatedly” misled MIT over the content of her remarks. While there is a clear right at MIT to communicate the message Vemuri conveyed to students in nearly any other circumstance, there is no corresponding right to be granted a platform at MIT’s commencement, even if the platform is customarily given by virtue of your position in the class. MIT is free to attach strings to the privilege, and to withdraw those privileges to those who refuse to hold up their end of the agreement.
A few notes bear mentioning. First, while attention has focused in particular on Vemuri’s anti-Israel message, the viewpoint of her speech should ultimately be immaterial to MIT’s response. Had Vemuri used her address to advocate for the destruction of Hamas and the open-ended occupation of Palestine, criticism would have come from the opposite direction, but the fundamentals would have been the same. The issue is not the views being expressed; it’s the speaker misleading the institute and exploiting their privileged position to deliver a political broadside at a traditional university ceremony. MIT cannot premise its actions here on the speakers’ views if it wishes to apply its policies in a principled and consistent manner.
Second, we note that MIT framed its action against Vemuri as a response to her violating MIT’s rules on “time, place, and manner.”
MIT’s guidelines, issued and revised largely in response to the large protests and demonstrations that were common at MIT after the October 7 attacks in Israel, have figured heavily in campus free speech controversies over the past two years, and we’ve commented on them frequently. Many protests and demonstrations,
while politically charged, complied with MIT’s regulations. Others, such as the
occupation of Lobby 7 and the
encampment on the Kresge Oval, clearly did not.
Vemuri’s address is, on some level, an atypical application of these guidelines due to the unique nature of commencement. Nevertheless, it’s understandably MIT’s position that commencement is neither the time nor the place for a diatribe against Israel and a condemnation of the Institute. Vemuri’s address, at the least, violated the spirit of the regulations, and MIT had every right to strip her of her remaining duties in response. Barring Vemuri entirely from the undergraduate ceremony is potentially another matter. It’s not clear that MIT held this out as an explicit potential consequence to student speakers; if MIT wasn’t explicit about that before, it should be now.
What does seem clear, though, is that MIT judged this a sufficient enough violation that it could take the action it did without initiating the disciplinary process. This brings us to our final point: MIT has not apparently delayed the receipt of Vemuri’s degree, meaning that there is presumably no open disciplinary action against Vemuri and that she has graduated from the Institute. Many have criticized MIT for this, but that’s ultimately the university’s prerogative.
A contrasting example is
how New York University responded to a similar controversy this spring, when a student speaker, similarly to Vemuri, deviated from his agreed-upon remarks to condemn the war in Gaza. Though his treatment of the subject was apparently briefer than Vemuri’s, NYU condemned his remarks,
and a spokesman stated that “[t]he University is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions.” Many have called on MIT to do the same, though it’s unclear the precise grounds on which NYU pursued its disciplinary charges.
There are lessons for MIT to learn for the future. If it wasn’t already clear about the potential consequences for flouting one’s role in its commencement proceedings, it should be now, and this outcome should be explicitly held out as a possibility for future participants. It should reaffirm its commitment to free expression in all other areas of university life, and enforce its time, place, and manner regulations fairly and consistently so as not to appear partial. It should examine those instances in which it failed to abide by its free speech obligations, such as
with its wrongful suppression of the
Written Revolution publication last year (a publication for which, incidentally, Megha Vemuri was one of the editors).
We don’t wish to see the range of acceptable opinion narrowed at MIT; opposition to that mindset, after all, is a major part of why MFSA was founded. Students have the right to criticize Israel and MIT, as well they should. But MIT also has the right to determine how it wants itself presented at its commencement, and we agree with MIT that its commencement ceremony is best seen as an opportunity to unite, rather than divide, the community.
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