The first thing that told me this wouldn’t be just any graduation ceremony was the plane circling above our heads before we even got through the gates. You know the type: the single-seater that flies over football stadiums on gameday, pulling a giant banner and promoting a business.

Or a cause, in this case. The banner read, “WE STAND WITH ISRAEL,” which was followed by a big red heart, which was followed by a clever swipe at every social justice warrior in the stadium below: “JEWISH LIVES MATTER.”

It could’ve been worse, I suppose. After all, the filthy leftist Jew-hating rabble could’ve caused the event to be canceled — like at Columbia, or at Southern Cal. Instead, I was treated to the pomp of a graduation ceremony at the University of Michigan’s storied 107,601-seat football stadium; treated to what I imagine was the proudest day of thousands of young people’s lives — including the life of a particular young lady who’s much smarter and harder-working than her old man ever was.

It was no surprise that Michigan’s spring commencement would be singled out by The Mob. Michigan’s student body is approximately 15% Jewish and therefore is a target-rich environment for the pro-Hamas hordes that had long since set up a protest camp in the center of the campus, there on the diag, there to intimidate Jewish students and to denounce the tiny Middle East parcel of Jewish homeland and all those Jews and non-Jews who believe in its fundamental right to exist.

The graduation ceremony itself started smoothly enough, but then, during Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro’s presentation of ROTC grads, what seemed like 30-or-so pro-Hamas graduates, decked in their kaffiyehs and sporting their Palestinian flags, stood up en masse and formed up in the center aisle amid their fellow graduates and began to shout: “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!”

They rotated other sophomoric chants into their presentation, and they yelled “Intifada!” and called for the university to divest itself from Israel. But some in the crowd felt emboldened enough to exercise their own First Amendment rights (language warning):

Protesters interrupt University of Michigan’s graduation ceremony.

Students respond by chanting “Shut the f*ck up!” pic.twitter.com/y6Y0BseDq7

— OutKick (@Outkick) May 4, 2024

There’s no telling how long the mob would’ve stayed right there, right in the midst of everything, chanting and shouting and disrupting and eliciting jeers and boos and the occasional obscenity from their fellow graduates. But then they overplayed their hand and started moving toward the stage. That’s when they were intercepted by the Michigan State Police, an action that brought a roar from the crowd. The cops then escorted The Mob to the very back, to the far endzone on the opposite end of the stage, where they stayed for the duration of the ceremony. And I’ll say this about these Jew-hating true believers: They were energetic. There wasn’t a moment during the entire ceremony when they weren’t chanting and shouting and gesticulating.

As it turned out, they had an uphill struggle. The Big House was full of folks who weren’t much interested in their protest, and there was a distinctly Jewish flavor within the commencement agenda itself. This included remarks by U of M Regent Mark Bernstein and an outstanding commencement address from a friend of Bernstein’s and a fellow U of M graduate, author Brad Meltzer, whom Bernstein called “a real mensch through and through,” or some such. “The world needs more empathy, more humility, and certainly more decency,” said Meltzer in a fleeting fit of understatement that could’ve been aimed directly at the protesters.

The ceremony also included remarks from Tom Braun, a faculty representative who spoke about his graduating daughter’s bat mitzvah and the Old Testament’s Tower of Babel story. Take that, rabble.

It was around this time that I noticed another plane circling above, but this one had a different message: “DIVEST FROM ISRAEL NOW! FREE PALESTINE!” Its pilot must’ve overslept because his pro-Jewish counterpart had been circling the stadium long before the ceremonies had started. Now, the two of them circled the stadium on opposite sides of a giant loop. One young man who couldn’t have cared less about Middle East politics pondered the same weird thoughts as me: What if those two planes had a dogfight up there, or played a game of aerial chicken?

In the end, the protesters lost, and the graduates and their friends and families won. Try as they might, The Mob didn’t sufficiently disrupt the ceremonies, and I don’t think their classless behavior won them any friends or influenced any people.

But, in a way, the University of Michigan also lost. The administration had plenty of time to prepare for and counteract the disruption but instead chose a more cowardly and accommodating course: to let the tyranny of the few disrupt the otherwise memorable moment of the many. And in that sad sense, they were anything but Victors Valiant.

POSTSCRIPT: Our Mark Alexander takes a deeper dive into what might be animating the pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses across the country.

Updated with a quote from Brad Meltzer and a link to Mark Alexander’s essay on The Narcissist Generation.