05/16/2024

Why the White House Won’t Retreat on Commencement Speeches

Tensions must be overcome to improve relations with minority groups

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Even before the White House announced last month that President Joe Biden would deliver one of his two commencement speeches this graduation season at Morehouse College in Atlanta, the prestigious historically Black college was seeing signs of the same political unrest that was bubbling up at dozens of colleges and universities across the country.

But Morehouse is no Columbia. There have been no massive pro-Palestinian encampments, no clashes between protesters and police in riot gear. The tension is there all the same, most of it a bare inch below the surface, and Democrats fear it may erupt this Sunday as Biden dons a graduation robe to address its student body.

Since the school and the White House announced on April 23 that Biden would be the school’s commencement speaker, faculty and students have engaged in an intense debate over blemishes in Biden’s records—not just his handling of the conflict in Gaza and his critical posture toward pro-Palestinian student protestors, but also his policies related to mass incarcerations and policing. Put plainly: All of the reasons Biden’s poll numbers with Black voters—and their intersectional allies—are softening have come into focus in Atlanta, as Biden arrives for a marquee speech at a major HBCU. It’s a microcosm of the fracturing coalition that put Biden in power in 2020, a trend that even White House apologists acknowledge threatens to make their boss a one-term President.

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