Graduation day is supposed to be one of the most joyful moments of a young person’s life. Years of hard work, late nights, and sacrifice, all culminating in a single morning with family in the stands and a future wide open. That is what it is supposed to be.
At the University of Michigan on May 2, Jewish students experienced something very different.
Prof. Derek Peterson, the outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate, used his commencement address to praise the student activists who have spent the past two years making Jewish life on that campus difficult. He sang out to the protesters, celebrated their cause, and urged the graduates to go out and “make good trouble.” The crowd cheered. The university’s president sat there in his regalia and watched it happen.
When the backlash came, the university’s first instinct was to scrub the video from its YouTube channel. Then, under pressure from alumni, faculty, and activists, they put it back up. Two thousand students, staff, and alumni signed letters demanding that the president retract his mild criticism of Peterson and pledge to protect what they framed as free expression. The American Association of University Professors issued a statement calling Peterson’s remarks “measured and principled.”
The struggle of Jewish students
Jewish students, who have faced years of harassment, intimidation, and targeted hostility on that campus, sat in their graduation gowns while a senior faculty member effectively told the crowd that the people making their lives hell were heroes. A university official stood at a podium and validated two years of discrimination against one specific group of students.
A University of Michigan professor was criticized by university leaders for praising anti Israel activists during a commencement speech, after two years of anti Israel vandalism targeting the homes and offices of UMich regents and officers.
Source: Derek Peterson Youtube pic.twitter.com/k669BCuRBZ
— Michael Starr (@StarrJpost) May 4, 2026
Imagine for a moment that the targeted group were Black students. Or Latino students. Or Asian students. If a faculty leader used a commencement address to celebrate the activists who had spent years harassing those students, screaming at them, surrounding them, making them afraid to wear any symbol of their identity on campus, no one would be drafting letters in his defense. There would be no petitions. There would be no statements from professors’ unions about “protected speech.” The outrage would be swift, total, and entirely justified.
The Jewish community has become the one exception to every rule that otherwise governs how we talk about discrimination in this country. The double standard is not subtle anymore. It is on full display, in cap and gown.
What happened in Ann Arbor also happened in other places: Cornell, Columbia, UCLA. Campus after campus has watched administrators either look away or actively legitimize the targeting of Jewish students. And when those same administrators face any scrutiny, they retreat behind the language of free speech and institutional neutrality, as if neutrality is even a coherent position when one group of students is being singled out for abuse.
There is nothing neutral about using a graduation stage to cheer the people doing the harassing.
A culture of harassment
The University of Michigan made a choice. When the president apologized for Peterson’s remarks, it was a fleeting moment of institutional accountability that the faculty almost immediately moved to reverse. When the video was quietly hidden and then restored under activist pressure, the university signaled where its sympathies lay. When more than 2,000 members of the university community rallied around the professor rather than the Jewish students, the picture became complete.
The federal government provides substantial funding to institutions like the University of Michigan. That funding comes with an expectation, embedded in law, that campuses will not tolerate discriminatory environments. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act exists for exactly this kind of situation. If the university cannot protect its Jewish students from a hostile environment, and if it celebrates the people creating that environment, the question of federal funding is entirely legitimate to raise.
Jews are being attacked around the country. Synagogues are being attacked around the country. The violence does not exist in a vacuum. It is fed by this same culture, which condones the harassment of Jewish students on campus and condones a culture in which Jewish students are told, from the graduation stage at a major American university, that the people targeting them are on the right side of history.
The University of Michigan has made its decision. But it is on the wrong side of history. Until there are real consequences, I fear it won’t recognize that.
The writer is the International CEO of Aish, a global Jewish educational movement. He formerly served as Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City.
