AhlulBayt News Agency: New York University (NYU) has decided to withhold a student's diploma after he condemned Israel’s military campaign in Gaza during his graduation ceremony.
On Wednesday, Logan Rozos, an undergraduate student speaker from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, delivered a commencement speech in which he recognized the atrocities occurring in Palestine.
Rozos stated that his moral and political commitments guided him to speak out against the Israeli military onslaught, which has killed over 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded nearly 120,000 others since October 7, 2023.
He further criticized the United States for politically and militarily supporting the war, stating that it is funded by American tax dollars and has been broadcasted globally for the past 18 months.
Rozos’s speech received enthusiastic applause from students in attendance. However, NYU later released a statement denouncing his remarks, accusing him of misusing his role as a student speaker to express personal and one-sided political views.
By Thursday morning, Rozos’s student profile on the NYU Gallatin website had been removed, displaying a “Page or File Not Found (404 Error)” message.
Last August, NYU updated its student conduct guidelines to include terms like “Zionist” as examples of discriminatory speech, arguing that Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity.
The policy change followed months of student-led protests in solidarity with Palestinians, which led NYU administrators to call police onto campus, resulting in widespread arrests of students and faculty members.
In December, two tenured professors, Andrew Ross and Sonya Posmentier, were labeled as 'personae non gratae' by NYU after participating in a sit-in advocating for the university to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza.
/129
Your Comment