Derek R. Peterson, a professor of East African history at the University of Michigan, delivered a speech to the graduating class. It was a nice speech. He praised the activists on campus, and the students cheered.

Sing for the students of the Black Action Movement, whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of black people in this country.

Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activities who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The greatness of this institution does not only rest on the shoulders and on the accomplishments of our student athletes who deserve all the congratulations we can offer them.

It was honest, accurate, acknowledged student activists, and didn’t demean any of the people in the crowd. Except…hoo boy, it enraged Zionists and Republicans and Israeli donors to the university. The response was ridiculously over the top.

The same day, the university’s president, Domenico Grasso, issued a public apology, saying the comments were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.

We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment, Grasso said, adding that Peterson’s speech deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony.

The swift apology did not stop some Republican officials, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott, from calling for the school to be stripped of federal funding. A Republican member of the Board of Regents, which governs the public university, also hinted at possible discipline for the professor. The prominent Israeli-American investor Adam Milstein urged Jewish people to halt any donations to the school.

This is madness. Are they claiming that there is no unjust and inhumane war in Gaza? It’s ongoing. People are starving, they’re being shot by the IDF, their homes are being bombed and bulldozed. Professor Peterson said no lie. Is the institutional position pro genocide? Peterson has made an excellent reply to the hysterical nonsense.

I have respect for Regent Hubbard and her colleagues: theirs is not an easy job, and we here at Michigan benefit from their leadership.

I would however urge Regent Hubbard to review the comments I actually made at yesterday’s commencement. It should not be controversial to have one’s “heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza”, which is what I credited activists with doing. Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue. It is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.

So I am mystified about what I have done to earn Regent Hubbard’s ire. I have – like many of us here in Michigan – been convicted by the evidence of human suffering in Gaza; and I credit my awareness of that to pro-Palestinian activists. That is why I gave the speech that I did. On a day meant to honor students for their accomplishments, I thought it important that we would honor the student activists who have, over the course of time, pushed the institution toward justice.

The University has taken down the commencement video. But here is my talk, if you’d like to hear the whole of it. As you will see, it is a talk about the salience of student activism in this institution’s long history.

Allow me to add, if I may:

The idea that graduations should be apolitical is ridiculous. Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women. Our students are not wilting flowers. They have just finished their degrees at the foremost public university in the country. They can handle controversy.

They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we’ve given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed.

That is why I spoke as I did. If parents want sentimental graduation ceremonies, perhaps they should send their kids to a different institution. Here at UM we teach our students to face controversies, not run away from them. That’s what being the leaders and the best is about.”

There are a lot of people pushing the idea that a university should be apolitical; they are typically the kind of craven cowards who want to maintain the status quo, no matter how intolerable it might be. Alternatively, they have a political agenda which they want to promote by silencing critics, and they are backed by wealthy and influential supporters who do not question the vicious militants who want to carry out an ethnic cleansing in Israel.

I am shocked by the authoritarian, anti-free-speech actions taken by the University of Michigan and others (what the hell does Rick Scott have to do with Michigan?) who are loudly screeching about their intent to persecute Derek Peterson and the faculty and students of the University of Michigan.

We really need to kick these weird Zionist fanatics out of power.

A handful of students at U.S. universities also faced discipline in 2025 for seeking to highlight pro-Palestinian issues at graduation ceremonies, including a graduate of New York University whose diploma was withheld for criticizing Israel in a speech.

Expressing criticism in a speech is pretty much the definition of free speech, and those creepy zealots are the real opponents of freedom.