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In recent years, many elite universities have organized affinity-based graduation celebrations. They have served to commemorate minority graduates during university commencement exercises. These events have been criticized by leading conservatives as a form of segregation and part of “woke culture.”
Columbia University’s School of Engineering has implemented affinity-based celebrations which, according to the institution’s website, allow “community members to reflect on personal growth and community experiences that have impacted their time as students through to graduation.” At Harvard’s 2019 “Black Graduation,” students were called upon to “[celebrate] the common experience, [pay] tribute to the support from our graduating students’ families and our collective greater communities, and [make] a call to action in this time of public intolerance.”
California State University, Long Beach’s graduates this year are encouraged to attend one of nine ceremonies. These include a “Lavender Graduation,” aimed to empower “people within and outside of the LGBTQIA community,” as well as a so-called “UndocuGration” for graduating students who immigrated to the United States illegally.
Despite the inhibitions of a virtual school year, Princeton University is expected to follow suit.
A recent news piece published in The Daily Princetonian applauds the university’s plans to host several virtual graduation programs for various cultural backgrounds. The school’s Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding will sponsor individual ceremonies for “Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA),” “Latinx,” “Middle Eastern & North African,” “Native American,” and “Pan-African” communities. An alternative graduation for the “First-Generation, Low-Income (FLI)” community is also being organized by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. According to The Prince, the Fields Center anticipates a sharp increase in attendance over last year for its graduation events.
The university’s controversial ceremonies have proliferated rapidly since their founding. The Tory spoke to Tennille Haynes, Director of the Fields Center, to research the origins of these events. The first such ceremony, the “Latinx Graduation,” first occurred over 20 years ago to “celebrate [Latinx students’] achievements and recognize their roles as Latinx students in shaping Princeton’s environment,” explained Haynes.
In 2005, Princeton incorporated a Pan-African component as a way to foster “an intimate gathering for family and members of the Pan-African Diaspora to celebrate the graduates.” Princeton only added the three other cultural events in 2018.
May’s virtual events will incorporate “keynote speakers, student performances, class speakers, and remarks from the affinity alumni groups and other programmatic components the student committees are interested in,” Haynes noted. Students will be “presented with a cultural stole (specific to that graduation) for them to wear proudly and represent their culture and heritage throughout the rest of the university commencement festivities.”
The ceremonies and the cultural stole offer an opportunity for graduates to celebrate their accomplishments in a “cultural and personal way,” Haynes insisted.
Despite support from some university administrators, the Fields Center’s cultural events remain controversial. Several students and professors remain skeptical of these graduation ceremonies, citing their ability to sow division within the student body.
In an interview with the Tory, Rebekah Adams ‘21 reflected upon her unique voice within the ongoing cultural debate as a black student and prominent conservative voice within the campus discourse.
Adams will attend the Fields Center’s Pan-African graduation ceremony. She warned that while such events may be “beneficial” for some individuals seeking to express their identity, the university’s role in promoting such events is “problematic” given current political tensions within the student body: “especially around these times… it’s just a different graduation for different sects of people.”
If the school were truly intent upon emulating diversity of thought, she argued, “[Princeton should] make it an educational experience for other people rather than just being a celebration for [members of minority groups].”
Sergiu Klainerman, Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics, expressed concern over the precedent Princeton sets when it sponsors these cultural events. A frequent contributor to the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, an organization dedicated to the preservation of free speech on campus, Klainerman, like Adams, feared that the ceremonies could problematize student relations. Klainerman was also concerned with how the university “takes an active role in promoting and organizing them.”
With the lack of representation from certain ethnic groups within the programming, Klainerman’s concerns lay with optics as well. He lamented the hypocrisy of the university hosting events for a select few ethnic groups, professing that regarding the scope of these cultural ceremonies, “One can then ask why certain groups and not others.”
Addressing these ramifications of these events upon the university’s cultural prerogatives, Klainerman’s tone was of consternation.
“This could be in serious contradiction to the traditional role of the university to be inclusive and desegregate all its official activities. We should avoid any tendency to further balkanize our university.”
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