The Torment of the Class of 2024

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 26, 2024

 

The University of Southern California did not have to cancel its primary commencement ceremony this year for the graduating class of 2024. It was not inevitable that the anti-Israel protests convulsing elite universities across the country would foreclose on the commemoration students spent four years eagerly anticipating. The university gave up on its students because the alternative — policing its campus, restoring order, and demonstrating where the real authority lays — was too hard. Cowardly bureaucratic inertia consigned USC’s students to a muted celebration of this class’s achievements, but they should be used to that by now. After all, cowardly bureaucratic inertia had already robbed them of the classic college experience.

 

As was the case at so many other prestigious colleges and universities, the class of 2024 spent the summer before freshman orientation anticipating an in-person learning experience following the ruination of their senior year in high school. But it was not to be. The freshman who entered USC in 2020 discovered in July of that year that their school, too, had rescinded its plan to welcome students back to campus in the fall.

 

“We are now recommending all undergraduates take their courses online and reconsider living on or close to campus this semester,” the school’s message to incoming students read. The disappointment was palpable. But most students likely assumed that pandemic-related restrictions on campus activities would gradually ease over time. Rather, they become even more restrictive.

 

At the outset of the class of 2024’s sophomore year, students who didn’t want to continue with remote learning were invited back to campus. But those who took advantage of the opportunity had to observe a range of hypochondriacal best practices. They were compelled to remain masked, indoors and outdoors, at all times. They had to maintain six feet of distance from all other individuals at the few communal gatherings the school would permit. Onerous Covid testing and self-isolation protocols for the potentially exposed were strictly enforced. “All eating and drinking must take place outdoors,” a letter from one USC law school dean read. “Students are encouraged to take brief breaks from the classroom if they need to hydrate.” Students were encouraged to hector their colleagues who were “not compliant” with these guidelines, deputizing the student body and drafting them into campaign of espionage and moral blackmail against their peers.

 

By the spring of 2022, USC lifted its indoor masking requirement for most facilities — pending the verification of individual “vaccination status or a recent test result as required by the City of Los Angeles.” But as the preservation of the school’s hybridized (e.g., remote) learning programs suggested, the school had not suddenly come to terms with the moderate relative risk posed by the pathogen. Masking was still encouraged and widely observed by a generation of safety-conscious students well into 2023.

 

It was around that same time that USC experienced the early symptoms of the plague of antisemitism that has now descended across the collegiate landscape. In 2022, the Department of Education opened an investigation into USC on behalf of a matriculant who resigned from student government after experiencing unrelenting harassment for her “perceived ethnic Jewish identity.” She was branded “a Zionist” by her more zealously anti-Israel colleagues, and she accused the school of failing to “take prompt and effective steps” to address the hostile environment it cultivated. The school did not take the investigation seriously.

 

At least, that’s what we can glean from its 2023 decision to suspend a professor whom students accused of bias when he allegedly stepped on “a printed list of Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes” amid an event hosted by the “worldwide ‘Shut it Down for Palestine’ movement.” The professor’s fate was sealed after he was shown on video supporting Israeli efforts to neutralize Hamas terrorists on the battlefield — a discomfiting level of comfort with anti-terrorist military activity that just did not belong on USC’s campus.

 

In the interim, the school was rocked by a series of scandals. A former USC dean pleaded guilty to the charge that she awarded a scholarship and a teaching job to the son of a local politician who promised to direct a multi-million dollar contract to USC in exchange for the dispensation. A group of former USC students alleged in a lawsuit that USC conspired to mislead students about the quality of its educational programs by providing doctored data to US News & World Report. Ten fraternities associated with USC severed ties with the school after it imposed a series of rules on Greek life on campus designed to impose discipline on the unruly outfits.

 

For three years, USC managed to make student life as uncomfortable as possible, all while sustaining blow after blow to the school’s reputation and simultaneously cracking down on the institutions that maintain some level of spontaneity to campus life. And now, in their fourth and final academic year, the class of 2024 has spent most of it enduring the endless disruptions associated with the protests against Israel that erupted just days after its civilians were massacred, raped, and burned alive by Hamas terrorists. Last week, for want of any resolve to reimpose order on their campus, USC administrators closed the school “until further notice.” Their cowardice culminated in the minimalist graduation ceremony that will have to suffice for this tormented class of young adults.

 

For the parents who forked over an average of $95,000-per-year to see their children attend this once esteemed university, the experience they purchased their children has almost certainly been unrewarding. Moreover, the ordeal endured by USC’s students is probably familiar to so many members of the class of 2024 across the country. The unimaginative timidity on regular display from USC’s non-faculty administrators stole from an entire generation the college years their elders enjoyed. Students and parents alike must be asking themselves, what was it all for? Was it worth it?