Folt’s five years

“We’re really living in the proverbial winds of change every day,” President Carol Folt said, one early morning in March 2023. She was delivering that year’s State of the University address. “Shifting demographics, the need for new foundational skills, the changing nature of work, the STEM revolution … These issues, and war, are sweeping us into a swirl of confusing signals.”

These issues, and war. War, which at that point still meant the Russian invasion of Ukraine, used to be a footnote in a presidential term that was otherwise marked by acute optimism. She frequently spoke of “moonshots,” a “limitless” future. Ambitious titles — “USC 3.0,” “Frontiers of Computing” — headlined initiatives to revamp University programs, to reimagine sustainability, to center diversity. She took pride in rectifying this institution’s horrific past in a sequence of largely symbolic but nonetheless affirming gestures. War used to be on the back burner. These issues, and war.

I write now, on the other side of Oct. 7, not only as a Trojan who has watched in abject horror as the Folt administration’s choices have ripped apart an already tearing community but also as one of the three writers of an earlier profile of the president, published in this magazine in September. I can only speak for myself among those three writers, but in my contributions to that profile, at least, I had operated on a general sense of hope for this administration. 

Of course, Folt has had her own litany of hot-button issues to reckon with: historic settlements for sexual abuse allegations against George Tyndall, a growing movement toward unionization across several sectors, ongoing prosecutions of former University officials named in Operation Varsity Blues. And yes, there were heated moments where antisemitism — and anti-Zionism taken as antisemitism — took center stage. In 2020, the Undergraduate Student Government’s pro-Israel vice president resigned following a campaign to remove her from office. 

The next year, a Palestinian student was found to have tweeted that she wanted to “kill every motherfucking Zionist.” In each of those incidents, Folt issued statements offering support for Jewish students and announcing initiatives — “Stronger than Hate” in 2020 and the Advisory Committee on Jewish Life in 2022. 

But these controversies seemed to be isolated incidents, where a well-timed statement could give the University the freedom to wait out the storm. One could afford the privilege of looking past it all, of envisioning a bright future for this institution despite the setbacks.

There has been no such opportunity since October. For one thing, there is quite simply no easy way out. Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza seems to have no end in sight. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that the “intense phase of war with Hamas” was “about to end,” the Israel Defense Forces issued its largest evacuation order since October, targeting Khan Younis.

Folt learned the hard way that this would not be a matter of simply issuing a statement; after stumbling over her initial community message regarding “the horror in Israel and Gaza,” she stayed deathly silent on the matter for the next several months, perhaps fearing another public-relations crisis.

Yet I don’t feel so inclined to extend any sympathy to the president. The blame for all the chaos, all the confusion and all the anger that this administration’s decisions have wrought upon the community are principally on her shoulders. 

When the Gaza Solidarity Occupation forced Folt’s hand, her administration showed its true colors. When the University decided to rain the hellfire of law enforcement on a peaceful protest at Alumni Park, only to then have Folt backpedal weeks later, saying she regretted not speaking with students earlier, the hypocrisy and cowardice were quite apparent — perhaps most of all to the Academic Senate, to whom Folt had made that claim, mere hours after which the faculty body decided to censure her and Provost Andrew Guzman.

When Asna Tabassum dared to put a link in her Instagram bio, Folt’s administration showed its true colors. When Folt and Guzman chose to raze the main commencement ceremony to the ground rather than let a pro-Palestinian hijabi woman speak, when they chose to hide behind — and stick with — a limp excuse of “safety” that threw Jewish students under the bus and hardly aligned with USC’s own history of hosting high-profile and controversial people, the hypocrisy and cowardice were, again, quite apparent, and this time to the entire graduating class and those who planned to attend commencement. 

As the complaints grew louder and louder, we watched as this University stripped away the mainstage ceremony bit by bit: first the valedictorian, then the outside speakers, then the entire ceremony. It is no wonder that, rather than face the music, Folt relegated the makeshift “Trojan Family Graduate Celebration” to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — a venue so large that any protests would have been rendered a speck — and delivered no remarks.

It’s now already July, and the Trousdale North Entrance is still fenced shut. Security Ambassadors are still posted at the few open entrances, scanning USC IDs. (The University has said it will continue these measures for the foreseeable future.) The @uscedu Instagram account mustered up the courage to open up their comment sections again, and the results are just as expected. Under a bare-bones Juneteenth graphic jointly posted with @usc_athletics — “A day of celebration, education and reflection. Happy Juneteenth, #TrojanFamily!” — the top comment: “Yes, please educate us. Anything in particular come up during your time of reflection?”

Insofar as the Trojan Family is a family, it has become an increasingly dysfunctional one, and it will take nothing short of a miracle to bring us back together. Not another statement vaguely mentioning the “conflict in the Middle East,” not another violent police crackdown in the name of “safety,” and certainly not another embarrassing meltdown over a valedictorian. And most of all, not the tired strategy of laying low again and hoping the whole thing will blow over in time, as it always used to. Rather, I dare to dream of an administration that can look its students, faculty and staff in the eye and say it supports us, all of us, and act like it. That is, after all, what an administration is meant to do. And yet, given what we have witnessed and where we are now, accomplishing that would indeed be something of a miracle.