A still from the Commencement ceremony livestream. The Class of 2024 experienced the first Commencement ceremony held on the Pageant Green. Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke College.
BY TARA MONASTESSE ’25
Editor-in-Chief
Many students at Mount Holyoke’s 187th Commencement ceremony last May used the event as an opportunity to show support for Palestine amid the Israeli military’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip. At several points, a group of graduating seniors briefly interrupted the ceremony on May 19 with an organized series of pro-Palestine chants. Some students donned keffiyehs, pins and graduation caps decorated with green, red and black: the colors of the Palestinian flag. Others handed out miniature Palestinian flags to students and faculty.
The bulk of the demonstrations were organized by I-Change for Palestine, a group of pro-Palestine student activists at Mount Holyoke. Advocating for Mount Holyoke’s divestment from Israel is currently one of their main goals, as well as educating the community about Palestinian history.
As President Danielle R. Holley began her commencement address, a group of seniors in the audience began chanting “Free, free Palestine.” While Holley did not initially acknowledge the chants, she eventually paused her speech to recognize them.
“Let me take a moment and say thank you for raising your voices,” Holley said. “We know how important this is as an opportunity to many of you to raise your voices for a cause that you believe deeply in.” She went on to note that, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the graduating students at the ceremony were not able to attend their high school graduations.
“My hope is that the ceremony will focus on the graduates for today and allowing every graduate to be able to have this experience for themselves with their friends and family,” Holley said to applause.
Holley also alluded to the chants again when describing challenges facing the class of 2024. “Mount Holyoke and the world have gone through tumultuous times over the past four years,” she said. “As you’ve heard from our students raising their voices today, we continue to navigate a heated geopolitical atmosphere and war in the Middle East.”
Several students in the audience shouted “genocide” in response.
While Manuela Ribas ’26 said that Holley’s response to the chanting came off as “very PR,” she ultimately felt it was appropriate.
“I feel like it was very neutral and very professional, and I really did appreciate that,” Ribas, who worked at Commencement as an usher, said to Mount Holyoke News. “She acknowledged the demonstrations. I feel like it would have been a lot easier for her to just continue talking and pretend that nothing happened. I feel like acknowledging what was happening was very respectful.”
Other students felt differently.
“[The statement] felt very dismissive and manipulative on her part,” Esra Kadair ’24, a graduating senior who helped to organize the chanting and other pro-Palestine actions at the ceremony, said. “She’s trying to stay in the middle and not take a clear stance, but by not taking a clear stance, [Holley] is actively taking a stance.” [Editor’s note: The spelling of Kadair’s name has been changed for this article due to a request for privacy.]
Kadair, a newly graduated Palestinian alum who immigrated to the United States from Jordan about five years ago, has been involved in pro-Palestine student activism on campus throughout the 2023-2024 academic year and is the founder of I-Change for Palestine.
When crossing the stage to receive her diploma, Kadair held a cloth sign on which she had written, “How many kids did your 0.031 investment in Israel kill today[,] MHC?”
The sign referenced a criticism levied by some members of the community regarding Mount Holyoke’s alleged financial ties to Israel through its endowment.
“Regarding some community members’ calls for divestment from the state of Israel and also from the arms industry, Mount Holyoke has no direct investments in weapons manufacturing,” the College said in an emailed statement to Mount Holyoke News last November. “Indirect exposure to companies that trade on the Israeli stock market may come from a singular equity index fund out of the wide array of funds in which we invest our endowment. The total exposure to these companies is less than one half of one percent of our endowment."
By carrying the sign as she crossed the stage at Commencement, Kadair said she intended to convey that “the institution might have succeeded in giving me a degree, but it has failed as an institution to acknowledge the present and to take a humanitarian stance.”
Kadair said that I-Change for Palestine plans to continue organizing even after her graduation, with plans to elect a new executive board every year.
In an archived livestream recording of the ceremony, several offscreen voices can be heard calling for quiet during the chanting. Kadair and the two other graduating seniors interviewed for this article recalled hearing disapproving comments made by graduate students in attendance in response to the chanting.
“I didn’t enjoy the people trying to quiet down protestors,” Jude Barrera ’24 said. “I felt it was a very unwarranted pushback … It wasn’t a disruption of the actual process of Commencement. All our speakers still got to speak. Danielle Holley still got to speak.”
Mackenzie Windus ’24, a chemistry major and a member of the 2024 Commencement Committee, served as the student speaker for the ceremony. At the beginning of her speech, she referenced the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“I am honored and delighted to address you all on such a momentous occasion,” Windus began. “But before I continue, it is necessary to acknowledge that while we are here celebrating, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has resulted in no universities left to allow our fellow classmates of the class of 2024 in Gaza to experience such an occasion as this.”
She then asked the audience to hold a moment of silence “for the lives that have been lost, and will continue to be lost, until we have a permanent ceasefire.” According to Windus, this part of the speech was not included in the final draft she had initially handed in to the College.
“In the personal draft that I had, I included the piece about what's going on in Gaza. I didn't include that on the piece that the school had, simply because prior to the Commencement ceremony they actually had given me a security briefing just in case protests began to break out during Commencement,” Windus said. “Knowing the climate that the school was presenting themselves around graduation, I felt like if I had included it prior, then they might have asked me not to say something or vetted it out of the speech, and I just didn't want to run into any risks of that happening.”
Overall, Windus felt that the response from her fellow graduates was positive.
“I feel proud of students for speaking up, and I’m glad there was space for it at the ceremony,” she said. “I don't think there's a thing I'd change about that day.”
Editor’s note: Prior to their graduation, Jude Barrera ’24 was a Books section staff writer for Mount Holyoke News.