By Annette Ricchiazzi / Original to ScheerPost
A few years after graduating from USC, I proudly worked on campus in the office of university advancement, external relations and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In the first of those jobs, I helped plan large university events such as Homecoming and the main commencement ceremony, among others.
For many years, on commencement morning, I was assigned to the president’s office managing the robing of the platform party, which included famous speakers, honorary doctorate recipients and trustees. I planned the beautiful honorary doctorate dinner in Hoose Library, the most lavish and expensive dinner we hosted all year. I helped plan Baccalaureate and other graduation events involving university VVIPs—both internal and external. I was astonished at the resources and planning that went into these events for a group of people that as a student, I didn’t know anything about, and honestly, I didn’t care.
Now, as a two-time Trojan parent—one daughter graduated in 2022, and my younger daughter is going to graduate, one way or another, as part of the USC Class of 2024—I still don’t care if President Folt, Provost Guzman, the senior administration, and the entire board of trustees march in the column to the mainstage at commencement. I don’t need them to be a part of the esteemed “platform party” and I do not want to hear their remarks. My guess is if I could have polled the expected 65,000 guests with the question, “Would you still attend the main commencement ceremony if the president, provost, and trustees were not in attendance?”—there would be two overwhelming answers. 1) Yes; and 2) Who?
The cancellation of commencement and Baccalaureate and what appears to be every traditional event over which the president and provost preside during the days leading up to commencement, are partially due to the delusion that any of us requires their presence. It is in fact their presence that would be the basis of protests and disruption. Protests and movements are aimed at people in power. If those people used their power to make brave decisions, if they were capable of some humility, if they took a step back, maybe way back for some, and remembered their own college graduations, they might recall who and what was important to them on that day. If they practiced radical and resilient leadership, there could be a way to carry on, and fight on, in the true spirit of what that rally call means.
Right now, USC does not have those kinds of leaders. Our leaders have been making decisions first through privilege, then fear, and now self-preservation. It does not take any kind of genius in crisis management—although USC could have easily paid for the best in the world to help handle this situation, or likely has many faculty experts if they had cared to look and ask—to know that there are no scenarios in which our leaders can show their face publicly and not feel the painful backlash from USC stakeholders about the mess they’ve made.
If I were part of the team discussing scenarios of how things would play out during commencement, considering the events of the past three weeks, there is not one where the president, her senior staff and the trustees do not get publicly harassed, booed, and disparaged, and not from outside agitators, but from the graduates and guests themselves. To look further into the future, will there be a single event the president can go to any time soon if USC students, faculty, alumni, parents, or other constituents are present where she does not get called out? I can picture being at a football game this season, the president coming out onto the field for a ceremony between plays, which happens at almost every home game, and participating as the Coliseum erupts in boos and chants of “RESIGN!”
There simply is no scheme where these USC VVIPs—the people for whom the red carpet is rolled out time and again at USC—do not receive harassment and resistance from the people they are in power to serve. This is the real reason why commencement can’t happen. Or can it?
Open letter to the USC administration:
Dear President Folt, Senior Administration, and Board of Trustees:
There is one way to solve security issues, model your “students first” mantra” and demonstrate the kind of leadership that USC deserves and requires: You can stay home. You can excuse yourself out of respect for the graduates and their guests from all activities taking place over the next week. You can allow the reinstatement of Baccalaureate and some parts of the main commencement ceremony while there is still time. You can turn management over to the Academic and Student Senates. You can allow them and Dean Soni, the respected dean of religious studies at USC who is truly dedicated to building a culture of inclusivity rather than divisiveness at USC, to preside over the ceremonies and determine their speakers.
The playbook for commencement is many years old with little alteration. It is built on traditions at USC that go back decades. It can go on. The flags and doves can fly. The trumpets can sound, and students can march with joy and pride in front of their families and friends—but without you. This can happen. You can make it happen if you are brave enough to understand that USC will go on, with or without you. So let go. You can decide to change the narrative about USC. You can show the kind of resilience that you are asking the graduates of the USC Class of 2024 to shoulder because of your poor management and decision-making.
