USC: The university of lockdown

Last spring, after 93 protesters of conscience were arrested on the University of Southern California’s campus, and students and faculty were threatened with civil and academic sanctions, USC President Carol Folt seemed to be searching for a way out.

“What we’re really trying to do now is de-escalate,” Folt told the USC Academic Senate in May, as faculty pressed her on why she called in a heavily armed Los Angeles police force to quell peaceful student protests and dismantle their encampment.

She also claimed she would have “gone out there” herself before the police raid. The encampment was a two-minute walk from her office. Had she made the short stroll, she could have learned firsthand about the nature of the encampment: a peaceful, interfaith gathering of students and faculty to bear witness to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Regular encampment activities included yoga, meditation, teach-ins, Black-Palestinian solidarity sessions, and regular Seders during Passover.  But our president didn’t make that walk. “I don’t know why I didn’t,” she told the Academic Senate. “I regret that.”

USC’s actions since then bely Folt’s words. Like many other universities nationwide in the era of Gaza solidarity, our administrators are doubling down on repressive measures.

After the protests last spring, USC security, sometimes accompanied by off-duty police officers trained in “crowd management operations”, maintained a tight ring around campus. This fall, they have “welcomed” new students with metal bars, security checkpoints, bag checks and mandatory ID scans.

The university administration has also raised the pressure on students and faculty facing sanctions, sending threatening letters and calling them in for disciplinary hearings. Students have been made to write “reflection papers” expressing their remorse and a statement of “what you’ve learned” before any sanctions can be dropped.

“How did your actions affect other university community members and their scheduled activities in the affected spaces?” asked one redacted letter from the Orwellian-sounding USC’s Office of Community Expectations. “Please share how you might make different decisions in the future and expand on your rationale.”

In a typical sunny USC fashion, the draconian restrictions – “fast lanes”, “welcome service tents” and additional open gates – have been sold as conveniences. But make no mistake: our campus is on lockdown, “for the foreseeable future”, according to a campus-wide email. In other words: don’t expect a return to a more open campus any time soon – if ever. The reason? “Security on campus remains our top priority.”

So much for the olive branch.

USC is hardly the only campus faced with roiling decisions on how to contend with protest encampments and the passions of conflicting narratives on Israel-Palestine. A few, like San Francisco State University, have listened to their protesters and decided to divest from companies that profit from weapons production. Others, like Wesleyan, have facilitated conversations between student protesters and the university’s board of trustees.  Most have cracked down.

George Washington University has suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Indiana University and the University of South Florida have banned tents on campus without prior approval. The University of Pennsylvania has banned encampments. Columbia University now uses a colour-coded system to restrict campus access.

Some 100 US college campuses have implemented more restrictive rules governing protests on campus. And the atmosphere for free expression is worse than ever, especially at top universities, according to a recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Of 251 universities surveyed, USC was 245th, with a “very poor” rating. Even worse, earning an “abysmal” label, were New York University, Columbia, and, dead last, Harvard.

USC may not have “beat” Harvard in suppressing free speech, but it has surpassed all its “competitors” in turning the campus into a fortress. Nothing could be more antithetical to a college campus and its culture of openness and inquiry.

Now, every day we walk onto campus, we are forced to contend with a disturbing securitised environment. “Fast lanes” and “welcome tents” don’t help. They only increase the sense that we are under surveillance; that every time we go to campus, it’s like we’re at the airport, under the watchful eye of the Transportation Security Administration.

Just as disturbing is the message USC is sending to the surrounding community of South LA. “Compared to the long history of USC, where we placed pride in our integration with the surrounding community, access is severely constricted by the lines at the ‘welcome tents’, by the hesitation of guests to come and visit, by the seemingly arbitrary secondary security screenings that those whom the ‘welcomers’ have profiled are then subjected to,” the USC chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote to President Folt in August.

This is to say nothing of the effect the militarised presence has on students of colour, who may already feel marginalised in a predominantly white university. “They haven’t come to understand why we were there in the first place,” student León Prieto told Annenberg Media last month. “I don’t really see USC the same. I just don’t feel like I belong here.”

Over the years, the scandals that have plagued USC – a medical school dean doing drugs in hotel rooms with young companions, one of whom overdosed; a gynaecologist accused of sexual misconduct against hundreds of USC women; the “Varsity Blues” fraud and money-laundering debacle; the university’s opaque, bunkered response to these scandals – have often made it hard to be a proud Trojan.

But for me, nothing exceeds the shame and revulsion I feel about the events of the last five months: the violent arrest of our own students, subsequent charges against them for trespassing on their own campus, harsh academic sanctions, and the apparently permanent lockdown of our campus.

It is hard to escape the feeling that USC’s security-led administrators – and other college presidents, for that matter – were waiting for a crisis in order to administer their harsh tonic to our community. In her transformative book, The Shock Doctrine, social critic Naomi Klein wrote that “once a crisis has struck”, crisis agents find it “crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change”.

The transformation of USC’s campus is a microcosm of Klein’s sweeping doctrine: a kind of a laboratory for what a privatised, hardened perimeter, fortified by outside security agencies, can look like.

You can bet that other university presidents are keeping a close watch on USC’s experiment, to see if this kind of repression can stand.

At the centre of USC’s security-first ethos is Erroll Southers, vice president for safety and risk assurance, a former FBI agent and president of the Los Angeles Police Commission. The Commission oversees the LAPD, the very riot-ready force trained by Israel that stormed our peaceful student encampments last spring.

Southers is also the author of the book Homegrown Violent Extremism. In a report for USC’s Homelands Security Center, he warned that extremist indicators include strong identification “with Muslims perceived as being victimized (Palestinians, Iraqis…)” and harbouring “a grievance (such as perceived injustice or victimization) and associated anger directed at the United States”.

This perfect storm shows how high the deck is stacked against students trying to raise consciousness against Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza. Simply put, our university’s security apparatus is pre-disposed to seeing them as a threat.

If that weren’t bad enough, expect no pressure for reform from USC’s wealthy Board of Trustees. The board includes developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, the billionaire host of Los Angeles-based pro-Israel galas, who backed USC’s actions last spring, and far-right billionaire Miriam Adelson, an Israeli American who wants Israel to annex the West Bank.

In the face of universities’ institutional wealth and power, it has fallen to university faculty to defend vulnerable students, to remind the USC leadership of the values of openness and inquiry it claims to represent, and to ask: How does USC square its shuttered, hermetic, security-driven culture with its proclamations of academic freedom and “unifying values” to “stand up for what is right, regardless of status or power”?

There’s still time for President Folt – for college presidents across the US – to walk all this back. Drop all sanctions against our students, defend free expression, and open our campuses again. It is not too late to see the enormous damage being done and reverse course. Not doing so would solidify the role of universities as repressive spaces where freedom of expression and inquiry are unwelcome.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.