‘Insidious fear’ fills universities as Trump escalates conflict in commencement season

It is graduation season in the United States and with it a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia.

But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.

Amid concerns about the Trump administration undermining US residents’ free speech rights, some commencement ceremonies featured speakers who warned about the president’s abuses of power, while others hosted pop culture figures who delivered more innocuous remarks, and Trump himself went off script at the nation’s most famous military academy.

The politically charged speeches could hold increased significance this year as university leaders grapple with how to respond to Trump’s efforts to exert more control over federal funding to schools; campus protests and curriculum; and which international students are allowed to study in the United States, according to people who study such addresses.

“A lot of folks this spring will turn to these commencement speeches, especially now with the advent of social media, which allows us to distribute the clips much more widely, to see what people are saying in this critical moment, where our democracy is so fragile,” said James Peterson, a Philadelphia columnist and radio show host who has written about commencement addresses.

US graduation ceremonies have long provided a forum for speakers to not only deliver a message to students but also to shape public opinion.

In 1837, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech at Harvard University titled the “The American Scholar” in which he argued that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame”.

US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr described the speech as the country’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.

More recently, some of the most famous speeches include ones from then president John F Kennedy in 1963 at American University, David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College, and Apple founder Steve Jobs the same year at Stanford University.

While plenty of commencement speakers have sparked a backlash – after delivering another speech in 1938, Emerson was banned from Harvard for 30 years – the stakes could be higher this year for universities that host speakers who criticize Trump, who has withheld federal funding from universities that didn’t agree to his demands.

In recent weeks, the administration halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with the school because it “continues to engage in race discrimination” and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.

A Harvard spokesperson said was the ban on international students was “unlawful” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission”.

“This is not a time when colleges and universities are trying to attract a ton of attention,” said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. “Nobody wants to put their head above the fray and give anybody any reason to single them out as the next Harvard.”

But some speakers have delivered fiery remarks aimed at Trump. Wake Forest University hosted Scott Pelley, a longtime reporter for the famous CBS show 60 Minutes, amid turmoil at the network. The program’s executive producer resigned because he said he no longer had editorial independence. Trump had filed a lawsuit against CBS’s parent company, Paramount, over an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, wants to sell the company and needs approval from federal regulators. She reportedly wants to settle the case.

Pelley did not mention Trump by name but said: “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.”

The speech sparked backlash from rightwing media. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, said Pelley was a “a whiny liberal and still bitter”.

At University of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the state’s governor and a former vice-presidential candidate, described the president as a “tyrant” and called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”.

The Department of Homeland Security account on X posted that Walz’s remarks were “absolutely sickening” and that Ice officers were facing a “413% increase in assaults”.

The department did not respond to the Guardian’s question about how many assaults have occurred and what time periods they were comparing.

Ben Krauss, the CEO of the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and former chief speechwriter for Walz, said he thinks commencement addresses are important because there are not many opportunities where you have “a captive audience, even if it’s for 10 minutes”.

For speakers to “break through to society is probably a tall order, but I think the goal of a good commencement should be just to break through to the people in the room”, said Krauss, who shared that his agency worked on more than a dozen commencements this year but did not disclose which ones.

Still, Murray isn’t sure the speeches from Pelley and Walz will have a big impact.

“Pelley’s speech made a lot of people mad on the right, and I don’t know how much it did on the left or in the center,” Murray said. “It’s really hard to give a speech that really unites everyone, and giving a speech that divides everyone just seems to make the problems worse.”

Trump also took political shots during his address to graduating cadets at the United States military academy at West Point. He said past leaders “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars”.

He also spoke about postwar housing developer William Levitt, who married “a trophy wife”.

“I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” Trump said.

“It’s great to hear someone speak truth to power,” Peterson said of Pelley’s address. “It’s also sobering to hear a president be, as I think, in many folks’ perspectives, disrespectful of a longstanding American institution.”

Earlier this week, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with Harvard. On Thursday, the school held its commencement ceremony. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to prevent the school from enrolling international students.

Many speakers at the school’s events over the last week addressed Trump’s impact on the school and worldwide.

Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development, said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she found a global community at Harvard, the Associated Press reported.

But these days, her worldview has changed.

“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong – we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Other commencement speakers included actor Elizabeth Banks, who at alma mater University of Pennsylvania argued that the main problem affecting the world was not race, religion, ability or gender but the extreme concentration of money, and encouraged graduates to “wrap it up and keep abortion legal”.

At Emory University, the artist Usher argued that a college degree still matters “in a world where credentials can feel overshadowed by clicks and followers and algorithms”.

“But it’s not the paper that gives the power; it’s you,” Usher said.

And then there was Kermit the Frog at University of Maryland, the alma mater of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson. The frog, voiced by Matt Vogel, told graduates that life is “like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending.”

He then closed by asking the crowd to join him in singing his classic tune, Rainbow Connection.

“Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” they sang. “The lovers, the dreamers and me.”