Breaking decades of tradition, the USC Helenes will not camp overnight by the Hecuba statue during this Conquest Week.
“The Helenes Executive Board holds ideals of progress, social good and civil action at its core,” the Helenes said in an Instagram post on Wednesday. “It is clear now that the recent tradition of our administration does not. For these reasons, this year, we will not be resuming our traditions as normal.”
Instead of participating in the traditional overnight guarding of Hecuba in the Village, the Helenes will limit their watch to 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Their partner organization, the Trojan Knights, will continue to protect the Tommy Trojan statue overnight.
The Helenes’ decision was made in response to a university decision, allowing them and the Trojan Knights to camp overnight, as long as they used no camping gear.
“In recognition of their legacy of support for USC, the university has decided that these two groups – and these two, only – will be able to resume their traditional overnight watch shifts beginning tonight,” the university said in their statement to Annenberg Media on Tuesday.
This exemption allows both groups to operate outside of the school’s policy on overnight encampments, which was enforced last spring following the pro-Palestinian encampments that occurred on campus. The student handbook prohibits “living, sleeping, or camping overnight” on university grounds.
The Helenes’ statement called out the “double standards that the university holds.”
Senior Vishu Reddy, Helenes director of university affairs and a journalism major, said that continuing the organization’s tradition this year did not feel right.
“To use a privilege that has been extended to us, but that has been used against our fellow students is just something that we could not do,” Reddy said. “We were having discussions prior to that announcement about altering this year’s Hecuba watch, because we really wanted to be conscientious of our fellow students and the events that took place in the spring last semester.”
Reddy said everyone in the organization was involved in making this decision, including general members.
“After internal discussions among the board, we really wanted to bring the thoughts to the general membership body and see how everyone felt about doing certain things, and what course of action our membership felt was best,” she said.
Both the Helenes and the Trojan Knights have been considered the “official hosts” of USC since they were founded in 1921. Over the last 100 years, the two organizations have been instrumental in maintaining USC’s tradition and spirit.
Reddy said she does not take her role as an “official host” of the university lightly.
“We really do hold civil action and social good at the core of our executive board, but also who we all are as individuals,” she said.
During Conquest Week, which leads up to the annual USC-UCLA football game, the historic Tommy Trojan statue and the Hecuba statue are wrapped in duct tape and guarded by students all day and night to protect them from potential Bruin wreckage.
Logan Christianson, a senior studying International Relations and Global Business and a member of the Trojan Knights, emphasized the importance of tradition at USC.
“It’s super important for our organization, especially the members in it, to stay up late playing cards and throwing a football,” Christianson said. “It’s really great USC memories that I’m sure we’ll look back on fondly 20 plus years from now. The fact that the university wanted to take that away was pretty disheartening.”
Getting to guard Tommy Trojan over the years has been a special experience for Christianson, and she said she hopes the organization continues to uphold tradition.
“We do what is best for the university and its students,” she said. “The fact that we get to do this during Conquest Week is just one of the many awesome things we love about Tommy watch.”
Although she said she was glad that the Knights are permitted to guard Tommy Trojan, Christianson feels that the university administration is still being too strict towards the organization.
Through the camera that monitors the statue at all times, university officials have been keeping a watchful eye on the Knights to ensure that none of them are sleeping or participating in prohibited activities, Christianson said.
“Obviously they’ve been a little bit gentler to us than other groups, but they’re still kind of micromanaging and making sure that we don’t break any of the campus rules,” said Christianson. “Saying that the Knights and Helenes are the exception is perhaps a little bit misleading.”
Although the university granted both organizations the exception, only the USC Helenes decided to abstain from the new privileges. The Trojan Knights have embraced camping overnight to protect Tommy Trojan.
“We are more separate when it comes to things like that,” Reddy said. “I’m not entirely sure what their organization plans to do or what their systems or processes are. I can just comment on Helenes, and we are proud of the stance that we have taken.”
Reddy said that the Helenes acknowledged that the circumstances of this year’s Conquest Week differ from the past, and to continue the overnight guarding while other students have gotten arrested for doing the same last semester would not feel right.
“This is us basically saying that the status quo is not okay,” she said. “There’s a humanitarian crisis going on, and to ignore that would just not reflect the values of our organization or who we are as people.
“To go back and do everything the way it’s been done is not what we want to do,” Reddy said. “The world has changed, and as an organization, we have to change.”