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Delivering a university commencement address used to simply be a unique kind of honor. Speakers stand before a podium, wearing a traditional graduation cap and robe, to offer graduates life lessons and inspirational words as they enter the next phrase of life.
But today, speaking at a university commencement ceremony carries considerable risk, as Morton Schapiro, former president of Northwestern University, recently found out. Schapiro was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University Law Center’s May 17 graduation, but announced on May 6 that he would not appear at the event.
Some Georgetown Law students had protested and petitioned to have Schapiro’s invitation rescinded, citing what they said were Schapiro’s “controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions.” Schapiro wrote an op-ed expressing support for Israel and Jewish people a few days after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people.
Schapiro is in good company. There’s a reason the free speech advocacy group FIRE calls the lead-up to college commencements “disinvitation season.”
Over the last two decades, colleges and universities across the country have withdrawn invitations to various commencement speakers after students protested their scheduled appearance. Or, in some cases, invited speakers have said they will no longer participate after students speak out against their upcoming appearances.
As a political scientist who has written about the 1st Amendment and free speech on college campuses, I think Schapiro’s ill-fated Georgetown commencement invitation — and other instances like this one — shows that intolerance for dissenting viewpoints is a dominant theme on campuses that persists until the last diploma is handed out.
Some students want only people who hold similar views to address them at their graduation. They exercise what free speech law experts call a “heckler’s veto,” meaning an audience’s reaction, or anticipated response, stops someone from speaking. Free speech then is silenced, and a graduation becomes just a performative moment of political correctness.
University commencement season is well underway at colleges and universities across the country. Most schools will hold their graduation ceremonies by mid-June, if they have not already.
By the middle of the 19th century, American university commencements were drawing well-known outsiders to college campuses to speak.
In 1837, for example, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa graduates and issued a stirring call for American students and scholars to end what he called “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.”
In 1881, James Garfield became the first sitting American president to deliver a commencement address, when he spoke at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
Other presidents have used commencement speeches to announce major policy initiatives and agreements, including on foreign policy.
In 1963, President Kennedy told the graduating seniors at American University that the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union would start negotiations to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.
Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced at Howard University’s commencement that he would begin a major initiative to address socioeconomic disparities that disadvantaged Black people.
There was no notable controversy or protest about Kennedy, Johnson or other prominent speakers who delivered commencement addresses several decades ago.
But that was then. Times have changed.
FIRE estimates that between 2000 and 2024, there were 345 attempts to disinvite commencement speakers. Many of the scheduled speakers who faced pressure to not appear at the ceremonies backed out.
Examples of commencement speaker disinvitations have happened at small, private liberal arts colleges, as well as big, public universities. Being disinvited from speaking at a graduation is often precipitated by petitions and protests, from both conservative and progressive activists.
For example, in 2019, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, withdrew as the scheduled commencement speaker at Creighton University. This followed the Nebraska Republican Party objecting to Kerrey’s record of support for abortion rights.
In 2025, the noted author Salman Rushdie withdrew as commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College after members of its Muslim Student Assn. urged the school to revoke his invitation. They accused Rushdie, a self-described “hard-line atheist,” of “disparaging a global religious community” in his writing and public appearances. In a 2015 commencement address at Emory University he had said: “I sometimes think we live in a very credulous age. People seem ready to believe almost anything. God, for example.”
There have also been various commencement speakers who have delivered controversial addresses that some graduates — and outside observers — found offensive. Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, for example, spoke at Benedictine College’s commencement in 2024 and encouraged female graduates to become homemakers.
That brings us back to Schapiro. “I have presided over 28 commencements as a president and dean,” Schapiro wrote in a note to Georgetown’s law students, “and those ceremonies are about celebrating the graduates and their supporters. I was looking forward to giving a talk about humility and gratitude, but I don’t want my presence to distract from the day’s festivities.”
Humility and gratitude are often missing in disinvitation season.
In 2017, Drew Gilpin Faust, then the president of Harvard University, seemed to understand this absence when she issued a free speech message to graduates in her commencement address. “Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones,” Faust warned.
Commencement season puts Faust’s admonitions to the test. She said universities must show that truth is established through “reasoned argument, assessment and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.”
Austin Sarat is a professor of law, political science and social thought at Amherst College. This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that delivering a commencement address has shifted from being a straightforward honor to a risky undertaking, as invited speakers increasingly face campaigns to disinvite them based on their political or religious views. It frames Morton Schapiro’s withdrawal from Georgetown Law’s graduation, after students objected to what they called his “controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions,” as part of this broader trend.
It contends that these campaigns reflect a growing intolerance for dissenting or unpopular viewpoints on campus, extending all the way through the academic year to graduation day. According to the piece, some students want commencement speakers who echo their own beliefs rather than challenge them, turning ceremonies into venues for ideological conformity rather than intellectual engagement.
