She’s a sad grad.
Four years after her high school graduation ceremony was scrapped because of pandemic restrictions, a University of Southern California senior is “in tears” at the school’s decision this week to cancel its “main stage” graduation following out-of-control anti-Israel protests on campus.
“If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would graduate high school and not have a graduation, get into USC, go all four years at USC and not have a graduation, I would have been like, what? Like, that doesn’t make sense,” USC senior Gracie Flynn said in a Thursday TikTok captioned “just so upsetting and disappointing.”
“We as a whole senior class have never had a real graduation because of COVID first, which we thought was like a one-time thing,” Flynn laments in the video, which has amassed over 2.6 million views so far.
“Now all my roommates are depressed and we [are] all just literally sitting in the living room, like, in tears,” the gloomy grad continues.
On Wednesday, police arrested nearly 100 student demonstrators at USC during tense protests opposing Israel’s war in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state.
One protestor was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, LAPD said.
While Flynn acknowledges that “a lot has been going on” with “protests and everything” on the elite California school’s campus recently, “I just feel like there could’ve been a different way to go about this than to cancel the graduation for a class that never even got a high school graduation either,” she bemoans in the two-and-a-half-minute-long clip.
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In a message to the school community on Thursday, USC blamed the cancellation of the 65,000-person graduation ceremony at Alumni Park on May 10 to newly implemented safety measures, which they said wouldn’t allow guests to be processed in a timely manner.
“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,” school leaders said in the announcement.
The university’s latest pomp-and-circumstance controversy also comes after it called off a speech by valedictorian Asna Tabassum earlier this month due to “security” concerns linked to accusations that she spewed “anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric” on social media.