Megha Vemuri, the student body president at MIT, gave an incredible address to the OneMIT combined commencement exercises on Thursday in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In turn, she experienced severe consequences for speaking out. As she delivered her speech, Vemuri wore a keffiyeh over her graduation robe. She went on a tear denouncing MIT’s connections to Israel and hailed the student protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Following her remarks, university officials informed her that she would be barred from attending the undergraduate degree ceremony scheduled for Friday.
The speech Vemuri gave was different from the one that university administrators had pre-approved and submitted to the university’s speech police in advance. MIT officials stated that her speech “was not the one that was provided by the speaker in advance,” which they claimed justified their decision to prevent her from participating in the graduation ceremony. In addition, Vemuri was prohibited from being on campus until after the ceremony was over.
Here’s what Vemuri wrote, reflecting on the experience. Nor was she upset at having lost the opportunity to cross the dais. Rather than spend her moment discussing this tragic reality, she focused on thanking her family for their support. In an interview with CNN, she remarked, “I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide.”
Throughout her speech, Vemuri focused on strongly denouncing MIT’s connections to Israel. She noted that between 2020 and 2024, the institution allegedly accepted $2.8 million worth of grants, gifts or contracts from Israeli sources, according to publicly available US Department of Education data and as first reported by the Boston Globe. She implored MIT to cut its connections with Israel. She urged the organization to reconsider how it sustains life and support initiatives.
Vemuri said he was disappointed with how the university’s top officials responded. She stated, “I am disappointed that MIT’s officials massively overstepped their roles to punish me without merit or due process, with no indication of any specific policy broken.”
In the wake of this incident, Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, another defender of academic freedom, supported Vemuri’s protest. She stated that “MIT must respect academic freedom and respect the voices of its students, not punish and intimidate those who speak out against genocide and in support of Palestinian humanity.”
Despite MIT’s commitment to free expression, the institution stood by its decision regarding Vemuri’s speech. It continued to argue that her conduct was disorderly and deceptive to commencement planners.