I attended two People’s Graduations last spring: one for Columbia and one for CUNY. I might be the only person who went to both. The Columbia People’s Graduation was covered in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Teen Vogue, and Time. The CUNY People’s Graduation seemingly vanished without a digital trace.

This is unsurprising. As a full-time CUNY faculty member who used to moonlight as a Columbia adjunct, I often felt like I was commuting between New York’s educational extremes—one school at the center of attention, the other beneath notice.

Columbia is the largest private landowner in the city, a multibillion-dollar real estate empire that is also an Ivy League school built to look like a set of Greek temples. CUNY is what’s left of a long-ago collective commitment to accessible public higher education for “the children of the whole people”—almost a quarter of a million students crammed into classrooms with broken desks, busted HVAC systems, and a general atmosphere of austerity and asbestos dust. The median family income of a Columbia student is over $150,000. Most CUNY students have a household income of less than $30,000.

For a moment last spring, the protests brought these worlds together. On April 21, CUNY student protesters posted an inviting tropical image of Columbia’s campus decorated with palm trees:

ATTENTION CUNY STUDENTS
SPEND YOUR SPRING BREAK AT …
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Columbia first! CUNY next! All universities must divest!

But Columbia quickly locked down its campus to outsiders. Soon, CUNY had its own encampment at City College, modeled on the Five Demands Protest organized by CUNY’s Black and Puerto Rican Student Caucus in 1969. The Five Demands of 2024 combined support for Palestine with a call for “A People’s CUNY”—a fully funded university with free tuition, the way it was back when most of the university’s students were white.

In almost every way, the People’s Graduations dramatized the differences between the universities.

Columbia’s was held at the largest church in North America, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a beautiful bastion of Gothic architecture and WASP wealth.

CUNY’s was held by the basketball court at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem, in front of a weathered chain-link fence.

Columbia’s started and finished promptly on White People Time.

The students at CUNY’s graduation had just started setting things up when I arrived at the official start time. When I left four hours later, the celebration was still going strong.

I’ll remember the decorated graduation caps that bloomed like a field of poppies.

Columbia students were welcomed by the dean of the cathedral, with additional reflections from a minister, a rabbi, and a Muslim former student activist.

There were no clergy at CUNY’s graduation, but at one point a student chanted a call to prayer, and dozens of students knelt on the asphalt, using protest banners as prayer mats.

Columbia’s graduation had a beautifully planned program featuring speeches by famous scholars, activists, and poets, a video message from a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, and a performance by a Grammy-nominated jazz musician, who played a new composition on a gleaming grand piano.

CUNY’s was an improvised open mic featuring students, a student’s mom, and a former adjunct professor whose contract was not renewed after he posted an anti-Zionist tweet.

Columbia’s graduation did not have food.

CUNY’s had bountiful halal chicken and rice. A Sikh charity distributed the excess to people in need.

Columbia’s was a gift from faculty and staff to students. Well-connected professors activated their networks and pulled out all the stops to create a Broadway-quality experience of consolation and celebration.

CUNY’s was made by students and their communities for themselves and for each other—a DIY project with hand-rolled diplomas fresh from the copy shop, each tied like a birthday present with curling ribbon. “Congratulations on graduating from complicit CUNY,” the diplomas read. “As you embark on this new chapter, carry with you the values of integrity, compassion, and resilience. Let the words of Bassel al-Araj, the renowned Palestinian activist, inspire you: ‘You want to be an intellectual? You must resist. Otherwise, you and your education are useless.’”

Ritual is necessary because without it, faith will falter. My faith was faltering this spring after the violent crackdown on protests at Columbia and CUNY and universities around the country. In their different ways, the People’s Graduations restored my belief in the university—not as an imprimatur of excellence or a factory of social mobility, but as a community of scholars devoted to freedom and truth.

I left the Cathedral of St. John the Divine dissolved by the song we all sang together at the end, a song written by the daughter of Holocaust survivors to protest the Muslim Ban, a song that students had sung together at the Columbia encampment, a version of what Ruth said to Naomi in the book of Ruth:

Where you go I will go, my friend
Where you go I will go
Where you go I will go, my friend
Where you go I will go
For your people are my people
Your people are mine
Your people are my people
Your people are mine

I left St. Nicholas Park with a belly full of food and fiery speeches burning in my ears: the words of so many seemingly fearless young Muslim women who are orators and organizers in equal measure, including the Iraqi grad who told us she knew what it felt like to grow up with bombs, and the Palestinian grad who told us that the day was not just about fun and led us on a march to City College to protest the official graduation and face the cops.

I’ll always remember the Filipino student who walked for their mother who wasn’t allowed to stay in the US and so couldn’t finish her degree. And the community college grad, a father of five, who said, “If people ask me why I care about Palestine I say it’s because I’m Puerto Rican and I know what it’s like to live under occupation. But really it’s because I’m a father.”

I’ll remember the decorated graduation caps that bloomed like a field of poppies.

And I’ll remember that I got to see a beloved former student graduate. A couple weeks earlier she had been held illegally by the police for over 24 hours. She borrowed my eBay doctoral gown to graduate in, just as I had borrowed regalia from a friend for my graduation 14 years ago.

“Here in the belly of the beast,” the CUNY students kept saying, on a bright dappled May day that felt like a gift.

The graduations were evidence: We do not need our institutions to inform us whether our right to protest is sacred or whether our rituals are real. We know it is; we know they are.

Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions(Bloomsbury, 2019). She is an associate professor of English and the Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY. Her next book, Gilead Reread, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. 

Featured image of the CUNY People’s Graduation, provided by Briallen Hopper.