National Endowment for the Arts Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, who was also deprived of the chance to receive an honorary degree on the main stage, is scheduled to deliver a May 10 keynote speech to graduates of the USC Price School of Public Policy.

Via an NEA spokeswoman, Price declined an interview request.

Actor and activist Sean Penn will also still give a May 11 address to graduates of the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, according to his representative.

The last time the main USC commencement was canceled was in 2020 after the start of the pandemic. Those graduates participated in online and in-person ceremonies the next year, along with the Class of 2021.

“This is a rather unusual commencement, to put it in obvious terms,” said Donal Manahan, a USC biologist who has been the university marshal for the main stage ceremony since 2016. “It’s the whole country going through it.”

The saga at USC began on April 15, when Provost Andrew T. Guzman released a campus-wide letter citing unnamed threats that came after the university announced Tabassum as the valedictorian and a scheduled speaker. Guzman said the attacks were of an “alarming tenor” and “escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement.”

Guzman did not say what the threats were or who was targeted. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department told The Times that the agency had no crime reports regarding violent threats targeting Tabassum or the commencement ceremony.

The complaints focused on a link on Tabassum’s Instagram profile to a pro-Palestinian website that said, “Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology,” and, “One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel” so that “both Arabs and Jews can live together.”

Tabassum has denied she supports antisemitic views and said she is being singled out as a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.

Then last Friday, USC called off an appearance by Chu — the director of “Crazy Rich Asians” — and other commencement honorees. In canceling those events, USC cited “the highly publicized circumstances surrounding our main stage commencement program.”

In an interview prior to Thursday’s announcement of the main stage cancellation, Joel Curran, USC’s senior vice president of communications, said the decision about Chu and honorary degree recipients was done in order to avoid putting them “in an awkward situation” to address the valedictorian controversy or the Israel-Hamas war.

“We are putting them in an awkward situation, difficult situation. There have been a lot of conversations around commencement. We do not want to put them in that position,” Curran said.

USC is one of dozens of colleges and universities where tensions have grown in recent weeks over free speech and protest over the Israel-Hamas war, including Columbia, Yale, UC Berkeley and Cal Poly Humboldt.

In its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people and took roughly 240 hostages. Gaza health authorities say Israel’s retaliatory war has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians. According to the United Nations, 2 million Gazans are living in near-famine conditions.

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