It was, by most appearances, a normal Commencement: bagpipes, speeches, caps flung skyward.
But for students in the crowd, the day was shaped by a courtroom battle over the fate of Harvard’s international students that played out simultaneously with the ceremony — and by Harvard’s historic, high-stakes standoff with the Trump administration.
Midway through Harvard’s 374th Commencement on Thursday, as keynote speaker and Stanford University physician Abraham Verghese delivered his address, phones buzzed across Tercentenary Theatre with breaking news: a federal judge had extended a temporary order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard’s certification to enroll international students. The decision, though not final, brought visible relief — a ripple of applause joined the day’s more expected cheers.
The ruling capped a week of uncertainty after the DHS abruptly informed Harvard last Thursday it was no longer authorized to enroll international students, citing allegations of campus antisemitism, race-based discrimination, and foreign influence. Harvard sued the next day, and University President Alan M. Garber ’76, now the face of two high-profile lawsuits against the White House, cemented his role as a standard-bearer for higher education.
Garber, booed at last year’s Commencement over his decision to block 13 pro-Palestine activists from graduating, was welcomed Thursday with two separate standing ovations.
One came as he took the stage. The other followed moments later, when he welcomed “students from across the world, just as it should be” — a simple line that landed as a firm rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to push those very students out. The crowd of roughly 30,000 students and family members roared in response.
Yet despite his central role in Harvard’s clash with the White House, Garber never mentioned President Donald Trump by name. Nor did he speak directly about the lawsuits or the DHS order that threw the futures of roughly 6,000 Harvard students into limbo. Instead, his address struck a characteristically measured and largely apolitical tone, focused on intellectual humility and the perils of ideological homogeneity.
“Though many would be loath to admit it,” Garber said, “absolute certainty and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin — a coin with no value but costs beyond measure.”
But to many in the crowd, the message didn’t need to be spelled out. Garber’s refusal to back down from his defiant posture spoke louder than any line in a speech. And frustration at some of his administration’s decisions — like renaming Harvard’s diversity office and suspending some Palestine-focused academic programs, which were widely seen as concessions to the right — did not surface at a Commencement marked by striking unity.
Senior English Address speaker Thor N. Reimann ’25 made the ceremony’s subtext explicit. Veering away from his prepared remarks, he praised Harvard’s leaders for standing firm in the face of federal pressure.
“Our University is certainly imperfect, but I am proud to stand today alongside our graduating class, our faculty, and our president, with the shared conviction that this ongoing project of Veritas is one worth defending,” he said to applause.
And Verghese praised Garber directly, saying Harvard’s recent decisions have been “worthy of your university’s heritage.” In what amounted to a stinging condemnation of Trump’s attacks on higher education, Verghese described his own experience fleeing Ethiopia, where he grew up and attended medical school, after a 1974 military coup.
“One of the first acts of the military leader was to close the university and send the students to the countryside for a year to ‘educate the masses,’” Verghese said. “This is almost a reflex of so-called ‘strongmen,’ to attack the places where truth and reason prevail.”
International students and their allies marked the moment in quieter ways. More than 800 graduates wore white flowers pinned to their gowns — a student-organized gesture of solidarity with those whose visa status has been put in limbo. Others wore keffiyehs or carried signs.
Even faculty members and deans made their allegiances clear. As they processed into the Yard in full academic regalia, many wore stickers quoting a line from Harvard’s lawsuit against the DHS — “without our international students, Harvard is not Harvard” — affixed to their gowns, labels, or phones. Outgoing Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana proudly displayed the message on his phone case, while Graduate School of Education Dean Bridget T. Long wore hers on her sleeve.
Unlike last year, when more than 1,000 students and faculty walked out of Commencement in protest of disciplinary sanctions against pro-Palestine organizers, Thursday’s ceremony unfolded without mass disruption.
Still, protest was present — if more subdued. A banner reading “There Are No Universities Left in Gaza” was briefly unfurled on the steps of Widener Library before being confiscated by campus police. Another, reading “Harvard Divest From Genocide in Gaza,” was dropped from a window of Sever Hall and taken down minutes later.
Outside the gates of Harvard Yard, more than 50 demonstrators lined Massachusetts Avenue with signs urging Harvard to divest from Israel’s war in Gaza and defend student speech. At the same time, a digital doxxing truck funded by right-wing advocacy group Accuracy in Media circled the Yard, displaying photos and names of pro-Palestine student activists under the heading “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
But within Tercentenary Theatre, Commencement proceeded apace.
Verghese — the physician and novelist who told graduates about his experiences growing up under authoritarian rule in Ethiopia — praised Garber and the University for what he described as moral clarity in a moment of national turmoil.
“More people than you realize are grateful for Harvard for the example it has set,” he said, calling the White House’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students part of a “cascade of draconian government measures.”
Verghese concluded his speech with a story from his early years in medicine — a letter from a young AIDS patient to his mother shortly before his death. In the letter, the patient expressed his satisfaction that he had lived his own life to the fullest, even though it would take hundreds of years to fulfill all his dreams.
“If anyone ever asks you if I went to heaven, tell them this: I just came from there,” the letter read. “No place could conceivably be as wonderful as where I’ve spent these last 30 years.”
Moments after Verghese stepped away from the podium, Pusey Minister Matthew Ichihashi Potts delivered the closing benediction. Then, as tradition holds, Middlesex County Sheriff Peter J. Koutoujian struck his gavel three times, formally adjourning the meeting.
—Staff writers Samuel A. Church, Elyse C. Goncalves, William C. Mao, and Akshaya Ravi contributed reporting.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.
