Organizers of the pro-Palestinian protests at USC will meet Tuesday with USC President Carol Folt for the second day in a row.
Organizers of the pro-Palestinian protests at USC will meet Tuesday with USC President Carol Folt for the second day in a row.
"The students said at the end that they would not have considered this meeting a victory from their perspective, and I can fully appreciate that,” Folt wrote Monday in a statement to the Daily Trojan, the campus newspaper. “I think we need to continue to have those conversations and I'm glad we all agree on that. We will go day by day.”
The USC Divest from Death Coalition said in a statement that they were “deeply disappointed that the university claimed ignorance of our divest campaign.” Folt, USC attorney Beong-soo Kim and vice president of student life Monique Allard “did not come to the meeting with workable ideas or concrete steps to address any of our demands,” the statement said.
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“Folt claims that she was not aware of our stop-investment campaign until the beginning of the occupation. This despite us launching our academic divestment campaign, Suspend Study Abroad in Israel on April 11 and organizing a strike on April 15.”
Occupation organizers said before the meeting that they would not make any concessions and would “reject any normalization in our negotiations.
Our occupation will continue until our demands are met.” The meeting, held at 3:30 p.m., came hours after community activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, held a news conference near the USC campus on Monday morning asking Folt to engage in an emergency dialogue on campus with students about the protests over the war between Israel and Hamas and the students' demands.
The University of Southern California announced last Thursday it was canceling one of the key events of the 2024 commencement ceremonies amid unrest following Wednesday’s mass protest on campus and the cancelation of the undergraduate valedictorian’s commencement speech.
The school shared the update with students and faculty members that it would not be hosting the “main stage ceremony,” which the university said typically brings 65,000 guests to the school campus.
The university’s safety officers as well as officials from the Los Angeles Police Department increased security around the school after tensions flared during an “occupation” of USC's Alumni Park by pro-Palestine protesters demanding that the university end ties with Israel and Israeli-tied investments.
