Part 47: A Brief History of Student Movements at USC – From Organizing for Collective Action to Averting Labor Strikes
November 28, 2023
Photo of USC student members of the Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee - United Auto Workers from union website.
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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
Today was supposed to be the day, had the University of Southern California (USC) and the Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee-United Auto Workers (GSWOC-UAW) not reached a last minute deal yesterday 3,000 Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants and Assistant Lecturers would have gone on strike. Instead, after nearly a semester of negotiations, in the end the administration blinked and capitulated to the new union’s demands, the two major sticking points being wages and the creation of a separate grievance system for such workers in the case of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.
USC had resisted the GSWOC’s demands for changes to the latter sphere of issues having not made a counterproposal in bargaining since mid-October. The GSWOC-UAW first organized in February having won by a 93% margin with a tally of 1,599 to 122. Earlier this semester, 1500 students signed the union’s United for Workplace Justice letter with 300 hand-delivering it to the USC administration in Bovard Hall with Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman giving “a powerful speech in support of the Union’s demands,” according to the GSWOC statement.
The GSWOC Workplace Climate Survey “found that 3 out of 4 GSWs lack faith in the resolution process.” These processes separately protocoled for sexual misconduct and discrimination, retaliation and harassment cases are overseen by USC’s Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX (EEO-TIX) lead by veteran campus administration former U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights official Catherine Spear. VP Spear in turn reports to USC Senior Vice President of Human Resources, a lawyer and former University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill official who followed current USC President Carol Folt to the home of the Trojans in June 2019.
The loss of faith and confidence in these processes by USC students, staff and faculty, broadly shared call for new accountability at USC. This wasn’t just another student movement at USC, and we’ll be taking a deeper dive into that, but rather it was the culmination of a long pattern of deceit and disillusionment by the USC administration that has fractured the bonds of trust. When I first started writing about these issues, I knew that I was not alone in mistrusting USC to appropriately handle such cases, but as my own resolution process unfolded following USC’s retaliatory termination of me in August 2022, I knew that the change had come to slow to USC.
It wasn’t anything I wrote, or said, but rather the collective failings of leadership to be responsive and forward looking just as it was in negotiating with the GSWOC-UAW this semester delaying until the very last minute making a concession on this particular clause out of many in the new contract while disclaiming that there are any tangible issues on campus. The union’s new grievance “carve-out” from USC controlled processes means that for the first time there is a collective action possible in defense of community members who have been mistreated, but only if you’re covered under the contract. For those not covered, a system that few have confidence in will remain in place as a beleaguered reminder of how USC has evaded making meaningful changes to restore trust and confidence if it could be done.
“The Tyndall settlement alone could cover every single GSW’s current funding package for nearly eight full academic years,” wrote the union organizing committee in its “Our Fight” statement referring to the two legal settlements, one class-action and one follow-up round of litigation amounting to $1.1 billion dollars in costs that USC has sought to brush off as insignificant to its reputation. Today’s students clearly haven’t forgotten what happened in May 2018 going forward under the public eye, even as the events leading up to that “Breach of Trust” as one documentary by student Mishal Mahmud titled it in 2018.
The union fact sheet notes that the “independent arbitration” process that USC had resisted is already present at UCLA, the University of Washington, NYU and the New School. Rather than having to go through EEO-TIX report, those covered by the new contract. The changes called for allowed complaints to be taken first to the grievance process. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Teresa Watanabe similarly describes how “USC agreed to meet with complainants and their representatives within 90 days of a complaint being filed to discuss both interim measures and grievance resolution.” Plus USC also has agreed to new transparency measures “regarding reporting on the number of claims filed, their status and the duration of the investigation.” Additionally, “peer-led training on preventing harassment and discrimination will also be launched” but this will still only apply to the 3,000 on campus covered by the deal.
Final ratification will take place on December 8. This chapter spells perhaps the first time that a student movement for change, indeed for systemic reform has succeeded in USC in not just securing some limited concessions, but a wholesale system outside at least nominally of USC’s lawyers and administrators. “HR protects USC administration, not us,” says the unions statement, “GSW’s need a survivor-centered grievance process and independent investigations into discrimination, harassment, and abusive conduct.” Whether this high standard can be met is another question, surely an administration that has worked so hard to control just about every possible outcome in every case and pain point for more than a decade wouldn’t just hand over control to outsiders much less a new graduate student union?
