You may have heard about Rami Elghandour, a successful entrepreneur and Rutgers alumnus who was invited to deliver a commencement address at the 2026 Rutgers School of Engineering convocation on May 15, 2026, which was later rescinded due to his pro-Palestinian advocacy. Below are links to the YouTube version of his speech and the text, which I transcribed from the same.
Here is some background information about Rami and this sad and infuriating story.
Alumni Spotlight: Rami Elghandour, ENG’01 (31.3.26)
Wikipedia post about this travesty
Bravo to Rami Elghandour and shame on Rutgers University.
MAA
14 May 2026 (Transcribed by TurboScribe)
Well, this isn’t where I expected to be. If you’re watching this, you probably know Rutgers School of Engineering canceled my convocation address. A few students were upset that my social media advocacy for Palestine was against their beliefs.
The administrators decided that accommodating this handful of students was worth altering the graduation experience for your class of 1,000 students and your friends and family. They pretend that none of us have ever sat through a speech where the speaker’s presence or beliefs challenged or contradicted our own, like some of your professors, for example. These students have every right to express their beliefs.
But so do the students for Palestine, who instead of receiving the type of institutional backing that canceled my speech, get doxed, fired, and blacklisted. Such is the imbalance of privilege. When Rutgers leadership found out they were on the wrong side of this issue, they concocted an excuse that was as flimsy as it was false.
Rather than recoil in horror at the unconscionable and inhumane treatment of Palestinians, they focused on a tweet. That’s the depth of the moral bankruptcy and racism that renders these leaders unfit for office. They also left the First Amendment in tatters.
This is called the Palestine exception, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. We have free speech in this country, unless you speak up for Palestine. In fact, the Associated Press guidelines outlaw the use of the word Palestine.
That’s systemic bias at work. So here’s my speech, as it was intended, with no alterations. There are just a few bits of irony that I’ll point out along the way.
And I’ll come back after the speech with some reflections in light of this past week. Before I start, I want to thank everyone for their support, especially Rutgers students, faculty and alumni, my family and friends, journalists and principled organizations like IMEU, Jewish Voices for Peace, PEN America, and CCR. So many people of conscience, true Americans, who stood up for what’s right and against this fascism.
Okay, here goes. Thank you, President Holloway, Dean Cuitiño, distinguished faculty, proud families, and most importantly, the Rutgers Class of 2026. I have to be honest, when Dean Cuitiño asked me to give this address, I immediately said yes.
What a privilege and an honor it is to be part of your special day. I then spent the last five months trying to figure out what I could possibly say that was impactful, entertaining, and memorable. Then it finally hit me.
I can’t remember who spoke at my graduation, let alone what they said. So that was a relief. I don’t have to be good, and you won’t remember this.
Now I’m a little worried that you might. With that high bar set, it’s pretty surreal standing here in front of you. You’ve mastered the principles of engineering, more or less, right? So I thought I’d share some principles of life from someone who sat in your seat, rode the H bus on a loop, and survived the RU screw, clearly, though, still getting RU screwed 25 years later.
Back then, before it was named after the renowned philosopher Jersey Mike, this place was called Iraq. But unlike an RU basketball game, you will walk out of here a winner today. Beyond our shared experiences, there’s another reason I feel a personal connection to your class.
Unlike a lot of commencement speakers, I’ve gotten to know some of you already. Earlier this year, I had the privilege of joining you for a fireside chat here on campus. I heard your concerns about the world you’re stepping into, the unyielding onslaught of information, the livestream genocide abroad and alarming state violence at home, and the looming threat and opportunity of AI.
But more than your concerns, I was inspired by your character. Because the number one thing you wanted to talk about was how to align your work with your values, how to build a thriving career and life without compromising your beliefs. So before I could inspire you, you truly inspired me.
And now it’s time to return the favor. You might not realize it, but what you’ve gained at Rutgers Engineering is invaluable. You learn to break down problems and get to first principles.
You develop the confidence to solve hard problems. And you learn to work cooperatively to solve complex problems. That’s an invaluable education.
