The University of Southern California has announced it has canceled plans for a commencement speech by this year’s valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, who is Muslim. The school said the decision stemmed from security concerns based on emails and other electronic communications warning of a plan to disrupt commencement, including at least one targeting Ms. Tabassum.
“Over the past few days, the debate over the choice of our valedictorian has taken on a troubling tenor,” said Andrew T. Guzman, the professor, who added that he had made the final decision to choose Ms. Tabassum. “The intensity of emotion, fueled both by social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial security risks and disruption to the authority ».
But the university declined Tuesday to provide details on where the communications came from or whether it was under criminal investigation. And her decision followed complaints about Ms. Tabassum’s selection by two pro-Israel groups on campus that cited her social media support for the Palestinians.
Ms. Tabassum, a biomedical engineering major who identified herself as a first-generation South Asian American, could not be reached for comment. But in a statement, he criticized the decision.
“I am so shocked by this decision and deeply disappointed that the university is succumbing to a campaign of hate aimed at silencing my voice,” Ms. Tabassum wrote, adding, “There are serious doubts as to whether USC’s decision to withdraw my invitation to speak. it is done solely on the basis of safety.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, also condemned the decision to cancel the speech as “cowardly” and called on USC to retract it.
The commencement speeches could be the next point of contention in the free speech debate that has engulfed many universities since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. University officials have had to navigate heated debates over pro-Palestinian student protests, which many Jewish students and alumni say often veer toward anti-Semitism. Protesters say the pushback is an attempt to censor their political beliefs.
But Dr. Guzman, while acknowledging that the decision to cancel the speech broke with university tradition, said: “To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with free speech. There is no right to free speech to speak in the first place.”
Erroll Southers, who oversees security for USC, said in an interview that the decision followed a barrage of communications threatening the upcoming graduation ceremonies.
“No one could ever recall these kinds of complaints coming to us,” said Dr. Souters, associate senior vice president for security and risk assurance. “They had identified our priest. They were significant in terms of the specificity of the person, the event, signifying our initiation and their intent to disrupt our initiation.”
Dr Southers said it had not been decided whether Ms Tabassum would be allowed to sit on the dais during the ceremonies.
USC announced April 5 that Ms. Tabassum, who is from Chino Hills, Calif., would be the valedictorian of 2024. She was chosen from more than 200 students who met the academic qualifications — a grade point average of at least 3.98. From this pool, a selection committee of faculty members evaluated more than 100 candidates.
Ms. Tabassum’s selection announcement cited her volunteer work with nonprofit organizations in the Los Angeles area, including a mobile blood pressure clinic that visits homeless shelters and a group she co-founded that distributes medical supplies to areas in need throughout the world.
Shortly after the announcement, a campus group known as Trojans for Israel issued a statement saying Ms. Tabassum “openly peddles anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” She cited her social media bio as including a link to a page calling Zionism a “settler-colonial racist ideology.” A similar complaint came from the campus chapter of Chabad. The organizations urged the university to reconsider the selection of Ms Tabassum.
Anuj Desai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, suggested that Ms. Tabassum could have legal grounds to sue, particularly in light of the California law that upholds students’ First Amendment rights.
“If the reason she’s being removed is because of her views, then that looks a lot more like a free speech problem,” he said. “Normally we’d say, beef up the security.”
But Mr. Desai said the university could be justified in shutting down her speech if it learned that Ms. Tabassum planned to use the address as a forum, as graduation speakers sometimes do, to discuss their anger over issues of the day.
“They might reasonably say we don’t want to talk about the Middle East — we’re not pro-Palestinian and we’re not pro-Israel,” he said.
In a similarly controversial decision, the New York University School of Law suspended a tradition in which students choose their commencement speaker. That decision, first reported by The Forward, followed last year’s speech when Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a graduating law student originally from Yemen, attacked the New York City police and called on her classmates to fight against “ capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism. “
The CUNY Board of Trustees called the remarks “hate speech,” and Hunter College raised concerns about a plan to hold CUNY Law’s 2024 commencement ceremony on the Hunter campus in May. Instead, the law school announced that the ceremony would take place at the Apollo Theater.
