Commentary: 'Heckler's veto' turned commencements into disinvitation season

Delivering a university commencement address used to simply be a unique kind of honor. Speakers stand before a podium, wearing a traditional graduation cap and robe, to offer graduates life lessons and inspirational words as they enter the next phrase of life.

But today, speaking at a university commencement ceremony carries considerable risk, as Morton Schapiro, former president of Northwestern University, recently found out. Schapiro was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University Law Center’s May 17 graduation, but announced on May 6 that he would not appear at the event.

Some Georgetown Law students had protested and petitioned to have Schapiro’s invitation rescinded, citing what they said were Schapiro’s“controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions.” Schapiro wrote an op-ed expressing support for Israel and Jewish people a few days after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people.

Schapiro is in good company. There’s a reason the free speech advocacy group FIRE calls the lead-up to college commencements“ disinvitation season.”

Over the last two decades, colleges and universities across the country have withdrawn invitations to various commencement speakers after students protested their scheduled appearance. Or, in some cases, invited speakers have said they will no longer participate after students speak out against their upcoming appearances.

As a political scientist who has written about the 1st Amendment and free speech on college campuses, I think Schapiro’s ill-fated Georgetown commencement invitation — and other instances like this one — shows that intolerance for dissenting viewpoints is a dominant theme on campuses that persists until the last diploma is handed out.

Some students want only people who hold similar views to address them at their graduation. They exercise what free speech law experts call a “heckler’s veto,” meaning an audience’s reaction, or anticipated response, stops someone from speaking. Free speech then is silenced, and a graduation becomes just a performative moment of political correctness.

University commencement season is well underway at colleges and universities across the country. Most schools will hold their graduation ceremonies by mid-June, if they have not already.

By the middle of the 19th century, American university commencements were drawing well-known outsiders to college campuses to speak.

In 1837, for example, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa graduates and issued a stirring call for American students and scholars to end what he called “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.”

In 1881, James Garfield became the first sitting American president to deliver a commencement address, when he spoke at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Other presidents have used commencement speeches to announce major policy initiatives and agreements, including on foreign policy.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy told the graduating seniors at American University that the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union would start negotiations to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.

Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced at Howard University’s commencement that he would begin a major initiative to address socioeconomic disparities that disadvantaged Black people.

There was no notable controversy or protest about Kennedy, Johnson or other prominent speakers who delivered commencement addresses several decades ago.

But that was then. Times have changed.

FIRE estimates that between 2000 and 2024, there were 345 attempts to disinvite commencement speakers. Many of the scheduled speakers who faced pressure to not appear at the ceremonies backed out.

Examples of commencement speaker disinvitations have happened at small, private liberal arts colleges, as well as big, public universities. Being disinvited from speaking at a graduation is often precipitated by petitions and protests, from both conservative and progressive activists.

For example, in 2019, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, withdrew as the scheduled commencement speaker at Creighton University. This followed the Nebraska Republican Party objecting to Kerry’s record of support for abortion rights.

In 2025, the noted author Salman Rushdie withdrew as commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College after members of its Muslim Student Assn. urged the school to revoke his invitation. They accused Rushdie, a self-described“hard-line atheist,” of “disparaging a global religious community” in his writing and public appearances. In a 2015 commencement address at Emory University he had said: “I sometimes think we live in a very credulous age. People seem ready to believe almost anything. God, for example.”

There have also been various commencement speakers who have delivered controversial addresses that some graduates — and outside observers — found offensive. Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, for example, spoke at Benedictine College’s commencement in 2024 and encouraged female graduates to become homemakers.

That brings us back to Schapiro. “I have presided over 28 commencements as a president and dean,” Schapiro wrote in a note to Georgetown’s law students, “and those ceremonies are about celebrating the graduates and their supporters. I was looking forward to giving a talk about humility and gratitude, but I don’t want my presence to distract from the day’s festivities.”

Humility and gratitude are often missing in disinvitation season.

In 2017, Drew Gilpin Faust, then the president of Harvard University, seemed to understand this absence when she issued a free speech message to graduates in her commencement address. “Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones,” Faust warned.

Commencement season puts Faust’s admonitions to the test. She said universities must show that truth is established through “reasoned argument, assessment and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.”

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Austin Sarat is a professor of law, political science and social thought at Amherst College. This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.