Today marks one year since LAPD officers raided the USC encampment at Alumni Park.
At least 100 students and local organizers protested the Israel-Hamas war, a moment that sparked outrage across campus and emphasized growing tensions over student protest rights and free speech.
“USC’s unprecedentedly aggressive action towards its students will always be remembered,” a student who participated in the encampment said. “Its continued interest in fascism and the apartheid government of Israel will come up to be one of the school’s many ugly truths when looking back in a couple decades. ”
The student, who requested anonymity out of fear of academic retaliation, said she was glad to be “on the right side of history.”
The raids resulted in the arrest of at least 50 USC students and culminated in the university placing at least 29 students on interim suspension last May, despite President Carol Folt promising negotiators from the USC Divest from Death Coalition that no students would face academic consequences for participating in the protests.
“What stood out to me about last year’s protest was just how quickly USC came out with LAPD. We saw other major universities, like Columbia and UCLA, and it took a few days before those universities called police to essentially take the encampments apart and to brutalize and arrest students,” the student said. “At USC, they were on campus in a matter of hours to make arrests, USC is going to have to live with the fact that they were probably one of the fastest if not, the fastest university to sic LAPD onto their own students.”
The outcome of these disciplinary actions are unclear.
Most suspended students have been at the mercy of USC’s Office of Community Expectations (OCE) since July when hearings began. Some students were told consequences could range from none to expulsion, were asked to write essays about “what they learned” that could’ve been shared with law enforcement and summoned throughout the summer for multiple disciplinary hearings.
In a statement to Annenberg Media, the university said “we are unable [to] discuss individual disciplinary matters due to student privacy laws.”
Following LAPD’s raids on the encampment last April, much of USC protocol and culture has changed.
Last year’s commencement ceremony received backlash after the university cancelled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s speech, deeming her pro-Palestinian views a “security risk.” Permanent fencing, gates, or walls now cover every portion of the campus perimeter for the first time since 1880.
The student involved in the encampment said her classmates feel these barriers are ineffective and a “waste of money.”
“There’s been an insane increase in security, which actually doesn’t do anything – those checkpoints to get into campus are all just for show,” she said. “It’s actually very sad how many of our fellow peers I’ve kind of fallen to thinking that those are actually improving security when it’s not.”
USC journalism professor Sandy Tolan, an expert on Israel-Gaza who was present during the encampments, said the “militarization of campus” has raised barriers, effectively isolating USC from the greater South Los Angeles community.
“We’ve become a kind of fortress,” Tolan said. “All of this together is leading to a stifling of free speech at a time when we desperately need to be speaking out to save our democracy.”
Laurie Brand, a USC professor emerita of political science and international relations and Middle East Studies, shared a similar sentiment.
“The chilling effect that began to be put in place by university administrations and local police forces last spring has only increased and intensified,” Brand said. “The current [federal] administration has made it extremely clear that it views any kind of anti-Israel protest as a form of antisemitism.”
Brand taught at USC for 32 years and was involved with the encampments last year.
The student involved with the encampment echoed this sentiment by talking about USC’s lack of push back against the Trump administration this year, stating USC displayed a “willingness to bend their knee to fascism” and were “willing to throw their students and faculty and staff under the bus.”
“The response to the encampments definitely showed that USC is not an equal opportunity school that they definitely value money over education and intellectualism,” she said. “It’s happening now with USC refusing to counter the Trump administration, they’re one of the few universities that are not doing so right now and that’s also very telling of where USC stands on fascism as a whole.”
Universities around the country face threats to free speech following President Trump’s Jan 30 fact sheet vowing to take “forceful steps” to combat antisemitism. These efforts have manifested in the detainments of many pro-Palestinian international students or faculty with temporary residence in the U.S. — through green cards or visas — by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) .
“They’re being denied their First Amendment right as residents of this country, whether they’re citizens or not, to express themselves peacefully on political or other issues,” Brand said.