South Carolina State University President Alexander Conyers announced that the educational institution has dropped South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette as its commencement speaker after student protests at the HBCU.

Per WIS, Conyers made the announcement on Wednesday, saying that the university has chosen “to move in a different direction.” After the university initially picked Evette, who is a Republican politician and an avid Trump supporter, to speak at its commencement, students repeatedly protested its decision. Evette is also anti-DEI.

“We are grateful to Lt. Gov. Evette for her willingness to engage with our students and for her time and consideration in accepting the invitation. Our intent was to provide students with a speaker whose professional journey could offer practical insight and inspiration as they prepare to enter the workforce. Out of an abundance of caution for safety and with careful consideration, the university has decided to move in a different direction for this Spring Commencement,” Conyers said in a statement.

Conyers also stated that SC State “will welcome Lt. Gov. Evette to our campus to engage with our students, faculty and staff in a constructive manner at a later date outside the celebratory nature of commencement.“

Following the announcement, Evette, 58, took to X to claim that she was dropped as the commencement speaker because of “credible safety threats.”

“The fact that a speech had to be canceled for credible safety threats is exactly why we cannot give up the fight to end indoctrination and DEI on campuses once and for all,” she wrote. “The root problem is professors who gin up feigned outrage at the detriment of their students, who they should be teaching to think critically. End tenure now!”

Despite Evette’s claim that she was dropped because of “credible safety threats,” Conyers did not make mention of that when he made the announcement, WIS reported. Conyers rather explained that the university made the decision because of “the safety and well-being of students, families, faculty, staff, and guests.”

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On Wednesday, Evette also stated that she wouldn’t yield to a “woke mob” on the Orangeburg campus.

“President Trump, the governor, and I have done more for our historically black colleges and universities than anybody in the history of the state or the country,” Evette, who is running for governor in the Republican primary, said. “To make sure that we’re supporting, that they are an intricate part of not just our country, but our state. And I don’t think that what’s happening here is that you have students who are well-educated who don’t know the facts.”

Evette was also asked to explain why she labelled the students who protested as a “woke mob.”

“Anytime you have people with signs and bullhorns, and yelling…and I am against DEI. And I am a big supporter of the president, right? Those are all facts, but there’s a better way to do things. And if these are well-educated young adults and we should all be able to attend anything and hear opposing views and be okay with that, but yelling and chanting and screaming is what we’re seeing happen all over the country from California to New York. We are seeing it all over. It can’t happen here,” she stated.

Evette further made mention of Charlie Kirk, the conservative political activist who was assassinated at Utah Valley University in September 2025, WIS reported.

“When you take constructive dialogue, which Charlie Kirk was trying to do, and what did he say? When people stop talking, when people stop listening to each other is when violence happens,” she said. “There was always great and better ways to do things than what was happening. And what we saw with hundreds of people coming together, yelling and chanting is a mob.”

She additionally doubled down on her anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) position and her view that college professors shouldn’t receive tenure.

“We’ve got to get rid of indoctrination by professors on college campuses by ending tenure,” Evette said. “I can tell you that I never understood why we had tenure when I was in college. And now I understand it even less because I can tell you firsthand that the best professors I had in college were professors who could argue both sides of an argument. And we as students never knew where their opinions were.”

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