USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum stands by views that got her barred as graduation speaker

The University of Southern California valedictorian who was barred from delivering a commencement speech while accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric said she doesn’t regret sharing her views.

Asna Tabassum told KABC-TV Wednesday that she felt “pride and humility and humbleness” at being chosen to speak — but “very quickly it turned into shock and surprise” when she was told the offer was withdrawn over “security” fears sparked by her views.

But she said she has no regrets over her social media activity that critics say promoted “anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.”

“Absolutely not. I stand by exactly what I stand by,” Asna Tabassum told KABC-TV. “It is the very values and the very lessons USC taught me that I stand by.”

University officials made the about-face after several on- and off-campus groups complained that the biomedical engineering major with a 3.98 grade point average “openly promotes antisemitic writings.”

“I don’t believe it’s ironic for me to minor in something called resistance to genocide, and then speak out on it and then be revoked because I’m penalized for something that people have an issue with,” Tabassum said.

Andrew T. Guzman, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at USC, said Monday that allowing Tabassum to address her fellow graduates would present “substantial” security risks.

“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,” Guzman reportedly wrote in a statement.

Trojans for Israel Vice President Ella Echo objected to the planned speech because the senior “calls for the abolishment of the state of Israel, which is complete antisemitic, and that makes us Jewish students at USC feel unsafe, unheard, and targeted,” according to the article.

Guzman did not cite objections to Tabassum’s activism in his statement, saying the move was “necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students.”

Tabassum said she didn’t buy his explanation, but had little recourse.

“Almost a one-way conversation – and then the next day they came to me, they gave me a call and said ‘It’s unfortunate, but you don’t get to speak,'” she told the station.

Her initial reaction to being chosen to give the address was “pride and humility and humbleness, but very quickly it turned into shock and surprise,” she told the outlet.

The wishy-washy response was also condemned by Rabbi Dov Wagner, who runs USC’s Chabad.

Wagner wrote on Instagram that the school should have denounced her social media anti-Israel activism rather than blaming Jewish groups that oppose it.

“This statement conveys the idea that the university supports the hate speech, and in fact creates the impression that it is our community that poses a security threat, rather than the ones being maligned,” Wagner wrote.

He added, “USC’s Jewish students are now being portrayed as threatening the safety of the valedictorian, and as silencing Muslim voices — when nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Wagner noted that the US Department of State defines any criticism of the Jewish people’s right to have their own state to be antisemetic.

USC faculty member Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize- and MacArthur-winning author, also slammed university officials, saying he was “disgusted and angered” by them – but for different reasons than Wagner.

“I don’t know why any faculty member would attend the commencement and endorse this failure by the administration to support its student and to stand for academic principles,” noting that she studied under USC’s Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielgerg in 1994 to preserve the testimony of Holocaust survivors.

“It boggles the mind to think that she learned the correct lesson–genocide is always wrong–and is being punished for it,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram’s Threads.

In a personal statement shared by the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the “first-generation South Asian-American Muslim” accused the university of “rewarding hatred” and “succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.”

Colleges and schools across the US had been torn by Israel’s war against Hamas following the terror group’s Oct. 7 attack, which had inflamed antisemitism and reignited free speech debates as many students and teachers voiced their support for Palestine to achieve sovereignty as the humanitarian crisis in disputed territory worsened.

Tabassum, who has not been accused of inciting violence, said the debate associated with the violence in the Middle East would not be squashed just because her speech was canceled.

“When people are using this particular issue as a to way to discuss issues of free speech, of security, of First Amendment rights and right to expression, of racism, of hatred, of ideological debate — that’s exactly what a university is supposed to do, you know?,” she told the station.

“That’s exactly how we learn as college students.”