JVP Academic Council Statement in Support of NYU Graduate Speaker Logan Rozos

21 May 2025

President Linda Mills
Provost Gigi Dopico
Board of Trustees Chair Evan Chesler

New York University
50 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012

cc: Committee A of the American Association of University Professors

Dear President Mills, Provost Dopico, and Board Chair Chesler:

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) offers its admiration, gratitude, and support to Logan Rozos. Mr Rozos used his platform at NYU Gallatin’s graduation ceremony to do exactly what must always be done at a university: tell the truth—in this case, the urgent truth about the continuing Israeli genocide in Gaza.  

In its statement attacking Mr. Rozos after he spoke, the NYU administration reports that Mr. Rozos broke a university rule by speaking words that had not been pre-approved by the administration.  As punishment, the administration has withheld Mr. Rozos’s diploma, an achievement he earned, thus harming his capacity to seek employment and/or further educational opportunities. 

Permitting Mr. Rozos to speak only words that have been pre-approved is, of course, an act of prior restraint on speech or censorship. It is fair to assume, moreover, that the NYU administration would never have approved honest words about Gaza, the genocide, Palestine, Israel, or U.S. complicity. The administration’s rule allowing Mr. Rozos to speak only pre-approved words is thus a throttling of speech that serves, by design, to silence opposition to the Israeli state’s mass murder of Palestinians.

It is clear that the NYU administration has failed to hear and absorb this key lesson from Reverend King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”  The NYU administration’s rule requiring Mr. Rozos to speak only words it has pre-approved—which is to say, only words the administration has censored—is an unjust law or, to be precise, an unjust rule of the university.  Mr. Rozos, in turn, has lived up to Rev. King’s standard of moral responsibility and acted courageously to disobey the NYU administration’s unjust rule, in order—as Mr. Rozos himself put it—“to say the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large”: the truth about both the “atrocities currently happening in Palestine” and the United States’ key role in funding, arming, and supporting those atrocities.

Those who disobey unjust rules must be prepared, we know, for punishment from those who hold power, but it does not follow that such punishments are anything other than additional unjust conduct.  There was no justice in jailing King for disobeying unjust Jim Crow laws.

In Mr. Rozos’s case, the NYU administration’s decision to withhold his diploma is facially unjust, a frankly mean-spirited punishment for disobeying an unjust university rule, despite his having met all of Gallatin’s graduation requirements.  JVP’s Academic Council joins those who demand that the administration award Mr. Rozos the diploma he has earned, without delay and without taxing him with having to engage in a struggle against the NYU administration.  

The NYU administration’s attack on Mr. Rozo is, unfortunately, a continuation of its ongoing support for Israeli genocide and repression of opposition to it. At the beginning of the academic year, NYU effectively made Zionism—a political ideology—a defining feature of a protected class, insulating supporters of apartheid and genocide from critique and authorizing harsh repression of anyone at NYU who advocates for Palestinian rights. The administration swiftly followed up on this by bringing disciplinary action against law students silently studying in their library while wearing keffiyehs.  Later in the year, NYU administrators disciplined scores of students and faculty in response to peaceful protests.  This included the arrest of two Jewish NYU faculty members, and declaring those two and three other faculty to be “persona non grata,” thus barring them from buildings on their own campus, for acting as witnesses and liaisons.  By contrast, NYU’s response to vandalism and threats from the neo-fascist, pro-Israel Betar movement has been muted at best. 

Criticizing Israel for conducting genocide and for its denial of Palestinian freedom is in no sense an attack on Jews or Judaism; it follows that none of the NYU administration’s conduct we have discussed fights antisemitism or contributes one iota to Jewish safety. The administration’s awful conduct is, however, an affront to our Jewish values of standing against injustice and oppression in all cases.

Unfortunately, the NYU administration’s betrayal of its students, faculty, and the university’s educational mission in order to support Israel and its genocide is anything but an outlier in U.S. higher education today.  To the contrary, it is but one more case in a virtual epidemic of intellectual and moral failure by higher education administrators in this time of genocide in Gaza and emergent fascism in the U.S.

Finally, we want to turn again to Mr. Rozos and say that what we find most commendable about his conduct and words is that in speaking at the Gallatin graduation, he did precisely what must be done at this moment: he centered Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza in the cause of justice.

Sincerely, 

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.

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