Rising Son: Bovard is a USC landmark, but its significance has depreciated


Shideh Ghandeharizadeh | Daily Trojan

If you’re walking down Trousdale Parkway, you’re bound to run into Bovard Auditorium. You can’t miss it. Built in 1921, it  remains totemic to the fabric of USC’s campus: Its ornate, neoclassical architecture and the statues of philosophers standing on its upper ledges give the bustling University a sense of hushed academia. As a starry-eyed high school senior who dreamed of attending an Ivy League school, I saw Bovard as a representation of the idyllic college, the kind I’d seen in movies, where new students would look down its hallowed halls and think, “I made it.” 

The first time I noticed Bovard’s structural elegance was during a tour for admitted students. My guide informed us that the building was a bit of a movie star: It had played Harvard University on a few occasions, notably in “Legally Blonde.” I took a picture. I’d made it.

I had always been affected by aesthetics; in USC’s case, it was the appearance of beauty and the sense of order. There was a time when I looked at the entrance to USC Village from the intersection of Jefferson and Hoover Streets, saw its manicured shrubs and brick-laden buildings and thought I had reached the mirage. There was a time when I looked forward to game days at the historic Coliseum, memorized the SoCal chants and tracked the Trojan football team’s rankings throughout the season.  There was a time when I looked up at the globe atop the Von KleinSmid Center and at once felt a sense of obligation and belonging, I to it and it to me. There was a time when I heard all the stories and promises about USC and believed them to be entirely genuine and sensical.

What I know now is that I made it to USC, not Harvard. And at USC, you can’t take everything at face value. This isn’t to say I dislike USC Village or the Coliseum or VKC’s globe — they all still make up the school I call home. But I have grown tired of the story. I don’t buy it anymore. I don’t buy the gentrified ice cream parlors or Oprah at graduation or the elitist lifestyle sold by high-society members who speak of “good connections” as tantalizing rewards for my membership in the exclusive Trojan Family social club. “That’s how you move up in the world,” they say. That is the show, spectacular as it seems. 

But even more spectacular — or perhaps better described as sinister — is what happens behind the scenes: The Hollywood movie becomes the phantasmagoria of scandal. The medical school dean smokes methamphetamine. The gynecologist sexually abuses the female patient. And in an exam room nearby, another doctor sexually abuses the bisexual male patient. The aunt from “Full House” pays hundreds of thousands in exchange for her daughter’s admission. We’re witnessing a new Gilded Age, a time in USC’s history when corruption and scandal, power and privilege, is hiding under the cover of lower acceptance rates and higher rankings. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and power-washed red bricks.

So, the mirage truly was a mirage. Everyone has heard the stories. They know about the dean and the doctors and Aunt Becky. How could they not? What used to anger me but now intrigues me is that we remain mere witnesses to the spectacle, passive audience members who don’t raise picket signs or march down Trousdale. Or at least not to the extent they do at University of California Berkeley, where students stand against “the patriarchy” and “the one percent” and “the man.” But this is not Berkeley, it’s Los Angeles, where the temperate air incubates a sense of hedonistic privilege, where arguments over politics and scandal become background noise muffled by the sounds of five o’clock traffic.

And I’ve realized that students, too, are not just mere witnesses but participants in the game of collegiate politics. They want their degree, and by extension, their time at USC, to mean something. Students pay $75,000 a year to see the show, and they want to get their money’s worth. They want to experience the mirage.

At the end of my sophomore year, after I had taken my last final and packed my belongings, I shared an elevator ride with three girls, each wearing a sorority shirt. One of them was excited to graduate but she didn’t plan to go, to her commencement ceremony: “The speaker was some boring intellectual,” she said. The other girls nodded in understanding, and I understood as well: Oprah would have been more entertaining. I also understood that this is Los Angeles and not Berkeley, and that Bovard is not quite Harvard.

Ryan Fawwaz is a junior writing about his identity and relationship to space. His column “Rising Son” runs every other Wednesday.