Rutgers Faculty Split Over Disinvited Commencement Speaker

The Rutgers University Senate formally censured School of Engineering dean Alberto Cuitiño on Tuesday, 12 days after he rescinded the invitation for Arcellx CEO Rami Elghandour to speak at the school’s upcoming commencement ceremony.

The Senate’s resolution criticized Cuitiño’s handling of the situation as “one-sided, opaque, and harmful” to the university. Theirs is one aspect of a debate over whether Cuitiño was right to rescind the invitation and whether Elghandour—whose online critiques of Israel have recently come under fire—should have been invited to speak in the first place. The ongoing fight is complete with all the trappings of a campus divided over free speech—petitions, student rallies, faculty meetings, backchannel discussions and administrators’ attempts to quash it all. It also adds Rutgers to a list of at least four institutions that have disinvited commencement speakers this spring.

Cuitiño revoked Elghandour’s invitation to speak at commencement—scheduled for this coming Friday, May 15—on April 30. The dean told Elghandour that some students “no longer felt comfortable attending the convocation ceremony with him as the speaker” but did not elaborate on those concerns, according to the Senate resolution. A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed on May 6 that Elghandour was disinvited due to concerns about “social media posts, including one that shared an inflammatory claim,” and linked to an April 20 X post from Elghandour in which he wrote about Israel, “They’ve committed genocide. They’re running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners … Weapons embargo is the absolute minimum. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation are beyond justified.”

A few weeks after Elghandour’s post, The New York Times ran an op-ed by journalist Nicholas Kristof that included firsthand accounts of Palestinian former prisoners who were raped by dogs at the summon of prison guards. The Israel Foreign Ministry condemned the article on X, calling it one of the “worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.” Elghandour shared the article on X, adding that “Rutgers tried to defend this by calling it inflammatory and cancelling my speech. Apologists for sadism is now their brand.”

Inside Higher Ed asked Cuitiño via email if these new testimonies changed his thoughts on the decision to revoke Elghandour’s invitation. He referred the question and others to a university spokesperson.

“The Rutgers School of Engineering dean made the right decision to disinvite the speaker. Our concerns about the speaker were valid,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “No graduate should have to choose between their personal convictions and celebrating their hard-earned academic achievements at convocation.”

Cuitiño has faced significant public criticism for canceling the speech, including from students and employees who participated in a campus rally on Monday. When students asked for permission to leave the free speech zone to deliver petition letters to the dean Monday, senior associate dean Kerri Willson told them they must stay in the zone or “there would be consequences,” said Troy Shinbrot, a biomedical engineering professor at Rutgers.

“They were concerned about the consequences and so asked faculty to join them wearing regalia as they walked to the [biomedical engineering] building to deliver the letters,” Shinbrot told Inside Higher Ed over email. He helped escort them, and the students were stopped from approaching the building by several Rutgers police officers who, according to Shinbrot, threatened them with arrest if they did not disperse.

After some back-and-forth with the officers, Shinbrot proposed a compromise: The students would disperse if he was allowed to deliver the petitions. The officers agreed, and Shinbrot delivered them during a meeting between Cuitiño and biomedical engineering department faculty.

“The dean said this was a waste of paper because he already got the letters by email. I asked if that meant he was going to throw them away. He said no, but repeated, as I recall, that if this was the petition that had 20 or so recipients, he had already read them,” Shinbrot said. “I explained it wasn’t a petition, it was individual letters, and the senders were waiting for a response.”

The meeting was part of an attempt by Cuitiño and some engineering department heads to “circle the wagons,” said Anand Sarwate, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Cuitiño held individual meetings with all seven engineering departments on Monday and Tuesday of this week to discuss “issues related to the [School of Engineering] Convocation Speaker, and answer questions,” according to an email to faculty from electrical and computer engineering department chair Yingying Chen and obtained by Inside Higher Ed.

On Tuesday morning, Shinbrot received a reprimand from his department chair.

“I had to let our staff members leave early because they feared for their safety. Your performative stunt in which you entered the conference room in full regalia, hiding who knows what under your robe, was an attempt at intimidation and showmanship,” the chair wrote, according to Shinbrot. “This is completely and utterly unacceptable and must never happen again. You are supposed to be our colleague.”

Despite the rally and scathing resolution from the University Senate, not everyone is against the dean’s decision. In an email to their department, one faculty member said, “If I had made a mistake (while serving in a critical admin position), I would want my colleagues to support me.”

This sentiment—that disinviting Elghandour was a mistake but Cuitiño should not be thrown under the bus for it—is held by a number of professors, according to an engineering faculty member who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

“The people who truly support his decision can be counted on one or two hands,” the faculty member said. “Then, there’s a splintered group. There’s a group that says, ‘It was wrong but we can’t throw one of our own to the wolves.’ There’s a group that says, ‘He was wrong and institutions of higher education need to stand by the principles of free speech.’”

Another group thinks the decision was wrong but that speaking out could invite unwanted attention from the Trump administration, the faculty member added.

After the department meetings, chairs asked engineering faculty to vote on a statement of support for Cuitiño, which read in part, “Convocation is, first and foremost, a celebration of our students, their accomplishments, and the families and loved ones who have supported them throughout their academic journey. This occasion should remain focused on honoring our graduates and bringing the community together in recognition of that shared achievement. We support the leadership and judgment of the School of Engineering in making decisions intended to preserve the purpose of this important event and to ensure that the focus remains where it belongs—on our students and their families.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, at least three departments had approved the statement. In its resolution, the Senate alluded to these meetings by writing that Cuitiño “sought retrospective validation of his actions through fragmented faculty engagement rather than transparent, collective dialogue.”