Welcome to Commencement 2024. I’m delighted to be your speaker today because the original, more famous booking dropped out when he realized what you’re like. Some of you, anyway. A recent survey showed that just over half of students disapprove of the pro-Hamas camps and anti-Jewish intimidation on Ivy League campuses like this one. This means that only a minority of you have convinced Americans that all their universities are factories of bigotry. How could this have happened? 

One reason is that the majority of you did nothing other than offer disapproval in a poll. All those years of your teachers telling you to “be an upstander, not a bystander,” and you still blew it. You could, as students at the University of California, Los Angeles, did, have fought back. But you didn’t. As the dead, white, cis, colonialist male Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The bad among you have done the rest.