USC's cancellation of Asna Tabassum's valedictorian address in the face of prejudice: A betrayal of the university's principles and its students

This is Asna Tabassum. This brilliant young woman of first-generation South Asian descent, who identifies as Muslim, graduated as USC’s valedictorian this year with a major in biomedical engineering and a minor in resistance to genocide.

Then came a flurry of hate mail directed against Tabassum, for being a Muslim - when we as a nation should have been celebrating the achievement she made here in our country exemplifying the right of education for women and Muslims as for all people, that the United States stands to protect as a positive example for the world and that defines our nation and the rights it stands for for all humankind.

Then came the news that rather than standing to support her - her own university, the University of Southern California, would abruptly be cancelling the valedictorian address that she had worked so hard for and been promised. They cited ‘security concerns,’ then in a follow up communicated to her noted that while USC had the resources to keep her safe it is not the ‘image’ USC wished to convey.

This amounts to a betrayal by a leading American university of one of its one minority students, which chose instead to cave into the voices of prejudice that it ostensibly claims to stand against in its mission to its student body. Moreover, this represents a failure of the university’s leaders to stand by and uphold the very principles of support for ethnic and religious minorities against hatred that were taught to Tabassum in one of the very curricula in which it graduated her.

Tabassum stands by the rights of Palestinians as of all people, against their genocide and for solutions that aim for peace - the same principles that were taught to her by USC’s own faculty in her antigenocide curriculum minor. Only for the university itself to declare that it is not willing to publicly defend these same principles that it taught her to believe in and stand for in the face of select voices of public opposition to them. In the end, Tabassum believed in defending the ethics of solidarity with human rights taught in her curricula - with greater commitment than her university’s own leadership.

We cannot stand by quietly as a major American university of 50,000 students - 27% of them international - demonstrates that it will rescind rather than defend the achievements of its most diligent minority students, when voices of bigotry and hatred oppose the university’s commitment to that right.

USC stands in shame today, and tragically its well-deserved valedictorian has demonstrated a greater commitment to the defense of human rights than her own university that should have stood by her in the face of the prejudice it claims to teach its students to oppose and rise above.

I hereby withdraw all of my support for and pending collaborations with USC until this decision is reversed and appropriate reparations to Tabassum are made - and I urge my colleagues to do the same. We cannot support an institution whose leadership does not stand by the support of its students and fundamental human rights.

Furthermore, I propose that another university invite Asna Tabassum to deliver her valedictorian address to their student body instead - as a public statement that the American education system at large DOES stand with our ethnic minorities, our women, and our students in defense of their educational right, and their right to be recognized for their achievements and courageous voice in support of human rights. If we do not support our graduating students in support of these principles, then the American educational system has failed them.