Stanford students shouted ‘Free Palestine,’ and walked out to protest the Google CEO
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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, about 200 students walked out as soon as Photosi took the stage, before he even started speaking. As they left, some students were seen carrying Palestinian flags.
The protest may be against Google’s involvement in “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion joint cloud contract with Amazon linked to the Israeli government. The deal was first announced in 2021 and has been a source of controversy for anti-Israel activists ever since.
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Stanford University has a history of anti-Israel protests during lectures. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Fox News Digital has reached out to Stanford University for comment.
Despite the protest, Pichasi’s speech largely avoided political issues such as international wars or artificial intelligence. The pivot is in stark contrast to the first Google University of Arizona lecture by Eric Schmidt of the University of Arizona, where Schmidt was challenged while talking about AI.
Instead, Photosi focused on the importance of optimism.
“This may not be true for you right now,” Photosi said as he spoke. “The world is dealing with a lot: global conflicts, economic concerns, technological reconnection, information overload, all at once. It’s easy to look at the news of the day and think we’re living in particularly challenging times.”
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Stanford University graduates were seen carrying Palestinian flags as they left their commencement ceremony on Sunday. (Getty Images)
“For me, it helps to remember that each generation has faced difficulties in its own way,” he continued. “We can’t choose the world we end up in, but we can choose how we organize our circumstances.”
Photosi was not the first speaker students protested at Stanford University. Graduates walked out again last year when commencement speaker Katie Ledecky protested the school’s “participation” in Israel’s war with Gaza.
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Anti-Israel protesters storm the Stanford University president’s office in 2024. (AP Photo/Nic Coury)
In 2024, students again protested the university’s then-president, Richard Saller, and held their own “People’s Commencement” event to “honor Palestine.”
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Stanford was one of several major universities that became controversial over what many saw as a lack of anti-Israel protesters on campus. In 2024, more than a dozen activists entered the offices of Stanford University’s president and provost, vandalizing the exterior of the building.
