On Wednesday, Logan Rozos, an undergraduate student speaker from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, delivered his commencement speech in which he said: “The only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestina”.
Rozos told the crowd that “as I search my heart today in addressing you all”, it is his “moral and political commitments [that] guide me” into condemning Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed at least 53,000 Palestinians over the last year and a half.
Rozos went on to say: “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’s anti-war speech was met with widespread cheers and applause from students across the auditorium.
Following Rozos’s speech, NYU released a statement saying that it “strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today … to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views”.
Last August, NYU updated its student conduct guidelines to include “code words, like ‘‘Zionist” as examples of discriminatory speech.
The updated guidelines came months after anti-war students at NYU and other college campuses across the country demonstrated in solidarity with Palestine. As a result, NYU administrators called police to campus, leading to widespread arrests of students and faculty members.
Last December, two tenured professors who were declared “personae non gratae” by NYU accused the university of escalating its suppression of anti-war speech under pressure from donors, politicians and pro-Israel organizations.
The two professors, Andrew Ross and Sonya Posmentier, were barred from entering certain university buildings. The PNG declarations came after Ross and Posmentier joined a sit-in at the university library in calls for the university to divest from companies profiting off of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Source: The Guardian
