June 8, 2026

The closing line of the graduate student address at Sarah Lawrence College’s 98th Commencement on May 8 was “Free Palestine.”

It was not an aside. It was the final beat of remarks delivered from the institutional podium by a student the College had selected, platformed, and presented to the assembled community as the voice of her graduating class—a student whose political affiliations were publicly knowable to anyone in the administration who chose to look. The audience under the tent included Jewish graduates and their families, many of whom heard the line for what it has become in the years since Oct. 7: a slogan now inseparable, for many Jews, from movements that reject Jewish self-determination and, at their extremes, justify violence against Israelis and Zionist Jews.

I was in the tent and only feet away from the speaker. I knew, the moment the line was delivered, that it had been chosen. I watched the families around me register what they had just heard. I sat with what I experienced as hostile and threatening speech, not in its origin but through its repetition as Jewish blood has been spilled: the same words the murderer of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim chanted outside the Capital Jewish Museum. Not for everyone who says it. But for many of us hearing it, the connection is all too clear.

I watched the row of administrators on the stage register it too. And I watched what they did next, which was nothing.

I have written twice in these pages this spring about how Sarah Lawrence responds, in private memos and through faculty silence, to incidents involving Jewish students. What happened on May 8 is a different mechanism. It is institutional speech, delivered from the College’s own stage, in front of every graduating family. And it reveals the same reflex, doing more visible damage than the previous incidents could.

None of this was hidden. Only a few weeks before commencement, the Sarah Lawrence chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine—the same chapter whose 2024 occupation of an administrative building is among the materials the House Education and Workforce Committee requested in its investigation of the College—publicly promoted the same graduate student as a billed guest at one of its events.

The chapter’s own public posting announcing the event described it as raising emergency funds for Lebanon and framed it around “the history of struggle against the Zionist occupation in Lebanon” and “US-Israeli violence and genocidal bombardment.” The chapter is a local affiliate of National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella organization that, in its official “Day of Resistance” toolkit distributed to campus chapters in the days after Oct. 7, called Hamas’s massacre “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and called for “not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.” The student’s public association with the local chapter was not in question; it was advertised, on the chapter’s own social media. The College knew, or should have known, who it was elevating to the commencement microphone before it elevated her.

There is no plausible defense that the administration could not have been expected to be watching what SJP was doing. The College has been under an open Title VI investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights since December 2024. Its conduct toward Jewish students has been the subject of House Education and Workforce Committee inquiries demanding documents specifically about its SJP chapter. The federal government has required Sarah Lawrence, in writing, to pay attention to exactly this organization.

There is no plausible defense that the administration could not have been expected to be watching what SJP was doing.

To claim ignorance of SJP’s public activity in spring 2026 is not a defense. It is an admission that the College has failed to do what active federal proceedings require of it. The administration can say it did not know who was about to speak from the commencement stage but it cannot also say it was meeting its institutional obligations.

What happened next compounded the choice. The closing line was not in the prepared remarks. It was extemporaneous. The administration did not approve those two words in advance; the speaker added them at the podium. But the administration had approved the speaker, knowing who she was, what she stood for, and what she had been publicly platformed by SJP to say only weeks earlier. And when the line was delivered, in real time, with every administrator on stage and every family in the tent hearing it, the response from the institution was silence. No president intervening from the dais. No statement from the College that afternoon. No statement that evening. No statement the next day. No statement now, three weeks on.

The institutional framing of that silence had, in fact, already been supplied earlier in the same ceremony, by the president of the College herself. In her own commencement address, now published on the College’s website under her name, president Cristle Collins Judd told the community that Sarah Lawrence is “committed to free expression practiced within a framework of mutual respect,” and that “there is a constant and fundamental tension at the intersection of free expression and mutual respect.” Those sentences are the lens the College has invited the community, and the public, to apply to what happened next.

It is the wrong lens. And it is becoming the default lens at colleges across the country whenever the speech in question is directed at Jews.

This is how anti-Jewish hate spreads: not because anyone is shouting it, but because the institutions whose job is to address it have decided that addressing it would be harder than reframing it. The reframing is the mechanism. The reframing is the spread.

This pattern is not a Sarah Lawrence story. It is a national story for which Sarah Lawrence happens to be an unusually clean example. Two weeks before our commencement, the same kind of disruption occurred at the University of Michigan, where the chair of the Faculty Senate used his five minutes at the commencement microphone to share his personal, political views on Israel and Gaza. The two institutions faced the same kind of incident. They responded very differently, and the contrast is the point.

Michigan’s response was late, but it was a response. Interim President Domenico Grasso apologized, saying the remarks were “hurtful and insensitive” and “do not represent our institutional position.” The repudiation came after the fact rather than in real time, and the criticism of that delay was fair. But the institution did, in the end, say in its own voice that what was said from its podium was not what the institution stood for. That single sentence—uttered by the president, on the institution’s letterhead, within hours—is what Sarah Lawrence has refused to produce now for three weeks and counting.

