After months of student opposition, USC has said it will not renew its contract with the U.S. Navy.
By Jackson Mills
Daily Trojan photo byyKaijel Mairena
USC will end its cadaver contract with the U.S. Navy on Sept. 24, according to a statement from the Keck School of Medicine to Annenberg Media. USC Keck School of Medicine will stop selling corpses to the U.S. Navy for Israeli military training. , Under the contract, for over five yearUSC previously sold to the US Navy dead bodies, that were used to train Israeli military medical personnel .
In the statement, the Keck School of Medicine wrote that it is not ending the contract because of recent protests – which were sparked by ongoing Annenberg Media revealing the details. The contract will not be renewed solely because UC San Diego said it would no longer provide bodies for the program. USC did not respond to follow-up questions and said they would not comment further.
Previous reporting by Annenberg Media revealed that UCSD supplied bodies to USC that were used for the military training program. Under the 2016 contract, USC paid UCSD a $2,900 allocation fee for each body. Newly obtained documents by Annenberg Media showed that as recently as October 2025, UCSD had quoted USC up to $4,205 per whole unembalmed body, along with transportation costs.
The Keck School of Medicine also wrote that “USC did not profit off donated bodies provided through UCSD. The Navy was charged at cost for obtaining bodies, plus fees for our surgeon expertise and oversight, the time of skilled technicians, and marginal overhead cost.”
USC earned over $1 million through the contract.
A spokesperson from the University of California Health Communications team wrote to Annenberg Media that the school decided to stop supplying bodies to USC’s program due to the surgical skills laboratory not meeting the “UC standard requiring that courses involving human remains be conducted in facilities specifically designed and maintained for human surgical education and training.”
UC Health did not respond to Annenberg Media’s follow-up questions about what changes USC made that did not meet the UC standard cited in the statement in time for publication.
The Keck School of Medicine also wrote that “no bodies donated to USC’s Anatomical Gift Program were used to train IDF healthcare professionals.”
On the website for the Anatomical Gift Program, there was previously no indication of what bodies could be used for after donation. Families who had donated the bodies of relatives to the program were given no indication that their bodies could be used by the U.S. Navy. Some families were only made aware of the possibility after reporting by Annenberg Media and The UCSD Guardian.
USC added a new section on its FAQ page on the Anatomical Gift Program website to state that donors’ bodies may be used for a variety of reasons, and that “such uses may be conducted by USC and/or by USC’s educational, research, healthcare, governmental, or industry partners in accordance with applicable law and USC policy.”
On Sept. 15, a student raised a question to USC President Beong-Soo Kim about the cadavers program at an Open Dialogue Project event. When the student said that the event felt hypocritical given the university’s contract with the U.S. Navy, Kim stated, “Let’s have another dialogue event, and then we can have the rational full conversation about it.” He added, “So, let’s do that. I welcome it.”
The Keck School of Medicine also wrote in its statement that the event would not be happening. The statement read that students raising concerns over the contracts “refused to participate in a public conversation about the facts of this matter” and that the “Keck School of Medicine would have been happy to engage in a rational and fact-based dialogue with these students.”
Annenberg Media confirmed from members of both USC Students for Justice in Palestine and the Open Dialogue Project student advisory board that there was a conversation between the groups, but SJP refused because members did not believe that “genocide profiteering” was a topic to be debated.
In a statement to Annenberg Media, SJP wrote that members are “thrilled” that the contract has ended, but don’t see this as the end of demands to USC.
“We want to emphasize that this is just one step. USC-SJP has been organizing to demand a divestment from death on our campus long before we even knew of this horrifying contract. There is still far more work ahead,” the statement read.
“This is no congratulations to our admin or the Keck School. The end to this contract is many years overdue. Our voices have been continuously disrespected and suppressed through a closed campus and comically overbearing police presence.”
Students have actively opposed the cadaver contracts for months, including students at the Keck School of Medicine. The students who sent a letter to Keck Dean Carolyn C. Meltzer in April said that Keck previously refused to host a town hall over the cadaver contracts.
On Wednesday morning, Meltzer sent an email to Keck medicine students informing them that the cadaver contracts with the U.S. Navy will end.
In a statement to Annenberg Media, a Keck medicine student who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation said that there is much still unknown about why the contract was ended, as well as concern for the Keck School of Medicine’s justification.
“Considering the tone of the announcement, it seems this was not a change in conscience on the part of USC,” the statement read. “Still, I am glad that the anatomical gift programs at UCSD and USC will not provide bodies from individuals who did not consent to their use in military training. Hopefully, this means that our training infrastructure will no longer be used by those who are complicit or active participants in genocide.”
Edited by Malik Gamble, Scott Hills, and Kather
According to a further report in the Daily Trojan, the USC campus student newspaper, “USC still maintains over 360 contracts with the Navy as well as multiple others with different branches of the military. For those who support the USC South Central Against Labor Exploitation-Students for Justice in Palestine campaign calling on the University to “divest from death,” this rejection is nothing more than a baby step toward that goal.
The news of this one particular contract’s existence caused so much shock in large part because the medical training staff handling the cadavers included members of the Israel Defense Forces –– and the reaction was justified. Much of the outrage, however, seemed misdirected for the relative scale of revealed information.
Headlines highlighted the 12 cadavers that were used by non-combat surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses in the IDF over the past two years. But what’s been overlooked are the far more immediate and pervasive connections that USC has to the Israel-Hamas war.
“There’s a very clear double standard too, with these Zionist organizations and their allowance on campus when … the sheer fact of [a student’s] relation to Palestine or to other Muslim groups becomes an issue for the administration,” said a member of SCALE-SJP who asked to remain anonymous.
