COVERAGE NOTE: Follow CNN’s live updates Thursday on Harvard’s commencement ceremony and federal court hearing starting at 8 a.m. ET.
From the time Leo Gerdén left his native Sweden, he has looked forward to this day, when he’ll cross a stage as one of more than 1,700 undergrads earning degrees from Harvard University. But he’s not sure he will feel the kind of joy he expected at commencement.
“I think it will be quite hard, to be honest,” Gerdén told CNN.
Still, Gerdén is lucky. As a senior, he always planned for this to be his last semester at Harvard. Now, many other foreign scholars fear their own time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could be cut short.
Harvard’s international students – who make up 27% of the university’s enrollment – are the latest group caught in the crossfire of ideological warfare between their school and the Trump administration as it presses colleges across America to adopt policies aligned with its politics or face steep funding cuts.
Thursday’s commencement ceremony – capping off several days of celebrations – gives the university a chance to focus on its nearly four centuries of tradition. And Harvard has no desire to make waves. This year’s keynote speaker is uncontroversial, and the sponsored affinity group events that so frustrated President Donald Trump have disappeared, a terse advisory on the school’s website all that remains.
But in the past, commencement has also given speakers and students their own opportunity for unscripted moments, with this week’s happening as the institution is trying to carefully thread a needle with the White House between resistance and accommodation.
The event will unfold as federal District Judge Allison Burroughs – in a courtroom just 6 miles from the music and cheering – hears arguments in a case that could determine whether those who plan to return to Harvard in the fall actually can come back.
Inside the gleaming glass façade of the John Joseph Moakley US Courthouse overlooking Boston Harbor, attorneys for the nation’s oldest institution of higher education are set to face off against lawyers representing the Trump administration over the government’s attempt to block the university from accepting any international students.
The ban, now on emergency pause by Burroughs, already has shaken some of the world’s brightest thinkers at a school often heralded as a premier global hub of higher learning.
“I have no family in the US. I came here as an 18-, 19-year-old, and now I have to deal with all of this,” Harvard Undergraduate Association Co-President Abdullah Shahid Sial – a citizen of Pakistan – told CNN.
“Students feel very dehumanized, very demeaned and very disrespected.”
Many now find themselves victims of circumstance – without the pomp they expected after years of diligent achievement.
“The day I opened that acceptance letter was probably the best day of my life,” Gerdén said. “And now all of that hard work can just be taken away from us just like that.”
Commencement can provide a forum for the unexpected
Harvard has walked a careful tightrope since the Trump administration began targeting it on multiple fronts. On the one hand, it is now the face of resistance to White House efforts to reshape academic institutions in its own image, with two pending lawsuits against the government: one to lift its ban on international students and the other to unfreeze more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts.
But the university also has shied away from direct confrontation in more legally precarious areas. For instance, some efforts to promote “viewpoint diversity” on campus are worthwhile, it has agreed, even as it fights the Trump administration’s demands to directly oversee those efforts.
And in response to Trump’s executive order aiming to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion programs nationwide, Harvard renamed and refocused its former Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging into an office of Community and Campus Life, “cultivating a culture of belonging … for all,” the office’s top officer wrote.
But conciliation is not universal. More than 300 students on Tuesday protested the government’s actions against Harvard with an on-campus rally, CNN affiliate WHDH reported. While that event was relatively constrained, commencement ceremonies bring another moment where events are not entirely under the control of the buttoned-down institution.
“Everyone is in a state of extreme uncertainty right now,” said Gerdén, who helped to organize Tuesday’s protest.
Harvard did not respond to requests from CNN to clarify whether students or speakers would be expected to limit political statements at commencement.
Only one change from previous commencement week plans is noted on the Harvard website: the cancellation of all school-sponsored graduation celebrations for affinity groups after the Trump administration banned universities from using their own money to fund what it casts as “segregation by race at graduation ceremonies.”
“Harvard will no longer provide funding, staffing, or spaces for end-of-year affinity celebrations,” the school’s website states, although some groups have continued their events with private funding.
