Student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have escalated in the United States and around the world as civilian death counts in both Gaza and the West Bank continue to climb. Estimates show Israeli forces killed at least 42,500 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023, and another two million survivors have been displaced from their homes. U.S. college protests largely agree on a common demand for their universities to divest from Israel and, where applicable, to sanction and boycott the Jewish state for what they say is an unfolding genocide.
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence reviews the student protests at her own University of Southern California (USC). Lawrence examines the university’s decision to cancel commencement and graduation ceremonies and how university administrations, politicians, and law enforcement agencies are responding to the demonstrations.
May is finally here, and so is graduation season. Across the country, many college students have earned their degrees, and they’re going to be welcoming in the next chapter of their lives, whether it’s furthering their education or finally entering the workforce. While this moment should be a joyous one all around, for many young people out there, this moment is marked by lasting disappointment and ire as pro-Palestine protests sweep college campuses across the nation, and jarring arrests, attempts to silence peaceful voices. These students are getting a first-rate education on the complicity and depravity of their institutions of higher education. And this disturbing awakening will have a lasting effect as to how these young people engage with their educational institutions in the future.
In addition to following media coverage of the student protests, as an adjunct faculty member teaching media law at the University of Southern California, I have had an up close and personal look at at least one of these institutions, and they have failed to properly respond to student protests of Israel’s attack on Gaza. At USC, we watched the university select an accomplished Muslim student who minored in genocide studies to be valedictorian, only to cancel her graduation commencement speech, citing safety concerns, then cancel all the speakers, likely upon realizing that canceling the speech of Asna Tabassum alone wasn’t a good look, whether it was in the court of public opinion or the court of law.
The students, my students, saw this. No matter where they stood in terms of Israel or Palestine, they were angry, and rightly so. Did the school consider how its decision to silence Tabassum would impact Jewish students, that these students would be perceived as threatening or violent? That USC’s decision would fuel further antisemitism, playing into tropes about Jews controlling the world and silencing voices and so on?