New York Post

Grad’s ‘day’ nixed again

First COV, now protests

- By GEORGIA WORRELL

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 antiIsrael 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 more than 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 (above) acknowledg­es “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 twoand-a-half-minute-long clip.

In a message to the school community on Thursday, USC blamed the cancellati­on of the 65,000person 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.

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