This is the moment that USC could no longer resist. When I was a student at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, fellow classmates of mine were among the first to organize for dedicated diversity, equity and inclusion programming under the Students of Color and Allies Policy Forum. Support was gained from former Dean Jack Knott in 2014 who even readily provided the funding to cover the cost of the event at what was then called the USC Radisson, now the USC Hotel. This was not the normative across campus though, and USC lacked even a single dedicated administrator for DEI programming on campus. This came to a head on November 12, 2015 with “Hundreds of students gathered in Hahn Plaza Thursday afternoon to rally against racial discrimination and stand in solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri and other campuses across the nation,” as the Daily Trojan report describes.
At the time, I was new to the USC Office of the Provost. The sound of hundreds of students chanting then Provost Michael Quick’s name could be heard inside Bovard Hall. Quick himself did not want to come out to face the students, so instead he sent Vice President of Student Affairs Ainsley Carry out to speak with the protestors. They agreed to a later meeting the following night with student leaders on campus at the United University Church, which is now being remodeled into a building for the School of Dramatic Arts having come under USC ownership. “I’m the highest ranking academic officer at this University,” Quick said in the Daily Trojan report. “This is the most critical academic issue of our time. I’m accountable.”
The Campus Climate Resolution that followed created some first steps, but not the full demands for a dedicated VP-level official for diversity, equity and inclusion that would not be met until March 2021 with the hiring of Dr. Christopher Manning by Carol Folt as the first dedicated leader in this capacity. In the interluding years, Quick would instead hire-on 3 part time university officials, all females of color, who would struggle with the other duties as researchers to deliver the changes in campus culture that had been demanded particularly by the African-American community. Title IX issues were also addressed, the foundational statute for gender-equity in education nationwide, and USC had seen a great deal of leadership turnover and lacked capacity.
According to the Daily Trojan report, the then interim Title IX coordinator was also doubling as an investigator, “which has led to some cases taking six to eight months to resolve, rather than the federally suggested two months.” There is no limit on how long the process can actually proceed, nor does USC routinely provide promised investigative updates. These problems persist and were the subject in 2022 of anonymous accounts posted on Instagram under the USC MeToo page described as “a safe space for survivors to tell their stories while USC won’t take accountability.” My own EEO-TIX investigation for retaliation and sexual harassment would take nearly 8 months before being dismissed after I objected to the claims being unreasonably narrowed even after an independent investigator, an attorney, was hired to nominally investigate.
In later discussing the matter with an experienced attorney with litigation experience about the matter she agreed, I was probably right to bail on the process after that, nothing good was going to happen and USC clearly wasn’t ready to accept responsibility. USC similarly on DEI would not accept public responsibility after issues became public with its landmark Norman Topping Scholarship Fund. USC eliminated the then program director Christina Yokoyama leading to protests announcing that it would be restructured. After the Los Angeles Times published a story on the matter depicting Yokoyama with three students next to the Tommy Trojan statute on campus my colleagues were irate. Students had organized to meet using the same Radisson ballroom my classmates had received funding for, but this time they were accused of misusing resources to oppose the administration’s decision.
The slow pace of change at USC could seem sometimes glacial. When I started to document the lack of DEI content, support resources, and reporting information consistently on USC’s school and administrative website in May 2022 this won me few friends in the senior leadership even as a few brave compliance staff members accepted the information. They knew that I had done the analysis, and that in the 21st century you simply can’t get away with an effort to prevent such issues so lackluster and poorly staffed. Legendary Mexican American historian George Sanchez said at the time about the Norman Topping scandal, “They show a consistent pattern of trying to do things on the cheap and shoveling money around but not really paying attention to what the students say they need.”
I turned the spreadsheet into my supervisor after having a few colleagues check it’s obvious relevance for improving the Office of the Provost’s leadership in such matters. More scarily apparently, me documenting that 6 USC Schools had no DEI content was disconcerting to them. For weeks after I was fired, USC EEO-TIX under VP Catherine Spear was afraid that my spreadsheet designed to create consistent information for students amidst a bewildering array of offices at USC to report to and ask for help from was threatening. They were worried that I had instead documented their repeated non-compliance with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights Resolution Agreement with USC for the victims of disgraced, and now deceased gynecologist George Tyndall. So I turned the spreadsheet over to EEO-TIX. They in turn after presenting reasonably accurate allegations withdrew them. Everyone knows that at USC, you can be retaliated against, and you won’t be protected, you’ll be outcast and fired.
