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 The freshman who entered USC in 2020 discovered in July of that year that their school, too, had rescinded its plan to welcome students back to campus in the fall.
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