Though New York University contingent faculty’s ongoing strike is the biggest news of late from campus, the institution’s suspect labor practices aren’t the only recent damning headlines: NYU is also attempting to silence its students.

On March 5, Washington Square News editor Leena Ahmed broke the story that NYU has canceled all live student graduation speakers for all of its upcoming commencement and convocation ceremonies this spring.

Ahmed reported that:

Graduation speakers will no longer give live remarks at school-based ceremonies and must instead record their statements for a video, in compliance with a policy NYU is rolling out this year.

Instead, in what sounds like hostage videos, graduation speakers will be “professionally recorded” beforehand… and the “university will now play a video of selected speakers’ pre-recorded remarks as they sit on stage.”

Seeing “speakers” sit on stage, mute, while a video of themselves is played for their parents will make them seem, I imagine, as if they are…