It’s what’s allowed me to go from engineer to venture capitalist to CEO, from medical devices to cutting edge cancer biology, and from entrepreneurship to film production. The question I’m going to answer for you today is how. How I built on that foundation to make a life I’m proud of.
How I found success, personally and professionally, without compromising my values or losing my sense of self. In the words of Sinatra, I did it my way, and so can you. What if I told you you already possess all the answers? You have all the abilities, the talent, success, love and friendship you will ever have.
It’s in you. You just have to leverage that to build the life you want. If you didn’t catch that reference, it’s from my favorite subject, physics.
That’s right, that kind of leverage. Actually, leverage is the rare term that’s meaningful in both business and engineering. See, you’re going to have to pay attention.
Archimedes said, give me a place to stand and a long enough lever and I will move the world. Life is full of challenges and opportunities. I’m going to share with you some levers to move the world in your favor, and in some cases, tilt your perspective.
By the end of our time together, I hope that you’ll see the world and yourself in a completely new way. Let’s start with the first lever. The price is the price.
Don’t compromise your dreams. Like the princess bride, I’m going to start at the beginning, of my career that is, because it’s pretty relevant to where you are today. Like you, I graduated in a recession and in a rapidly changing world.
It was 2001, the tech bubble burst, and the internet was obsoleting everything, careers included. And true story, on graduation day, I opened the mail and found that the job offer I had accepted months earlier was rescinded due to business conditions. At the time, I was responsible for my family.
My mom was experiencing some health issues, and my brother was still in school. And the market was pretty bleak. I managed to get one offer that summer, but it didn’t fit what I was looking for.
So I declined and applied to work retail at Barnes & Noble. With no prospects, no experience, no money, and serious real life responsibility in the worst possible market. But the price is the price.
Finally, the opportunity came, and it was worth it. I landed my dream job as a design engineer. If I hadn’t held out for that role, I wouldn’t be standing here today.
This principle will guide you through a lot of life’s big decisions. While we make about 3,000 decisions a day, there are only a handful that will have a disproportionate impact on how your life turns out. Those few big decisions are your places to stand.
The right decision moves your whole life. The wrong one does too. And not making a decision is a decision in itself.
So for those career, relationship, or values decisions, don’t settle. Hold the line. The price is the price.
The next lever, which is more of a question, quite literally changed my life. Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed? Jim Caruso, my first company CFO, asked me this question. Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed? Jim got so tired of saying it, he wrote it down on a piece of paper.
I still carry that piece of paper with me today. See, Jim, still got it. You might interpret what Jim said as finish strong, and that’s definitely important.
I call that the 90% rule, 90% done, 90% to go. Because that last 10% of any project takes about as much time and effort as the first 90%, if you’re doing it right. But what Jim meant was more nuanced.
At that point, I was working full time, doing my master’s in EE at night here at Rutgers. And now thanks to Jim, I was studying for the GMAT and applying to business school. And it felt like I was wasting time I already didn’t have.
As an immigrant kid from a state school in a company nobody ever heard of, I just wasn’t sure I could compete. The deeper truth is that I had an underlying fear that if I actually tried my best and didn’t make it, I wasn’t as good as everyone thought. Jim’s words didn’t mean work harder.
His words meant keep pushing even when the outcome is uncertain. Take the risk when fear holds you back. That’s when we fail before even trying in order to protect our perception of self.
That fear of being ordinary, that’s the hardest thing to overcome on the path to reaching your full potential. With that realization, I went in the other direction. I applied to three of the top five schools, no backups, no safeties, and I never looked back.
Doing what it takes to succeed takes conviction, not in the outcome, but in yourself. There’s a saying that a person always has two reasons for doing something, a good one and a real one. I initially declined the CEO role at Arcelix back in 2021, citing my good reason.
The company faced a myriad of challenges and was based in Maryland while I lived in sunny California. My real reason, after much introspection, was that I was scared if I failed, people would think my first success building Nevro was a fluke. I shifted my point of view from a fear of failure to an opportunity.
