A mysterious USC hoax
Tomo Chien
March 31, 2026
Good morning. It’s Tuesday, and these are the five USC, Los Angeles, and California stories you need to know for today.
1.
In what could be a budding April Fools’ prank, a mysterious website and Instagram profile spawned yesterday to promote a new “Samuel H. Altman School of Artificial Intelligence” at USC. Speculation quickly spread on Reddit and Sidechat, but a university spokesperson said the now-deleted pages aren’t real. Sorry for the buzzkill.
2.
Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will deliver this year’s keynote commencement speech. The New York Times once described the 45-year-old conductor as “central to the civic and cultural identity” of LA. View ticketing information for the main stage ceremony here.
3.
A USC student built a neat website that creates an “optimal” class schedule given your course requirements and time preferences. Likely to the chagrin of faculty, the website uses Rate My Professors reviews to choose between classes, although it does warn that students should only use it as a “starting point.”
4.
LA will install 125 speed cameras around the city by the end of July. The cameras, clustered in school zones and problematic traffic corridors, will issue no-fine warnings for a 60-day grace period before charging drivers going 11 mph or more over the speed limit. The closest camera to USC will be on Figueroa between 23rd and Adams.
5.
Stanford’s conservative student newspaper published a brutal takedown of a campus administrator that it blamed for a “methodical, years-long campaign” to extinguish all fun at the university. “The decisions (and deliberate inaction)” of Vice Provost Michele Rasmussen, wrote the Stanford Review, have decimated the school’s party scene.
