As anger at the tech industry boils over, college students across the United States are using their graduation ceremonies as a forum to voice their discontent.
At Stanford University’s commencement over the weekend, hundreds of students staged a walk-out ahead of a graduation speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The walkout, first covered by SF Gate, featured some 200 graduates who jeered, blew whistles, and unfurled banners as the billionaire tech exec took the podium. (Stanford only graduates about 2,000 undergrads per year, so the dissent was extremely visible.)
The protest was in response to Google’s numerous contracts with militaries and domestic police agencies like the Israeli Defense Forces and US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While other commencement protests have focused on the more nebulous issue of AI and automation, the Stanford protest struck a different chord.
“Google has actively enabled and profited from Israel’s apartheid and genocide of Palestinians through Project Nimbus,” the protest organizers declared in a walk-out pledge. “It has also enabled ICE’s persecution of our neighbors. This year, Google DeepMind just greenlit a no‑red‑lines Pentagon AI contract, betraying its own researchers’ pleas to stop arming war.”
After walking out, the organizers invited graduates to an alternative ceremony held directly across from the official venue, featuring Mahmoud Khalil as the headline speaker. A prominent Algerian-Palestinian activist and former student organizer at Columbia University, Khalil was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents in March of 2025, spending 104 days in detention despite never having been convicted or even charged with a crime.
“We don’t need another tech billionaire to tell us how to get rich off the killing and surveillance of Palestinians and US immigrants,” the pledge exclaimed. “Take a stance against war profiteering. Tell the Google CEO that he is not welcome. Walk out with your peers of conscience, and join our People’s Commencement instead of listening to the empty words of a Google CEO.”
For his part, Pichai seemed prepared for a different protest. Learning from the dozens of examples of college commencement speakers who’ve been jeered into oblivion for mentioning AI, Pichai made sure not to even broach the topic, choosing instead to highlight his own life story, SF Gate reported. Still, the fact that he was so prominently rebuffed regardless reveals the sheer scale of frustration with the tech industry: that discontent has grown too broad and too deep to be sidestepped by any one speech, no matter how carefully it’s crafted.
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