Commencement is supposed to be a time of celebration, but this season is shaping up to be subdued. Spring is still spring — students are back on the quad reading, sunbathing, skateboarding, and playing spikeball. Trump’s attacks on higher education haven’t stopped the steady beat of a cappella concerts or end-of-year parties. Beer pong goes on.
“Seniors are just soaking up what they have left,” said Jack Wile as he sat back in a red lawn chair at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with his sneakers kicked off.
And yet, even as grounds crews begin to mow pastoral greens and put up graduation banners, there’s also a feeling of apprehension thrumming beneath the regular rhythms of college life. “It’s not really a secret that a lot of us are feeling some fear,” Vemuri said.
Across Massachusetts, many students are scared to speak out. They’ve seen friends, classmates, and professors punished for their pro-Palestinian views or simply targeted for their identities. Their peers have been doxxed, detained, arrested, and, in some cases, deported. Foreign students have had their legal statuses terminated, and then hastily restored, adding to the chaos and confusion.
“Part of the ‘vibe check’ depends on who you are,” said Archon Fung, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, where he said more than half the student population comes from other countries. He’s anticipating muted ceremonies where students aren’t as comfortable expressing themselves — not decorating their mortarboards with Pride flags or Black Lives Matter colors, for instance — due to “a chilling effect.”
It’s not just undergraduates and graduate students who are feeling uneasy; it’s also faculty and staff. And it’s not just at Harvard, where university president Alan Garber is locked in an ideological battle with the Trump administration, with billions of research funding in the balance; or at Tufts, where Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested by masked immigration officers on a Somerville street.
“When she was finally released last Friday, there was a bit of a collective sigh of relief,” said Aaron Gruen, a senior who‘s investigative editor of The Tufts Daily. Still, he says, resistance with a capital “R” has “sort of dwindled,” and the mood has been “a lot more dystopian.”
“I think that there’s a general fear that exists, both institutionally and individually — fears about being targeted,” said Genny Beemyn, a nonbinary educator and the director of the Stonewall Center at UMass Amherst.
“We worry about our students, particularly our international students, our transgender students, and our undocumented students,” said Carrie Baker, a professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College in Northampton. “We’re tired.”
Along with exhaustion, disillusionment has set in at schools across the region. And while a handful of college and university presidents have been hailed as leaders of resistance against Trump, some voices on campus tell a different story, painting administrators as virtue signalers who are publicly putting on an act of resistance, while privately acquiescing to Trump’s demands.
At Harvard, recent moves to rename its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (now the Office for Community and Campus Life) and to not fund or host affinity-group graduation parties have intensified distrust among students who appreciated them.
Last year, Harvard hosted 10 affinity celebrations for the Class of ’24, including ones for Arab, Latinx, and low-income graduates, according to The Harvard Crimson. Considering the university’s history of exclusion and the more recent downfall of affirmative action, such events are critical, said Elyse Martin-Smith, a senior who has been organizing Black graduation celebrations.
She said Harvard’s decision to rescind its support was “hurtful” and has implications for other affinity programming. “We’re at a moment where we fear for the future of Black students at Harvard, and to be able to show our solidarity and our strength for completing the last four years is extremely important to us.”
Harvard’s Chief Community and Campus Life officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, has said in this new era, the university is “focusing on the unique experiences and contributions of the individual and not the broad demographic groups to which they belong.”
Fung characterized the past six months as “whiplash” after 20-plus years of “trying to figure out many different ways to make the whole environment more inclusive.”
There’s a sense among critics that some leaders are squelching free expression to avoid political trouble.
UMass Amherst associate professor of history Kevin Young was one of around 130 demonstrators arrested last year when police officers in riot gear shut down a Gaza solidarity encampment on campus. “There continues to be a lot of disenchantment” with the UMass Amherst administration,” said Young, who noted chancellor Javier Reyes got two votes of no confidence as a result.
There may be no bigger PR opportunity than commencement, and schools around the region are using it to broadcast their own values to students and families as well as alumni, donors, and the American public at large. While some have invited progressive speakers to signal defiance or resistance, others have tapped guests with no obvious connection to politics — suggesting, perhaps, an effort to change the subject or avoid it altogether.
A former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, Cody Keenan has about a dozen commencement addresses in the works for clients of his speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies, including one of his own for Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. “I’d say every single speech we ever wrote for President Obama weighed the tension between the world as it is and the world as it should be,” Keenan said, “and the same is true of any good commencement speech.”
The class of ‘25 grew up in the aftermath of 9/11, contending with climate change, active shooter drills, and a global pandemic. “They have every reason to be cynical,” said Keenan.
Instead, they’re asking: How should the world be?
And there are as many answers as there are graduating seniors.
Vemuri has two minutes to give her speech as class president but knows what she wants to say about the future. She’s planning to attend graduate school for neuroscience, but is watching in alarm as Trump targets academia and scientific research. “It’s pretty nerve-wracking to see that break down,” she said, but even more urgent is the immediate threat to free speech and other rights. “I think what my classmates really need to hear is that this fear is what needs to drive change.”
While at Harvard, senior Shira Hoffer started the Hotline for Israel/Palestine after Oct. 7, 2023, as a way to foster civil dialogue around an imminent war. She was inundated with text messages, but soon realized that while the hotline was great for people who had questions, it didn’t reach those who “feel like they know all the answers,” she said.
She founded the nonprofit Institute for Multipartisan Education to help people with differences disagree. “I feel like I’ve had a foot out the door ever since,” she said.
Still, she’s excited to see the commencement speaker — Abraham Verghese, author of “The Covenant of Water” — and to celebrate with her classmates. Her high school ceremony was held in a parking lot.
“Everyone sat separately. We were wearing masks [and] gloves to receive our diplomas,” Hoffer said. “So I am looking forward to the whole, like, putting on a cap and gown and sitting with my friends and having everything be … together.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.
