For Some Students, This Was the Worst 4 Years to Go to College

It started with Covid lockdowns and ended with campus protests.

cap and gown

Their college experience began inauspiciously four years ago. Orientation was online. “Move-in day” was replaced with “stay-in-your-childhood-home” day. Professors and students pretended to be excited about “meeting” each other remotely.

Even when they could finally move to campus, most students found they couldn’t leave their dorm rooms except to go to classes or the cafeteria. Sometimes they got in trouble for socializing, a typically normal and highly encouraged activity for college students. By the time their freshman year was done, the Class of 2024 was quite possibly one of the most isolated groups of students that history had ever seen.

Four years later, some of these students find themselves in new isolating situations thanks to protests related to the Middle East conflict. Columbia University switched to hybrid learning the last week of classes before finals. Emory University saw protestors and supporters tackled by police officers, causing safety concerns on campus.

The University of Southern California initially canceled the valedictory speech but later announced it was canceling its entire commencement ceremony. USC students who were deprived of a real high school graduation in 2020 because of COVID now won’t have a college ceremony because of “safety concerns.”

Who knows if other universities will make similar decisions in the next couple of weeks?

The USC situation is especially complex. A couple of weeks ago, the university said that it was canceling the speech of this year’s valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a South Asian American Muslim with strong pro-Palestinian views. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both 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 risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” USC Provost Andrew T. Guzman wrote in an email to students and parents announcing the decision.

Some student groups have called Tabassum’s stance on the current Israel-Palestine conflict antisemitic. She is said to have posted strong anti-Israel, anti-Zionist information on Instagram. It was unclear whether Tabassum’s speech had been canceled by USC for fears of her safety, Jewish students or the commencement crowd in general.

It didn’t matter, though, because a week later, the university announced it was canceling the entire main commencement event. The campus is currently closed to visitors because of large pro-Palestinian protests. Ensuring the security of the 65,000 people expected to be on campus for commencement would prove difficult, according to USC.

"We understand that this is disappointing; however, we are adding many new activities and celebrations to make this commencement academically meaningful, memorable, and uniquely USC,” the university’s announcement added, “including places to gather with family, friends, faculty, and staff, the celebratory releasing of the doves, and performances by the Trojan Marching Band."

There’s a good chance that most colleges in the United States will hold commencement activities as planned. However, encampments and protests continue to grow across U.S. campuses. (The Guardian estimates at least 40 at the moment.) While most are peaceful, some are not. At schools like Yale and Columbia, Jewish students have felt unsafe. An organizer of the Columbia protest was recently barred from campus after saying more than once that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.”

As college seniors across the country wrap up finals and prepare to accept their degrees, they might try to remember what normal feels like. As one Columbia student told the Wall Street Journal, “You talk to people in generations above us about college and they said you could just gather in spaces and do whatever you want and no one would stop you.” For the Class of 2024, that sadly feels like a foreign concept.