You can demonstrate truly radical leadership by deciding to step back and hand over some power so the crowning moment in the USC journeys for your most important constituent, your students, can happen. You can see to it that the 18,000 graduates of 2024 continue to be part of the Trojan Family rather than immediately divorcing themselves from it out of disappointment, failed promises and disgust. You can ensure that when people look back at how you pivoted to truly put human beings and the values of our great university first, you will be applauded for your courage and leadership in this moment. You can do this.
P.S. Then you can invite Asna Tabassum to your office, apologize in person, and start to build a way forward together. Note: This is modeling resilient, servant leadership. There likely is a very good class where it is taught at USC. Maybe you can sit in.
P.P.S. Just a further note that you are losing credibility about security threats with the latest invitation for graduates to a huge gathering at the Coliseum that doesn’t include a single mention of how you are addressing security for this event, which is now taking place the night before the event you canceled because you claimed you couldn’t secure it. Continuity in the manipulative themes of your communications is something to consider.
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I have purposefully not included any mention of why people are protesting or how I feel about the issues, which are global in size and are at the heart of why students at colleges across the country are becoming activists for various sides. I decided to write this letter after reading the LA Times story on Saturday, April 27 that said, “Even at a time when swelling demonstrations have engulfed campuses across the nation, USC stands out. No other university has pulled its main commencement, and few have seen as many arrests as quickly as USC.” (Since then, Columbia University has also canceled its university-wide commencement after protests that were much more intense and challenging to administrators than at USC).
I have always believed USC was exceptional. I have interacted with enough Trojans over the more than three decades since I was a student there to know that there is something special about the people of USC. Now, we stand out among our peer universities as a place that gives up and hides. We stand out as one of the first to quickly call police to arrest our own students and faculty who were holding a peaceful protest. We stand out for canceling an event that is the ultimate celebration of who we are. This is not the exceptional place we know USC to be and for the first time in three decades, even considering previous scandals, I am embarrassed to be associated with the University of Southern California.
I don’t expect USC to get it right all the time. We can’t solve many issues that go beyond our power to control. However, the events that made USC stand out over the past several weeks were largely within our control. There are a hundred reasons why decisions were made and thousands of opinions. Peel away the opinions, sides of the argument, and even a lack of thorough information and this is an epic failure of leadership that will likely be a case study in a Marshall School of Business class on leadership or an Annenberg class on crisis communication sometime soon.
USC leadership, I expect more. I expect that when you sit at the top of one of the most expensive, most celebrated, most competitive, and most exceptional places in higher education that includes students and faculty who are truly changing the world and could undoubtedly step in and with creativity and empathy solve many of the problems you’ve caused, that you lead with grace, humility, and an appreciation that all of this is much bigger than you.
When you get to the point where you cannot show your face at university events, and in response you cancel them, you must step aside. All Trojans must demand you step aside.
Finally, speaking as a parent of a heartbroken 2024 graduate who deserves so much more than this from a place she has loved, celebrated, worn with pride, and made better for the work she did there, you don’t have the right to cancel on her. You can’t take USC’s exceptionalism, which it holds because of students like her, away. You must stop gaslighting her. Remember and keep remembering like a righteous, nagging voice in your ear— “She is the reason you are here. You are not the reason you are here. She is the reason.”
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Annette Ricchiazzi
Annete Ricchiazzi is the founder and principal consultant of MissionLab
(www.missionlabconsulting.com), an independent consultant firm located in Los
Angeles with long-term clients focused on policy, education, social justice,
homelessness, the arts, healthcare, and philanthropy. She has specific expertise in
nonprofit organizational development and strategic planning, with a focus on leadership
capacity building to drive outcomes for her clients.