Last hour we had, we had Jay Johnson here
and he was talking about
Columbia making, you know, making some tough decisions
and having to balance a lot of different interests.
It sounds like Columbia's come up
with a compromise for graduation.
Well, this morning we've been following these developments on college
campuses across the country.
After weeks of protests over the Israel Hamas war in
Gaza,
it's really impacted commencement ceremonies and graduations for a number
of places.
Let's bring in NBC News correspondent Antonia Hilton,
who has the latest on the plans,
as Joe mentioned at Columbia University.
Antonia, what decision did they come up with
Morning Mika? Well, Columbia has just announced minutes ago that
they're going to cancel their mainstage graduation,
similar in fashion to what USC has decided to do,
and instead they're going to focus on individual school level
ceremonies and class days.
This means that the power and the real propulsion behind
the celebrations around graduation are going to be in the
hands of school administrators and the students themselves.
This comes after days of debate,
and NBC News was the first to report last this
week that these conversations were in motion.
School officials told us that they were concerned about security
and student government leaders who were
school officials to plan. All of this told us that
they were concerned about President Manoush Shafiq,
Colombian president speaking to the crowd in that classic cere
that that that could create quite a difficult situation.
Students could be upset. There could be protests that would
disrupt
the day for students and families.
And so this has been in the works now for
a while.
They are urging family, you know that they are still
going to be able to be part of celebrations on
campus.
They don't have to change their travel plans,
but certainly this is going to cause some upset today,
guys.
Interesting. So, So what you're saying is like for instance
and and this,
this seems like a good compromise to me.
You're talking about, like, for instance,
engineering school will have their own ceremonies.
Political science schools, our stage,
receive their diploma. Yeah, they'll still get recognition.
I mean, like for instance,
when I graduated from law school,
it was a smaller ceremony,
but it was 200 students.
It was the parents, and it was smaller,
but it was still special.
Is that what we're talking about here?
That's exactly what we're talking about.
Students are still going to get to where
all of the graduation garb,
They're going to walk across the stage.
They're going to get their diplomas in their hands,
and they're going to be interacting with Deans and school
leaders with whom they're already very familiar.
They're just not going to have that large crowd,
single commencement celebration. And Columbia had originally planned to have
one in the morning and one in the evening.
President Manous Shafiq would of course have been addressed
all of the students, not just at the undergraduate level,
but graduate schools as well.
And so you know, the the concern right is you
might not get some of the
classic imagery of students in that large crowd being able
to celebrate together some of the photography that families have
missed out on.
And and that may sound like a small thing,
but you have to remember this is a class,
these undergrads, when they graduated from high school in 2020,
many of them were socially distanced.
Some of them were in cars.
Some of them were on Zoom and had to get
their Loma later.
And so for some parents,
especially, you know, first generation families,
the kids of parents who never got the chance to
go to college,
this is going to be some difficult news to process.