Pro-Palestine protests force colleges to rethink graduation plans

livemint.com:

Ezra Dayanim anticipates his commencement ceremony at Columbia University next month will be interrupted by hisses and boos, especially when the university’s president addresses the crowd. He is just hoping the disruption doesn’t go beyond that.

Dayanim, who is graduating this spring with a joint degree from Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, plans to bring his parents and fiancée to the ceremony. He has generally felt safe around school, he said, and none of his guests have expressed reservations about attending.

But in light of what he described as a more hostile mood on campus in recent days due to confrontations over the Israel-Hamas war, he is relieved his grandparents aren’t making the trip like they did when his sister graduated from Barnard College a few years ago. “I can’t imagine my grandparents being able to walk around on campus peacefully," he said.

“All it takes is one person to say something, knock them over." With a fresh round of pro-Palestinian protests sweeping campuses nationwide, university administrators are rethinking their plans for celebrating spring graduation with an eye toward safeguarding students and guests, and their own reputations, from potentially ugly and violent political disputes. “We cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view," Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a letter to the school community Monday.

Concerned about bad optics during an extremely public moment, as well as the physical safety of the tens of thousands of campus visitors, schools are taking a range of steps to head off problems at commencement—though some of those efforts are backfiring. The University of Southern