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Hundreds of Stanford University students were seen walking out of their commencement ceremony on Sunday in protest of their speaker, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
According to local reports, around 200 students walked out as soon as Pichai took the stage, before he even began to speak. During the walkout, some students were seen holding Palestinian flags.
The protest was likely against Google’s involvement in “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion joint cloud contract with Amazon connected with the Israeli government. The deal was first announced in 2021 and has drawn controversy from anti-Israel activists since then.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Stanford University for comment.
Despite the protest, Pichai’s speech largely avoided political issues such as international wars or artificial intelligence. The pivot sharply contrasted with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s University of Arizona commencement speech last month, where Schmidt was booed while addressing AI.
Instead, Pichai focused on the importance of optimism.
“This might not ring true to you at this moment,” Pichai said during his speech. “The world is going through a lot: global conflicts, economic anxiety, a rewiring of technology, information overload, all at a fast pace. It’s easy to look at the news of the day and think that we’re living in uniquely challenging times.”
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“For me, it’s helpful to remember that each generation has faced hardship in their own way,” he continued. “We don’t get to choose the world we graduate into, but we do get to choose how we frame our circumstances.”
Pichai was not the first commencement speaker that students have protested at Stanford University. Graduates also walked out last year during commencement speaker Katie Ledecky’s speech to protest the school’s alleged “complicity” in Israel’s war against Gaza.
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In 2024, students also protested then-university president, Richard Saller, and held their own “People’s Commencement” ceremony to “honor Palestine.”
Stanford was one of several major universities that came under controversy for what many considered a lackluster response to anti-Israel protesters on campus. In 2024, more than a dozen agitators occupied the offices of Stanford University’s president and provost, vandalizing the outside of the building.
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