And that freed me to have the experience of a lifetime, building something that impacted the course of medicine with dear friends. Same job, same Maryland, same risks, what changed? I was willing to do what it takes to succeed. That’s the leverage of conviction.
You take the risks others won’t take by shutting out the fear and betting on yourself. Those become your opportunities to stand. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
It’s my most recommended book and will help you develop this mentality. Speaking of mentality, the next lever is the most trippy, but one of the most important, Be Yourself. That happens to be the title of one of my favorite songs by my favorite artist, Chris Cornell.
Being yourself is about finding and establishing a self that is above your thoughts and reactions. Here’s the breakthrough you need to get there. You are not your thoughts.
Think about that really. If you were your thoughts, how could you challenge them? How could you say to yourself, stop thinking that? Or why is this bothering me so much? Or why did I say that? The fact that you can observe your own mind means there is something deeper doing the observing. That observer or witness, that third layer beyond mind and body is actually who you are.
Conflating your thoughts with who you are is the single biggest limitation to your potential. Not unlike AI, a wandering mind will make things up, and the hallucinations are not productive. After our Marsh Fireside Chat, I received a deeply apologetic note from a student who thought she offended me.
She had shared that she only came for extra credit, but really enjoyed the talk. That’s actually a compliment where I come from, which I reassured her. That it bothered her for days is a great example of how our minds hallucinate unproductively.
That’s life, worrying about what’s to come or regretting your perception of what’s happened. Avoiding that and living in the moment is transformative. But it’s not easy.
Your parents want you to be safe. Your friends want you to be fun. Your partner wants you to be stable.
Your social feed wants you envious and angry. And without realizing it, you spend years becoming rather than choosing. So how do you choose yourself? Once you realize you are not your thoughts, that’s when everything changes.
That’s when you tilt your perspective. You are actually your habits and decisions, not your thoughts, goals, or ambitions. Ignore the noise and develop the habits that allow you to be your best self every day.
Consistency is the most underrated part of success. The lever is being yourself. When you’re not wasting energy, not being yourself, you’ll find your ability will grow significantly, if not exponentially.
Whoever you were yesterday or for the last 20 years, based on the myriad forces acting upon you, is a sunk cost. It doesn’t matter. You’re much more adaptable over time than you realize.
You want to be more adventurous, more outgoing, more quiet, more happy. You have full control to make that choice. I always had it in me to do this.
But I wasn’t always this outgoing, this confident, or this risk taking. I mean, look at me now. That took a lot of work.
That work is in the stories we tell ourselves and others. When I was applying to business school, I had to tell the story that I could be a CEO someday. I had to tell that story to myself, through my writing, and to the interviewers, despite only having R&D experience.
I had to rise above my thoughts, my doubts, and my history to get there. If I were my thoughts, I wouldn’t be here. Separating myself from my thoughts allowed me to grow into my full self.
Being myself meant I was emotional at times. I’ve cried during some of the biggest professional moments of my life, and lots of personal ones too. Often we’re taught that emotions and tears are a weakness for men, and that they render women unsuitable for leadership.
Emotions are an absolute strength. They expose your heart and humanity, and people will not just respect you, but love you for who you are. There’s one amazing side effect of being unapologetically yourself.
It gives people around you the confidence to be themselves too, and that’s an amazing thing. I’ve been wearing mismatched sneakers for about five years. I wear my heart on my sleeve, along with a Mickey Mouse watch.
I say and post what I think on controversial topics for all to see. That’s the leverage of authenticity. The energy most people spend pretending, fitting in, and managing impressions, fearing judgment, that energy is yours to spend on actually being.
Being myself didn’t just lead to success, it’s led to fulfillment for me and for everyone around me that found themselves too. So to reach your full potential, don’t listen to me, listen to Chris Cornell, and be yourself. Okay, the next lever comes from the unlikeliest of places.
I always say four people I’ve never met impacted me profoundly. From Michael Jordan, I understood what it meant to compete and to relish performing under pressure. From Arnold Schwarzenegger, I owe my commitment to fitness and the realization that some things can only be earned through hard work and dedication.
