I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still…

But, still, you have to laugh.

Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked.

Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course.

NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views.”

And just in case that wasn’t enough, they added this:

NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.

Oh, audience, oh, parents, oh, students, how ill fares the land, how subjected you were to remarks like these, having your moment stolen.

Like I said, you have to laugh.

I think back to all those literary lions who spoke at graduations past, how celebrated they were, by the media, by university leaders, for what they said, speaking truth to power and all that.

There was…

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978, saying this:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days….Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Susan Sontag, declared a pariah for telling the truth after 9/11, invited to Vassar, where she said this:

It’s hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

And this:

Despise violence. Despise national vanity and self-love.

And this:

Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American. Go even further: try to imagine at least once a day that you belong to the vast, the overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don’t have passports, don’t live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown in a plane.

Or Salman Rushdie, still in the flush of the fatwa, invited to speak at Bard, where he said this:

Since I have come to believe that such defiance is an inevitable and essential aspect of what we call freedom, I thought I might commend it to you. For in the years to come you will find yourselves up against gods of all sorts, big and little gods, corporate and incorporeal gods, all of them demanding to be worshipped and obeyed – the myriad deities of money and power, of convention and custom, that will seek to limit and control your thoughts and lives. Defy them; that’s my advice to you. Thumb your noses; cock your snooks. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

Oh, but the students, the parents, the Israelis, the humanity.

What a juvenile society we live in.