Rutgers University abruptly rescinded its invitation to a prominent alum who was slated to deliver a graduation speech next week after some students complained about social media posts he had published about Palestine.

Rami Elghandour – a tech entrepreneur, graduate of Rutgers’ School of Engineering, and executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab – was set to deliver a graduation address at the school’s campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey on 15 May.

But the school’s dean, Alberto Cuitiño, called Elghandour last week and told him he was cancelling the speech because of students’ complaints, though he declined to say how many students and what posts they had complained about. The dean, Elghandour said, broadly described the posts as “opposed to their beliefs”.

“What is most puzzling to me is that they champion me for my humanitarian views and now they’re canceling me for them,” Elghandour told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

Cuitiño told him he supports everyone “saying what they think” but that the students’ issue was “with you and your beliefs”, Elghandour said. He added that there would be no new speaker at the event, and possibly in the future, to avoid similar issues.

A spokesperson for Rutgers confirmed in a statement to the Guardian that the school had rescinded its invitation to Elghandour after the engineering school was “informed that some graduating students would not attend their graduation ceremony due to concerns about the invited speaker’s social media posts”.

The spokesperson did not elaborate on the posts and noted the ceremony in question is one of many planned as part of graduation at Rutgers, a public university with more than 70,000 students. “This decision keeps the focus on our engineering students and honors the celebratory spirit of the event to ensure that no graduate feels forced to choose between their personal convictions and a convocation ceremony,” she added.

Elghandour has frequently posted about Palestine and shared posts by others, including by sharing reports, documented by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, of Israeli soldiers using dogs to sexually abuse prisoners, which some have described as “antisemitic blood libel”.

The cancellation of the Rutgers speech is just the latest controversy surrounding fears of pro-Palestinian speech at graduation ceremonies. New York University has banned some live speeches at this year’s ceremonies while the City University of New York’s Law School has banned student speeches altogether, and the College of Staten Island, which is also part of the Cuny system, is pre-recording student speeches.

Dozens of students protested or walked out of ceremonies following nationwide protests and encampments in 2024. Since then, several students have used their speeches to express support for Palestinians’ rights, prompting universities to denounce their statements and in at least one case withhold their diplomas, among other punishments. Last month, Cecilia Culver, a George Washington University alumna who was barred from campus last year after using her graduation speech to criticize the university’s ties to Israel, sued the school.

Last week, a history professor at the University of Michigan paid tribute during his speech to the “pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza”, prompting backlash and an apology from the university president.

Elghandour, who is Egyptian-American, is the chair and CEO of Arcellx, a biotechnology company. He is also an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights on social media. In addition to his work on the Voice of Hind Rajab, about a Palestinian five-year-old girl who was killed by the Israeli military while waiting to be rescued by paramedics, he served as executive producer on American Doctor, a documentary about three US doctors working in Gaza during the war.

He said he has previously been criticized for his social media posts by an Arcellx shareholder and some social media users, and that he brought in a law firm to review his social media history, which the firm concluded contained no hate speech, violence or anything against his company’s code of conduct.

“I think [Palestine] is the moral issue of our time and I believe it’s been used to undermine democratic institutions in the US,” Elghandour said. He referred to the cancelled invitation as a sign or “erosion of free speech and the first amendment”.

“We’ve seen a livestreamed genocide,” he added. “And we’re supposed to worry about the feelings of the people who support that.”

Elghandour said that he had been looking forward to delivering the speech and that he had not planned to speak about Palestine but about “kindness being a superpower” and how to be successful “without compromising your beliefs”, something he said students have often asked him about. He added that he had been actively involved with the university, including speaking at an on-campus “fireside chat” with Cuitiño earlier this year, in which the topic of Palestine repeatedly came up – with no one raising complaints as far he knows.

In an announcement about the ceremony that’s since been taken offline, the school had celebrated Elghandour as an “impassioned champion” of gender fairness, social mobility, and “principled leadership”. They also noted his role in the two films about Gaza.

He said he told the dean the cancellation sent a “dangerous” message to students: “Don’t you dare speak up and say anything that you believe.”

In Michigan, the brief remarks about pro-Palestinian activists by Derek Peterson, a historian of colonialism and outgoing chair of the faculty senate, prompted a condemnation from the university’s president as well as some Republican politicians calling for “consequences” and for the federal government to cut off the university’s funding. In response, more than 1,400 faculty members at the university have condemned the president’s remarks and defended Peterson’s academic freedom and freedom of expression, as have the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers.

Peterson said that he had only slightly deviated from prepared remarks he had discussed with administrators and that he had specifically chosen not to use the word “genocide” in an effort to be “diplomatic”. His brief reference to pro-Palestinian activists, which was made in the context of the professor describing student activism on campus over several decades, was intended to encourage students “to see themselves as inheritors of a noble tradition of civic protest and civic action”, he said.

“Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women; we don’t train our students to be pearl clutches who are offended at every speech that they find difficult,” Peterson added. “We’re meant to be training students to be in the public service in a world in which there is injustice, there’s oppression and there’s disagreement.”

He took particular issue with the university president’s comment that the remarks were “inappropriate and did not align with the purpose of the occasion”.

“I see graduations as an occasion for us as faculty to remind our students about what we expect them to do with public education,” Peterson said. “And that is not just to go off and get rich, but rather to place themselves in the service of the common good.”