When Graduation Stops Being About the Graduates

There was once something sacred about commencement ceremonies in America.

I have a small confession to make. I did not make it to my college graduation ceremony. I just could not see myself in a cap and gown, walking down the aisle and then listening to some inspiring words from a keynote speaker who was just bestowed an honorary doctorate. Do I regret it today? Not in the slightest.

However, I understand how sacred this moment is for thousands of graduates and their families. Not sacred in the religious sense, but sacred in the civic sense, a rare moment where families come together with the common cause of celebrating sacrifice, perseverance, and hope.

A commencement is supposed to belong to the students: the first-generation immigrant whose parents worked double shifts to pay tuition, the young woman who survived cancer while finishing her degree, the son or daughter of refugees who crossed oceans for this exact moment.

Increasingly across America, this space is disappearing.

At universities like City University of New York, the University of Michigan and countless others, commencement ceremonies have become stages not for graduates, but for political demonstrations surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Protesters chant, wave banners, interrupt speakers, and turn moments of personal triumph into televised ideological battlegrounds.

One can support Palestinian rights. One can criticize Israel. One can advocate passionately for peace, ceasefires, or statehood.

That is not the issue. The deeper question is this:

Why has American public life become so incapable of restraint that even a graduation ceremony can no longer remain centered on the students themselves?

Something profound is happening in America. The activism surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer content with protest zones, rallies, teach-ins, or debates. It increasingly seeks total visibility. The belief some have that every public gathering must become a platform for the cause, regardless of context, regardless of who is harmed in the process.

And let’s face it. The people harmed are often not politicians, not governments, not military leaders. In the case of commencement celebrations, they are students and thier families.

Students who spent four years surviving exams, debt, loneliness, depression, internships, and uncertainty. Students whose parents flew across the country or across oceans for one single day. Students whose grandparents sat proudly in folding chairs holding bouquets and cameras waiting to hear a name called after years of sacrifice. Students whose parents poured tens of thousands of dollars into college funds literally from the day their children were born to ensure that they were able to reach this glorious day.

Instead, they find themselves trapped inside someone else’s political theater that is becoming a sad act in an American story.

When every ceremony becomes a protest, every celebration becomes ideological, and every institution becomes incapable of distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate spaces for activism, society slowly loses the ability to function together.

There was once an unwritten social contract in America: there are moments when we stop fighting long enough to let human beings celebrate life milestones. Weddings. Funerals. Memorial services. Graduation.

Time after time this contract is being broken.

The tragedy is that commencement ceremonies should represent optimism. The belief that young Americans can build something better than the world they are inheriting. Instead, many graduation ceremonies mirror the exact polarized society students are about to enter after leaving campus.

America should be asking itself a difficult question:

If America cannot even preserve one afternoon for graduates and their families, what does that say about the state of American civic culture?

Perhaps the real loss at these ceremonies is not merely decorum. Perhaps it is innocence.

The innocence of believing there are still spaces in American life where achievement matters more than outrage, where families matter more than slogans, and where for just a few hours, young people can stand at the center of the stage they so rightly deserve.