If you make the wrong complaint on the wrong person because you’re right, that’s going to put you at risk. The atmosphere of fear there was palpable and even as the individual staff members in these units, EEO-TIX, Office of Professionalism and Ethics, the Office of Culture, Ethics and Compliance, and so forth, were quite nice people, it was hard to not recognize that their bosses weren’t always the same. USC could have agreed to the “carve-out” on non-discrimination months ago without breaking a sweat like their peer institutions, but instead they sought to delay in the hope that they wouldn’t have to take a perceived loss of face on this issue. I’ve previously encouraged people to speak with attorney’s in advance of making complaints, and to file complaints with regulators outside of USC, and I standby that advice. While I don’t discourage anyone from reporting, it’s best to do wisely, because otherwise they will target you with zeal.
This isn’t a unique problem to higher education, but the degree of manipulation in this arena and especially at a place like USC is both unseen because it occurs in private, confidential meetings, and because it involves attorney’s. I have to be honest to any student seeking to hold USC accountable through the new grievance process. USC will fight you, and employment attorneys are quite intimidated by them. In fact, this almost seems to be a concerted strategy, while USC is entitled to its legal defense, the dirty tactics they use are almost too much to believe. According to an anonymous July 2020 whistleblower report from an attorney within the USC Office of Professionalism and Ethics under OPE VP Michael Blanton, the office works like a “hit team” to destroy opponents slinging investigation files like dirt and pretextual one-sided letters.
USC loads its investigations to silence its opponents. A university so averse to criticism they would rather further lose the trust of their own students than agree to measures many others have already agreed to after similar negotiations. If the resolution of this matter marks the first test of new Provost Andrew Guzman, a Latino and formerly the Dean of the USC School of Law then it’s a moderate passing grade, a C+ maybe even a B- because in the end USC still caved to the GSWOC-UAW’s demands for a separate system on discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
The big step forward here of organized student leadership, outside of student government, and for the many is an inspiring story, a welcome development, and protections that I hope will soon be extended to all students, staff and faculty at USC who desire them because getting to the mandatory arbitration phase is no small feat. That brave whistleblower attorney who in 2020 dared to tell us the truth about what goes on during these sham investigations suggested we take a class-action approach to litigation. I don’t think that will be necessary, or perhaps I just don’t want to believe it’s readily pursuable. Make no mistake though, change is coming to USC and where perhaps the SEIU faltered in 2016 in seeking to unionize USC faculty, the UAW has succeeded with the graduate students. More change is bound to come on campus, and soon I hope starting with some major executive attitudinal and leadership changes.
USC got trounced by UCLA last weekend even as Olivia Rodrigo adorably graced the sidelines and met with Carol Folt, but even Olivia Rodrigo couldn’t put lipstick on this pig. The same university that just had to wind down it’s nearly decade long partnership with 2U Inc. to offer online education programs that are the subject of litigation at both the School of Social Work and School of Education for enrolling massive numbers of poor, minority students at the same high cost as a campus program could use some singing lessons. Perhaps then they could have heard the music, they were never going to outlast the GSWOC on this issue because the system that they have maintained, profitable and resolute as it may be, wins little with the silence it creates.
“Palmam Qui Meruit Ferat”, can be loosely translated from the Latin as “let whoever earns the palm bear it,” and it is the motto of USC. Well the GSWOC has earned it, and so has the rest of USC, but what will it take to get to a system on this that everyone can trust, whether union-represented or not. The Los Angeles Times story was terse and to the point on USC’s EEO-TIX process, “many students said they mistrusted [it] because of delays and other deficiencies.” They aren’t joking, to change its culture USC must do better, and that includes in cases where say students, staff, and faculty organize for free expression without a union as has happened at the USC Chan Division of Occupational Therapy where many have organized in support of Prof. Arameh Anvarizadeh who was removed from her position as Director of Admissions wrongfully after many years of service after going on pregnancy leave and asking for more time.
USC is better than that, for real. What happened this week is a great big step into the future, but so many wrongs of the past remain unaddressed, more than I think anyone knows. Justice for Arameh, congrats to the GSWOC-UAW on their victory, and let’s keep on changing USC. For some I know that may seem scary, retaliation is real, but silence in the face of such injustices is a betrayal, one that for many years I tolerated and maintained, but no more. The first step toward solving any problem is being honest about how we got here, so that’s why I’ve written this brief history of student movements at USC, in the hope that the administration will stop trying to crush them in the mistaken belief that it’s somehow better serving the institution. More to follow.
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Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.