In his words, you can’t buy, inherit, borrow, or steal them. In Leonardo da Vinci, I found a model of being that opened my mind to possibilities that led me across three distinct careers and two different fields. Then there’s Superman, a fictional character that’s had a bigger impact on me than these larger than life icons.
My most identifying characteristic being that I wear a Superman t-shirt most every day. The Man of Steel’s impression on me is literally the opposite of his nickname. For all the power in the universe, Superman’s defining characteristic isn’t his strength, it’s his empathy and kindness.
These traits are so sorely lacking in today’s society, a world where our real life isolation is ironically proportional to our virtual connectedness. I’ve come to define kindness as everybody matters. So much of who we are is based on genetic and geographic luck, like Superman.
He never felt superior to his fellow man, and neither should we. Like Superman, I’ve had a couple of near-death experiences. Well, kind of.
I’ve left two companies as a leader, which is kind of like going to your own funeral. You find out what people really think, and what I found out really moved me. People felt seen, felt appreciated, and felt recognized.
That’s the most powerful thing. So many expressed that for the first time they felt they can fully be themselves at work. For the first time, a female colleague felt comfortable wearing her hair curly.
And another, also a woman of color, shared it was the first time in her career she felt psychologically safe at work. Maybe the most concrete example I can give you is a little hard to talk about. During the Arcelics IPO, I declined a stock grant to make sure everyone else in the company received theirs.
The market was tough, and we can only afford one or the other. It was an easy decision, because everybody matters. And what was the result of leading with kindness? 1,200 jobs created, two multi-billion dollar companies built, a distinction achieved by only a handful of people, with a combined value of $11 billion.
And so many lives positively impacted. That’s the leverage of kindness. Everybody matters doesn’t stop at the walls of my company, the borders of our country, or any other personal characteristic.
Kindness is having empathy for others who may not have a voice. It’s why I care so much and speak so often about so many issues that don’t directly impact me. I’ve spoken up about ICE, Palestine, black lives, abortion, and gender equity.
It’s why I got into the film business, and I’m supporting stories to amplify the voice of the voiceless, like Hin Rajab. And of all these topics, I’ve only received pushback on Palestine. Multiple attempts to censor me or get me fired.
Totally a coincidence the speech was canceled over Palestine, right? But it’s also the topic where I received the most support by far. I refuse to yield because I believe in the cause. And like Superman, I believe in truth, justice, and the American way.
Superman too was an immigrant. I’d like to think we both had a positive impact on Earth. To see immigrants vilified and abused is not just heartbreaking, it’s anathema to our ideals and hurts our country’s standing as the premier destination for talent in the world.
So when we’re falling short of our ideals, by supporting violence abroad and at home, while destroying free speech, I have to stand for those ideals. Kindness is a superpower. What you give may not always be returned, but it is who you are.
You can be extraordinarily successful while making a positive impact in the lives of others, and it’s so much more fulfilling. So if you want to be a CEO, pull this lever, try kindness, the greatest superpower. Okay, I saved the best for last.
If you take nothing else away from this talk, remember this. You are in the business of collecting experiences above all else, personally and professionally. Anytime you have a choice between two opportunities, choose the one with the richer, better experience.
Ignore titles, prestige, ignore everything else in favor of experience. As a friend of mine put it recently, I’ve had four jobs in my life, and two of those were CEO jobs. It’s kind of insane.
How did I do that? There’s a saying that a moving man meets his luck. The more things you say yes to, the more people you connect with, the greater luck you’ll have. That’s the leverage of experience.
One yes in the right place moves your world. I didn’t mention I met Jim Caruso, the guy who gave me that paper, because of fantasy football. I had never played, and the company league needed a tenth.
He was a CFO, and I was the most junior person. We otherwise would have never spoken. That yes changed my life.
I know you’re thinking of all the success, but now I’m stuck running four fantasy football leagues, and I’m miserable between September and February. So it wasn’t all upside. Thanks, Jim.
Another yes that changed my life is coaching my girls’ soccer teams. It allowed me to build great relationships with my girls and giving back to my community. The most terrifying yes, going on my first roller coaster with my then six-year-old daughter at the age of 41.
I was so terrified of those things, I avoided them my entire life. That’s right, Snow White’s mind train was terrifying to me. But thanks to that yes, I have lifelong memories, and I now enjoy Disneyland.
This lever unlocks the paradox of time. The more experiences you collect, the more time flies in the moment. But in retrospect, it feels long and full.
Paradoxically, if you do absolutely nothing, time moves slowly as you go through it, and in retrospect, feels like a blink. Ask your parents about summer days before the Internet. Collecting experiences is in part recognizing that meaning matters more than happiness.
Meaning is contributing to or being part of something greater than yourself. Happiness is short-term drive reduction. It’s convenience, a meal, a purse, a car, a house.
If I get that, I’ll be happy. Buying happiness never works. Building meaning through work, relationships, and causes you believe in is what makes life meaningful.
The more you focus on experiences, the richer your life will be. And if that’s not the point of life, in addition, of course, to being yourself and making an impact, I’m not sure what is. And now again, in the words of Sinatra, the end is near.
A big part of living a full life is choosing the right partner. I talked at the beginning about how a few decisions that will move your life, this is the most consequential. So let’s close by applying today’s levers to this decision.
Don’t settle. Life will throw a lot at you. Choose someone adaptable who can grow with you.
Always be yourself. It’ll always be enough for the right person. Choose someone kind in life’s hardest moments that will matter more than anything else.
And find someone you want to collect life’s experiences with. At its best, life is sharing the ordinary with the people you care about the most. Think about your best times here, totally ordinary.
But that is what made them extraordinary. The world will apply labels to you constantly. It will try to tell you who you are, what you can achieve, which risks are too great, and which beliefs are too costly to hold.
Most people accept those labels. They let fear set their ceiling, and it defines them. You don’t have to.
Hold the line. Be yourself. Make your decisions from principle, not from fear or convenience.
Lead with kindness, and collect experiences like they’re the only currency that matters, because they are. Five places to stand. Five levers to move the world in your favor.
Use them. I was sitting where you are today. I had no certainty that anything would work out.
What I had was optimism and the willingness to find out. And the conviction to do it my way. Now go prove it, not to anyone, to yourself.
Stand for something and do it your way. Congratulations, class of 2026. Well, I hope you enjoyed the speech and took something away from it.
Now imagine how fearful and cowardly they were that they canceled that speech. The word Palestine appeared once, and in relation to cancellation. Hollywood couldn’t have written that script.
The only people who want to bury the truth are those afraid of its disinfecting effect. The reality is they cannot allow someone like me to be your role model. Because if I can be this successful without bowing to the systemic racism and dehumanization, you can too.
And if we all do that, the world might be a more equitable place. And those in power, no matter their ideology, never want equity. Palestine is the moral litmus test of our time.
The people canceling pro-Palestine advocates like Professor Peterson in Michigan, or again, the countless students, educators, and professionals who were doxed, fired, and blacklisted would have canceled anyone speaking up against slavery, the Holocaust, Vietnam, or invading Iraq. All catastrophes by those who wield power. My speech was supposed to be delivered on May 15th, which is Nakba Day.
The Nakba is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 by Zionist terrorist militias. Terrorists massacred whole villages, men, women, and children, like a Deir Yassin, driving the majority population out of Palestine. Many of those who survived are now the survivors of genocide in Gaza’s refugee camps.
Thank you for listening and for your support. I hope you leverage this talk to make the world a better place. We certainly need better leaders than those who abandoned you.
In the words of the late, great Chris Cornell, if you’re free, you never see the walls. It takes tremendous empathy for someone with privilege to care about someone in a different circumstance. I believe in that power and in you.
Let’s change the world together. And one more thing, in the immortal words of Hannah and Binder, with a small tweak, go Knicks, fuck ICE, and free Palestine. Bye.
An International Educator in Vietnam 