The article notes that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has documented hundreds of attempts between 2000 and 2024 to disinvite commencement speakers, and the group has labeled this recurring pattern “disinvitation season.” Many invitations are rescinded or speakers withdraw after petitions and protests, suggesting that the threat of controversy alone is enough to deter speech.
To underscore what has changed, the piece contrasts today’s contentious climate with historical precedents. It points out that past commencement speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson used these platforms to deliver consequential and sometimes challenging messages—on intellectual independence, nuclear arms control and racial justice—without provoking the kind of organized disinvitation efforts now common.
The column emphasizes that pressure campaigns come from across the political spectrum. It cites, for example, former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s decision not to speak at Creighton University after Republican critics objected to his support for abortion rights, and Salman Rushdie’s withdrawal from a Claremont McKenna College commencement following objections from a Muslim student organization to his criticism of religion. These cases are presented as evidence that both conservative and progressive actors are willing to suppress speech they dislike.
It further highlights that commencement-related speech controversies are not limited to cancellations. The article points to Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s 2024 commencement address at Benedictine College—where he urged women graduates to become homemakers—as an example of remarks that sparked backlash and illustrated how easily commencement speeches can be turned into flashpoints in broader culture wars.
The piece characterizes these disinvitations and controversies as instances of what free speech advocates call a “heckler’s veto”: situations where anticipated or actual audience hostility leads institutions or speakers to shut down speech preemptively. The article aligns this with criticisms by free speech organizations and commentators who have condemned cancellations like the University of Southern California’s decision to cancel its valedictorian’s commencement remarks in response to threats, a move PEN America described as capitulating to “a heckler’s veto.”[2][3]
Finally, the article invokes then-Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2017 commencement message, which warned that “silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy” undermines the search for truth. It argues that disinvitation season betrays those principles, turning commencement into “a performative moment of political correctness” rather than a culmination of open inquiry grounded in “reasoned argument” and a willingness to confront uncomfortable ideas.
Different views on the topic
A Brookings Institution commentary contends that protests against commencement speakers are themselves an exercise of free speech, not a suppression of it.[1] The article argues that students who petition and demonstrate against invited speakers are “answering speech with speech” and trying to persuade administrators through argument, operating firmly within the best traditions of the First Amendment rather than undermining it.
That analysis stresses that, in most high-profile cases, student activists are not trying to shout down speakers at the podium or physically prevent them from appearing. Instead, they aim to influence institutional decisions before the event occurs, such as whether a university should extend or maintain an invitation. As such, the Brookings piece maintains, these actions differ from the classic “heckler’s veto,” which involves making speech impossible through disruption and intimidation at the moment of delivery.[1]
The Brookings commentary further argues that commencement invitations are unique because they function as symbolic endorsements by the university. Inviting figures such as Condoleezza Rice or IMF head Christine Lagarde, and often awarding them honorary degrees, signals that they embody virtues the institution wishes to celebrate.[1][4] According to this view, students are entitled to challenge whom their university chooses to honor, particularly when they object to a speaker’s policy record or institutional role rather than to abstract viewpoints alone.
In this perspective, protests are framed less as efforts to silence ideas and more as disputes over institutional honors and values. The Brookings article emphasizes that commencement is principally the students’ day and that the audience is effectively captive. It suggests that students should have a voice in preventing their graduation from becoming a stage for celebrating individuals whose actions they regard as deeply harmful or inconsistent with the university’s mission.[1]
The same Brookings analysis contends that alarm over a supposed epidemic of heckler’s vetoes is overstated. It notes that, in practice, outright shutdowns of commencement speeches are rare and that most protests take the form of petitions, statements, or symbolic actions such as turning backs or booing during introductions.[1] These forms of expression, it suggests, may be rude but do not stifle speech and should be understood as legitimate political participation rather than as censorship.
Moreover, the Brookings commentary defends, in some circumstances, the rescinding of honorary degrees or invitations as a morally and institutionally responsible act. It highlights Brandeis University’s decision to withdraw an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali after faculty cited Ali’s sweeping denunciations of Islam, arguing that a university with a religiously diverse student body “has every right to decide” not to honor a figure whose statements are widely viewed as slandering an entire faith community.[1] From this standpoint, retracting an honor can be compatible with free speech so long as the institution remains open to hosting controversial speakers in other, non-honorific settings.
Finally, that Brookings piece proposes that the deeper issue is not free speech alone but democratic governance within universities. It argues that many controversies arise because administrators select commencement speakers with little student input; greater transparency and student participation in that process could reduce resentment and post hoc protests.[1] In this view, the solution is more internal democracy—allowing debate over potential speakers before invitations are finalized—rather than condemning student activism as intolerance whenever disinvitation efforts occur.
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