Rutgers Canceled Me as a Graduation Speaker Because of My Advocacy for Palestine

My mere presence, Rutgers decided, is what its graduating engineers could not be exposed to. Unable to challenge me on the facts, the institution stifled my speech instead, writes Rami Elghandour.

Rutgers’s School of Engineering held its graduation ceremony on Friday – without me, its convocation speaker.

As a Rutgers engineering graduate and engaged alumnus, I was honored when the dean of the school – whom I had done a fireside chat with in March – invited me to deliver the convocation address back in December.

Two weeks before the event, he called again and disinvited me.

The reason, in his own words: some students had complained that my social media posts about Palestine “are against their beliefs,” and might not attend their own graduation. He told me candidly that he had decided not to review what I posted before making the decision. He acknowledged this had never happened before at this convocation. And in the same call, he floated a long-term solution – the school might simply discontinue having convocation speakers altogether, so “we don’t have this issue anymore.”

“This issue” is not me. It is the willingness of a public American university to host any speaker whose humanitarian advocacy on Gaza some students and administrators would prefer not to hear.

My core philosophy is that everybody matters. I have spoken publicly on issues many consider controversial – Black lives, abortion, ICE, DEI, Palestine. This isn’t the first time I’ve been targeted for the last of these; I’ve weathered multiple attempts to silence me as a public-company CEO. In response to one such attempt, my social media was reviewed in detail by a leading law firm. The conclusion: posts on “a broad range of social, humanitarian, and global issues,” focused on “critiquing government actions and spotlighting humanitarian concerns.” Nothing improper. Protected speech. If a leader of another ethnicity were harassed like this, it would make news. But for Arab and Muslim Americans, it’s the casual racism our communities endure.

My posts call out civilian casualties, the mass killing of children and journalists, the systematic destruction of hospitals and schools, and the subversion of our democracy in the service of a foreign state.

Rutgers says it wants to focus on students. That logic collapses on contact with the facts: the cancellation was driven by a small number of students, against the visible opposition of a far larger one. The faculty union demanded my reinstatement. A student campaign generated more than 36,000 signatures on a petition calling for the same. My mere presence, Rutgers Engineering has decided, is what its graduating engineers cannot be exposed to. Unable to challenge me on the facts, the institution stifled my speech instead.

I write this shortly after World Press Freedom Day. Israel has killed more journalists than any nation in history — more than the known number of journalists killed in the U.S. Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam War combined. In July 2024, The Lancet medical journal estimated Israel had killed 186,000 people in Gaza since October 2023. With entire neighborhoods and cities reduced to rubble now, nearly two years after that study, that number is feared to be much higher. Thousands of students protesting these atrocities have been met with violence or silence. Now, a handful of students object to a speech and get exactly what they want. Therein lies the bias at the heart of the Palestine exception: one side gets congressional hearings, the other gets revoked degrees and broken noses.

This is not a university balancing competing speakers, weighing student safety, or navigating the boundaries of protected speech. On the one side: my public statements on the moral crisis of our time. On the other side, a small number of students who disagree with those statements. That the existence of the objection – not its substance – was sufficient is itself a testament to anti-Palestinian bias at Rutgers.

What happened is textbook viewpoint discrimination by a state actor. Rutgers is a public university. The First Amendment fully applies. A public university cannot rescind a speaking invitation because others disagree with the speaker’s views – especially views expressed in protected political activity on a matter of grave humanitarian and public concern.

It is also a betrayal of what Rutgers claims to be. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranks Rutgers-New Brunswick 236th out of 257 American colleges and universities for free speech – an F grade, dropping 38 places in a single year.

I do not believe a speaker of a different background, holding views on a different conflict, would have been treated this way. I am Egyptian-American, and I have spoken publicly for Palestinian civilians. I am the second Arab-American speaker in two years to face a Rutgers campaign over humanitarian advocacy on Gaza. Last year, the institution held the line. This year, it did not.

A university is the last institution in American life whose explicit purpose is to be a place where ideas are tested and contested. The four years a student spends on campus are supposed to be where they learn to encounter disagreement without requiring its removal. When a public university models the opposite – when it teaches by its own example that the answer to objection is silencing, and that the answer to the difficulty of defending a speaker is to abolish the institution of having speakers altogether – it is failing not one speaker or one class of students. It is failing the generation of students it was built to serve.

Rami Elghandour is a graduate of Rutgers School of Engineering (2001). He is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx and Executive Producer of The Voice of Hind Rajab & American Doctor.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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ICYMI – Watch Rami’s interview with Zeteo’s Prem Thakker: