“The world is more interconnected than ever before. Building walls won’t change that," President Barack Obama said during his commencement address at Rutgers. | AP Photo Obama to graduates: Building walls won't make world better The president mocks Trump's positions and tells the Rutgers grads: 'Ignorance is a not a virtue.'

PISCATAWAY, N.J. — President Barack Obama used the Trump-sized audience at the Rutgers University graduation ceremony on Sunday to launch his first anti-Trump rally of the campaign season.

Speaking to more than 50,000 people in the state university’s football stadium, Obama did not say Donald Trump’s name, but it didn’t take a newly conferred doctorate to know whom the president was talking about when he rejected “building a wall” and anti-intellectualism.


“The world is more interconnected than ever before. Building walls won’t change that,” Obama said to applause, and he went on to attack positions the presumptive Republican nominee holds, like opposition to trade deals and plans to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

He added: "Isolating or disparaging Muslims, suggesting that they should be treated differently when it comes to entering this country — that is not just a betrayal of our values — that's not just a betrayal of who we are, it would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism. "

Obama also used the academic audience, which included an estimated 12,000 graduates, to deride what he characterized as a “strain of anti-intellectualism” in the political debate.

“So, class of 2016 let me be as clear as I can be: In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. It’s not ‘keeping it real’ or ‘telling it like it is.’ It’s not challenging political correctness,” Obama said, breaking into laughter. “That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about.”

Obama’s remarks were well received, and while the commencement ceremony was by no means billed as a political rally, the president evidently felt comfortable mocking Trump and other Republicans in front of a student body that he surmised “just might be America’s most diverse.”

The president did tell graduates that they, as citizens, bear some responsibility for learning the truth, rather than only reading sources that confirm their own beliefs.

“Ironically the flood of information hasn’t made us more discerning of the truth. It’s just made us more confident of our ignorance,” Obama said. When politicians are “not held accountable for repeating falsehoods and just making stuff up, while actual experts are dismissed as elitists, then we’ve got a problem.”

Obama also amplified themes he first addressed last week at a commencement address at Howard University, including the importance of voting. If young people are frustrated by lack of progress on income inequality, Obama said, they bear some responsibility.

“The reason some of these things have not happened even though the majority of people have approved, it’s really simple,” Obama said. “It’s because a huge chunk of Americans, especially young people do not vote.”

He added: “Apathy has consequences.”

Obama also repeated a subtle swipe at Bernie Sanders, who has called for a political revolution and criticized Obama for making only halting progress.

“Contrary to what we hear sometimes from both the left as well as the right, the system isn’t as rigged as you think, and it certainly isn’t as hopeless as you think,” Obama said. “None of the great strides in our history happened right away.”

Obama’s speech was his penultimate commencement address as president, and it came as a result of a three-year lobbying campaign by Rutgers, he said. His last will be on June 2, at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

In addition to Obama, Rutgers gave honorary degrees to the journalist Bill Moyers and astrophysicist S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The school was marking the largest graduating class in its 250-year history, according to its president, Robert L. Barchi.

Incidentally, one of Trump’s earliest and highest-profile backers, Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, did not attend the commencement exercises for the major state university. Instead, according to The Associated Press, he was at Princeton, watching his son play in the Ivy League baseball championship.