Ava Eitrheim, 2023 Owatonna High School graduate, has been living the dream of a warm breeze, beaches and palm trees during her freshman year at University of Southern California.
With finals just around the corner, Eitrheim has been hitting the books and soaking in the last days at school before returning home for the summer.
Unexpectedly, however, Eitrheim’s last day of classes were abruptly canceled following an explosive student protest on campus, trending with the number of Israel-Hamas war protests that have been increasing in numbers on college campuses throughout the nation this past week. The Wednesday protest at USC made national news, with 90 people arrested.
According to the Associated Press, the private college has canceled its main stage graduation ceremony, as its campus is roiled by protests. The university already canceled a commencement speech by the school’s pro-Palestinian valedictorian, citing safety concerns. The Los Angeles Police Department said more than 90 people were arrested Wednesday night for alleged trespassing during a protest at the university. One person was arrested for alleged assault with a deadly weapon.
LAPD Capt. Kelly Muniz told reporters that there was an altercation, but she did not have specific details. There were no reports of injuries. The university said Wednesday it had closed campus and police would arrest people who did not leave.
Earlier in the day, police removed several tents, then got into a back-and-forth tent tugging match with protesters before falling back. At one point, USC police detained a man and put him in a vehicle. A crowd surrounded the car and chanted “Let him go!” and the officers eventually did so.
It was in that moment, when the crowd began that chant, that Eitrheim had stumbled on the protest.
“It all started before I really knew anything about it,” Eitrheim said, stating she remembers waking up earlier in the morning to the sound of nearby helicopters, but didn’t think much of it at the time. “When I had to go to class later that day, I was walking past the center of campus when something bad must have just happened with the protest. Things had started to get more elevated.”
Eitrheim said all she could see was people quickly surrounding a police car where a student had been arrested. Demonstrators weren’t letting the police car move and were demanding the police let the student go.
“It was a solid 45 minutes of them just not letting the car move,” Eitrheim said. “People were getting more angry by the minute.”
Though she wasn’t sure what was going on at first, Eitrheim said she instinctively took out her cell phone and began recording the commotion.
“I wanted to get whatever I could,” she said, noting she happened to be on her way to her journalism class. “I knew I had to capture whatever I can.”
Eitrheim said she had been sending the recordings to her parents — OHS theater director and English teacher Erik Eitrheim and public defender Dawn Johnson, and Johnson said she immediately did not like what she was seeing.
“When Ava sent me videos of the protests she had taken for her media club, I was alarmed. That iconic photo of the Kent State massacre flashed through my mind,” Johnson said, adding that, as a mother, she has also felt concerned about her daughter being able to focus and study with finals coming up.
Eitrheim laughed that her mother was demanding she “get out of there” and go to class, but she admitted she was too curious not to see what was going on.
She did, however, decide to move on and get to class on time.
“Honestly I thought that would be the end of it,” Eitrheim said, noting she had heard the police did eventually let the student out of the car to try to calm the situation. “Throughout the rest of the day, it just continued to go on.”
While in the dining hall, Eitrheim saw on TV a group of students link arms in a circle around the main center of campus, while a circle of cops surrounding them were inching forward, arresting the students one by one.
“That didn’t stop it,” she said. “More kids kept joining.”
As the evening crept on, Eitrheim said she began to worry, as USC is a private campus and the outside doors close at 9 p.m. She said she wasn’t the only one worried about the protest potentially getting violent if people who weren’t a part of the student or faculty didn’t want to leave.
“Officers started to get shields to push people out of the campus lines,” she said, though she said overall she always felt personally safe during the day. “It is kind of daunting to have LAPD storm your campus with guns drawn, but I never felt I was put in danger. I was just worried about the students who were a part of the protest.”
Voice of a generation
While never before having experienced a volatile protest up close and personal, Eitrheim said she was reminded of the small protest in 2020 outside the Owatonna Police Department.
That protest was also trending from a string of others throughout Minnesota, following the murder of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter. At the time, Eitrheim said she was only 14, and her and a friend had gone to see it all take place.
“Neither of our parents wanted us to go. I think they were afraid it was going to be violent, but we snuck out of our houses, because we wanted to be there,” Eitrheim confessed.
What reminded her the most about the 2020 event, as she recorded the one on the USC campus earlier this week, was how she felt like an observer.
“Both times, I felt like an outsider looking in,” Eitrheim said, admitting that her priority of noting wanted to get in trouble or get hurt created distance between herself and the actual demonstrators. “I knew I shouldn’t go too close for the fear of being hurt, or my mom getting mad at me, and to be honest, I didn’t know exactly what was going on.”
The sound of voices in her generation getting loud in the face of injustice does not surprise her, though.
“Across the country right now there are protests happening at campuses,” she said. “And we saw that at OHS, too, when we did a walkout for the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“You also see a lot of mental health advocating going on right now in Owatonna, and all that advocating is from the students,” she continued. “The voice of my generation has just been profound.”
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