Meanwhile, international students – and in many cases, the parents who sacrificed for their educations – will head Thursday through the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Yard for the university-wide graduation ceremony, now shrouded in uncertainty over the institution’s future.
“Think about the families coming from all over the world for our graduation,” Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last week. “People who devoted their lives to making it possible for their kids to go to Harvard and to see them graduate now being told that somehow this is all being stopped because of a vendetta against Harvard.”
“I’m sorry,” he added, “I just can’t quite believe that this is happening in the United States.”
Past commencements have seen controversy
A major question mark hanging over the commencement is whether any participants will make political statements at a time the university is trying to avoid any activity the Trump administration could use as a pretext for more punishment.
Even the choice of who should deliver the keynote address at commencement can result in political backlash. Last year’s speaker was Maria Ressa, a Filipina investigative journalist a founder of Rappler who won a Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.”
The choice of Ressa drew online criticism for her critical stance against Israel in the ongoing war against Hamas, a conflict at the heart of Trump’s claims that elite campuses became breeding grounds for antisemitism. Ressa’s response in her speech to her critics only intensified the outrage.
“Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money,” Ressa said in her address.
The final report from Harvard’s Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias said Ressa removed part of her prepared remarks encouraging pro-Palestinian protesters to be more understanding of Jewish classmates, although Ressa told CNN the draft she submitted to the university was not intended to be final.
Hundreds of graduating students walked out of last year’s commencement as degrees were being conferred, some chanting and protesting the university’s decision to deny graduation to some organizers of a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus that spring, Harvard Magazine reported.
“It was bad enough to have the disruption within the audience, the day of celebration violated,” Harvard Chabad founder Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi told Jewish news organization The Forward. “But to have a program validate that and then to have her introduce her own antisemitic rhetoric. It was a sad day.”
Ressa later said on social media her comments on “power and money” referred not to Jews but to Big Tech companies she had referred to earlier in the speech and “people in power.” “Still, if my words caused offense, I apologize,” she wrote.
Ressa, who was a CNN journalist from 1987 to 2005, said Wednesday that the task force that criticized her speech did not reach out to her and ask for her side of the story before completing their report.
“I took a risk for them because I cared about the graduating students, and I was disappointed that I was treated that way,” Ressa told CNN.
Still, Ressa – whose independent reporting put her under intense legal scrutiny from the government of the Philippines – said she recognizes the pressure universities are under.
“It’s really uncertain times,” she said. “There is a lot of fear to go around, and there is a lot to lose.”
This year’s keynote speaker is unlikely to push as many political buttons. Dr Abraham Verghese – a physician, novelist and friend of Harvard President Alan Garber – is not known for taking controversial political stands.
Representatives for Verghese did not return CNN’s request for comment about his speech or whether the school asked to review it.
Commencements still are used as protest platforms
Harvard doesn’t have to look far into the past to see how commencements can turn unpredictable. At Columbia University graduation celebrations last week, school President Claire Shipman was booed at two events by students protesting the ongoing detention by immigration authorities of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student and lawful permanent US resident who played a key role in last year’s contentious pro-Palestinian campus protests. The government has cited Khalil’s “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” as reasons he should be deported.
“I know many in our community are mourning the absence of our graduate Mahmoud Khalil,” Shipman said as some students jeered and walked out. Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters chanted outside the university’s locked gates, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported.
As the educational institution sticking its neck out the farthest in fighting the Trump administration, Harvard is not anxious to provide any more potential fodder for claims it coddles rulebreakers and promotes extremism.
Gerdén’s walk across the stage will be followed by a previously scheduled scholarship master’s program in the fall at a university in Beijing, China.
“It would be very crazy if I would have said a couple of years ago that it feels safer to go to China than to stay in the US right now,” he said.
And with the future of thousands of students on the Harvard campus being debated in a courtroom just across the Charles River, Gerdén knows some changes may be permanent.
“I was looking forward to celebrating commencement,” he said, “but now I might leave this place, and it will not look the same next semester.”
CNN’s Sara Sidner contributed to this report.
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