The president of the university in the state of Georgia, where the US president, Joe Biden, will give a speech next Sunday during the graduation ceremony, announced this Thursday that he will suspend the event if disruptive protests occur.
This was stated in an interview on CNN by David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse College, a historically African-American private university in Atlanta, the largest city in the key state of Georgia, which Biden took from former President Donald Trump in the 2020 elections.
“What we will not allow is disruptive behavior that prevents the ceremony from proceeding in a way that attendees can participate and enjoy,” Thomas stated on CNN.
Biden is scheduled to deliver a speech at 9 a.m. Sunday during the Morehouse College graduation ceremony, in what will be his first direct meeting with college students since the start of the war in Gaza in October.
“For example, if the president were booed for a long time while he spoke. What I have decided is that we are not going to ask the police to remove students from the graduation ceremony by putting plastic handcuffs on them. “If we face that situation, I will cancel the ceremony on the spot,” Thomas added.
The announcement of the speech last month sparked peaceful protests and student petitions for the university to cancel the event over Biden's support for Israel in the war in Gaza.
Steve Benjamin, Biden's advisor and head of the White House Public Liaison Office, recently met with students and professors at the university with the aim of listening to them and talking about their concerns, as he himself explained this Thursday in a conference call. press at the White House.
“Many of them wanted to talk about the Middle East and the war,” explained Benjamin, who did not want to address the specific content of the meeting because it was private.
However, he said that as the conversation progressed, “heads were nodding” and students appreciated the information being offered.
Biden's speech will come after, in recent weeks, thousands of university students across the United States took over campuses with demonstrations and camps to protest Israel's war in Gaza, in the largest mobilizations of this type in decades.