How a USC student brought the UN secretary-general to graduation

Most of the University of South Carolina’s 6,800 graduates this weekend will have no idea that one of their own was responsible for landing the main ceremony’s guest speaker, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

But to those who know Cory Alpert, the feat is just an appropriate curtain call to a whirlwind four-year career at USC.

After all, this is the 21-year-old Irmo native who mobilized nearly 2,000 student volunteers to pass out supplies throughout the Midlands after the historic 2015 flooding.

He’s also the sociology and Russian double major who started the “Lead the Way” campaign that helped about 4,500 USC students register to vote and quickly spread to other campuses.

Those efforts – and a few more – come from “just seeing a need and being brazen or stubborn enough to think you can do something about it,” said Alpert, who graduates Saturday from USC and its Honors College. “That says a lot about the way I was raised and the way that all my siblings were raised by my dad that, whenever you see a problem, it’s your responsibility to do something about it.”

Amanda Alpert Loveday, Cory’s big sister and herself a USC graduate, chalks her brother’s drive up to something else.

“We all like being the center of attention,” said Loveday, the former executive director of the S.C. Democratic Party. “That just comes with also being interested in helping other people. Everyone in our family, all four of us, and our parents have very gregarious personalities and have used our personalities to do good.”

Alpert, the son of USC criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert, has done plenty.

He spent his sophomore year in Australia studying how alternative policing tactics affect crime rates and community perceptions of law enforcement.

He has helped organize Columbia’s Famously Hot New Year celebration for years, worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 president campaign, and wrote his senior thesis on how social and cultural movements take off.

Those who know him say he seldom misses an opportunity.

In February, when a group of USC students traveled up to New York City for a student conference at the United Nations headquarters, Alpert landed a spot on the front row.

He peppered U.N. officials with incisive questions and, after the conference, split off from the USC contingent to hang out more with the U.N. crowd, former USC student body president Michael Parks recalled.

“That’s Cory,” Parks said.

A month later in Washington D.C., Alpert said, an official at an organization that promotes the U.N. pitched him the idea of having Guterres as USC’s commencement speaker.

USC had announced last fall it would no longer have guest speakers, but Alpert gave it a shot anyway.

He emailed USC President Harris Pastides directly, having worked with him on the voter registration effort, and got his blessing. Within a few weeks, USC’s trustees offered Guterres a formal invitation. Several weeks after that, the Portugal native accepted.

“It was just a really lucky set of circumstances,” Alpert said.

Alpert still is mulling what to do next, though he currently is involved with a campaign to bring awareness to the global refugee crisis. As he leaves USC, he says he hopes to have inspired other students to run with their own ideas.

“It’s really exciting to me whenever someone emails me or texts me and says: ‘Hey, I’m looking to start this brand new thing that’s never come here before. What do you think I should do?’ ” Alpert said. “Getting to see that is really awesome.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2017 at 2:04 PM with the headline "How a USC student brought the UN secretary-general to graduation."