The Michigan example matters because it makes Sarah Lawrence’s silence a choice rather than an inevitability. Repudiation was available. Sarah Lawrence declined to use it.

Across higher education this spring, presidents who would never permit their ceremonial stages to be used for slogans targeting other communities have found themselves reaching, after the fact, for the language of “tension” and “complexity” to explain why this one was different. The vocabulary is doing a great deal of work, and the work it is doing is shielding choices from scrutiny.

The vocabulary is doing a great deal of work, and the work it is doing is shielding choices from scrutiny.

A clarification is in order, because the predictable response from the College and from the higher-education press will be that this is an argument against free speech on campus. It is not.

Universities should host speakers whose views are contested, and a heckler in the audience, an invited guest who says something the school did not anticipate, a protester at the gate—all of those are speakers the institution has a duty to tolerate but no duty to endorse.

Commencement is a different category. The voices at the commencement microphone are voices the school has selected, scheduled, and amplified before a captive audience of every graduating student and family. The speakers at Michigan and at Sarah Lawrence sharpen the point: One was the elected chair of the Faculty Senate, presented as the voice of the faculty; the other was platformed as the voice of the graduate student community. Both were chosen because they spoke for a constituency the institution itself constituted. When such a speaker uses the ceremonial podium, the speech is, for the duration of those remarks, institutional speech. The school chose the voice. The school approved the occasion. The school handed over the microphone. What follows is the institution’s own.

Here is where Sarah Lawrence has done something worth examining closely, because it tells you what the administrative reflex actually looks like once the ceremony is over.

The College’s website now hosts the prepared text of the graduate student’s remarks alongside the video of the full delivery. The text ends with “Congratulations Class of 2026!” and is marked, in italics at the bottom, “Remarks as prepared for delivery.” The closing line of the actual address—the line every graduate and family member in the tent heard from the podium –does not appear in the printed version. In the video, it does. That is the entire fact.

Pause on that. The phrase “as prepared for delivery” is institutional cover. The College could have printed what was actually said. It chose to print what it would have preferred had been said, then italicized the disclaimer at the bottom of the page. It is the same construction a White House press office uses when a principal has gone off-script and the administration wants the official record to read differently than what the public heard. That construction has a function: It tells the reader that the institution knows there is a gap between what was said and what is being printed, and that the institution has decided to print the version that is easier to live with. Prospective students, donors, journalists, alumni, and parents who land on that page will read the text. The text is the official record for nearly everyone who encounters it. The video is the legal alibi.

The text is the official record for nearly everyone who encounters it. The video is the legal alibi.

This is the same institutional reflex that produced six months of silence after Sarah Lawrence’s Student Senate voted to reject J Street U last November, the same reflex I documented in these pages after the College’s response to the House Education and Workforce Committee report failed to use the word “antisemitism,” and the same reflex behind the climate I recently described in which a faculty advisor working with Jewish students asked a national reporter for anonymity rather than be named.

The New School in New York took one day to repudiate its student senate’s vote to defund Hillel. It took six months and a media investigation to even comment on the J Street U rejection at all. The vocabulary of “constant and fundamental tension” is not a neutral description of difficulty. It is a tool, and the work it is doing across higher education right now is converting selection into circumstance whenever Jews are the audience for the harm.

There is no tension between free expression and mutual respect when a school-selected representative closes commencement with a slogan many Jewish students experience as hostile, exclusionary, or threatening. There is only a category, and the category is hateful speech that the College selected the speaker for, declined to repudiate from the stage, and then declined to print under its own name. To describe that sequence as “tension” is to launder editorial choice as forced neutrality. Faculty and students are right to notice the sleight of hand. Jewish families under that tent on May 8 noticed it in real time.

What a school chooses to platform at its ceremonial events, and especially through the speakers it designates as community representatives, it owns. What it fails to repudiate in real time from that stage, it ratifies. What it then declines to print under its own name, it confesses to knowing it should not have said.

The pattern is spreading because it is not being addressed. That is the whole engine. Every president who reaches for “tension” instead of “hate” teaches the next president that the vocabulary works. Every campus that watches a peer institution decline to repudiate from the podium learns that declining is an option.

Jewish communities watching this play out at campus after campus are not confused about what they are seeing. The institutions are counting on the rest of the country being confused. They should not be. The commencement lectern is not a pulpit, and it is not an open academic forum. It is the institution’s own stage. When a college chooses the voice, approves the occasion, and hands over the microphone to a known activist, it owns what follows from that stage. And when it refuses afterward to repudiate, to print, or even to name what happened, it is not practicing neutrality. It is teaching the next institution how to do the same.

Samuel J. Abrams is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.