Graduating senior Logan Rozos used his commencement speech at New York University (NYU) to speak out against “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine.” The administration reacted with horror, apologizing for the harms Rozos’s words had inflicted on “the audience [that] was subjected to these remarks.” Rozos, they said, had “abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”
NYU went further than merely offering a verbal condemnation of Rozos — the administration made the decision to withhold his diploma.
If we abstract away from the political specifics of Rozos’s speech, this looks like exactly the kind of campus incident the Right would have been all over a few years ago. A craven university bureaucracy, pandering to easily offended activists, absurdly apologized to an audience for being “subjected” to a point of view they don’t want to hear, as if this young man’s exercise of his free speech rights amounted to an act of violence.
Rozos played by the rules of academia: he paid his tuition fees — currently around $60,000 per year on average — passed all his classes, and even excelled to the point of landing a spot as a graduation speaker. Despite this, NYU has made the decision to punish him for holding opinions unpopular with the government. Truly, the woke mob has gone too far!
The difference between now and, say, 2020 is that the loudest voices in this particular mob are conservatives.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the American right was up in arms about “cancel culture.” Then conservatives worried…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
