Twenty years ago, commencement speeches at America's top universities were proud celebrations of freedom, intellectual discovery, and national purpose.
In 2005, Harvard's commencement address was delivered by none other than writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who reminded graduates that “indifference to evil is evil itself.” He spoke passionately about the moral obligation of the educated to defend human dignity and stand up for what's right, even when it's not popular.
Fast forward to 2025, and the scene could not be more different.
Instead of calls for moral courage and gratitude for Western freedoms, we are now witnessing elite institutions turn their commencement platforms into megaphones for moral confusion, anti-American rhetoric, and thinly veiled antisemitism.
At MIT, President Sally Kornbluth delivered remarks that included a tortured rebuke of the United States' “colonial legacy” and a bizarre attempt to equate America's Founding Fathers with today's political villains.
At Harvard, interim president Alan Garber couldn't resist taking a veiled shot at Israel, warning graduates of “the perils of unchecked military power” and calling for “solidarity with oppressed peoples,” a line that received applause from keffiyeh-clad students and faculty alike.
At Columbia, Minouche Shafik, fresh off a semester of disgraceful campus chaos, used her speech to lament how “structures of white supremacy” still define American institutions and claimed that “Palestinian voices” were being silenced, despite the fact that anti-Israel protesters shut down classes, desecrated Jewish spaces, and created a hostile environment for Jewish students for months.
This isn't just academic posturing. It is a moral inversion. An inversion that propagates to the student body and to America as a whole.
The fruits of this failed leadership were seen in the student bodies and their representative speeches.
Zehra Imam, a student selected to speak at Harvard's graduation, gave a speech that included pro-Palestinian rhetoric and strong anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments. She wore a keffiyeh and held a Palestinian flag, stating, “Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for us to arrive.”
During the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on May 29, 2025, Megha Vemuri delivered a speech that strongly criticized Israel and MIT's ties to it, spewing anti-Israel and anti-American hate due to U.S. support for Israel. She wore a keffiyeh and said, “We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it's a shame that MIT is a part of it.”
These are the students we are inviting into our country? These are the students that our Ivy League institutions and academia as a whole are producing today?
Our nation's most prestigious institutions are no longer led by stewards of Western civilization. They are led by cultural revolutionaries cloaked in academic robes, people who see America and Israel not as bastions of liberty and innovation, but as symbols of oppression that must be deconstructed.
The contrast with past decades could not be more stark. Go back to 2002, when former Czech President Václav Havel spoke at Harvard and praised the West's role in liberating Eastern Europe from communism.
“The values of freedom, responsibility, and human rights are not just Western,” he said. “They are universal.” Or take Condoleezza Rice's 2004 address at Boston College, where she called on graduates to serve the cause of liberty and honor the ideals that make our country great.
Those speeches were aspirational. They invited students to rise above grievance and to see themselves as guardians of a fragile but noble experiment, one rooted in Judeo-Christian values, constitutional order, and moral clarity.
Today's speeches do the opposite. They traffic in moral relativism, sow division, and cast the West as irredeemably corrupt.
These university presidents are not simply out of touch. They are actively enabling a new generation of ideologues who see America and Israel as villains on the world stage.
And their rhetoric matters. These are the institutions that produce the future judges, journalists, tech CEOs, and policymakers who will shape the next century. When their moral compass is shattered, the entire culture suffers.
What's most galling is the silence or complicity of university trustees and donors. These schools rely on the goodwill and financial support of Americans who still believe in the values being trashed at these podiums. Why are alumni still writing checks to institutions that denounce the very freedoms that allowed them to flourish?
And what of the students? Imagine being a Jewish student sitting at your own graduation while your university president praises resistance movements and calls for justice in Palestine.
It's not subtle. The message is clear: you're not welcome unless you renounce your identity.
There is still time to turn things around, but it requires courage. It requires alumni to speak out, donors to close their checkbooks, and lawmakers to ask serious questions about the billions in taxpayer subsidies these universities enjoy.
Most of all, it requires us to reclaim the moral high ground. We must remind America's institutions of what they were built to do: educate, uplift, and defend truth. Not to promote chaos and division.
Commencement should be a moment of gratitude and aspiration, not a political protest against the very country that made these students' achievements possible.
In the end, Elie Wiesel was right. Indifference to evil is evil itself. And today, that evil is masquerading as virtue on the campuses that once stood for the very best of the West.
Dr. Isaiah Hankel, Ph.D is the CEO of Overqualified.com and a 3X Best-Selling Author. He is on X @DrIsaiahHankel. Read More of Dr. Hankel's Reports -- Here.
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