SPECIAL: The Search for a New President at the University of Southern California
Published February 5, 2025.
Photo of USC Senior Vice President and General Counsel Beong-Soo Kim, a former U.S. Attorney and corporate lawyer from hiring in July 2020 (USC website).
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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
The late University of Southern California (USC) President Steven Sample was credited in the Los Angeles Times in 2000 by journalist Kenneth Weiss after serving 9 years of having turned the institution into a “hot school” on the upward trend in no small part because he was “the guy who demands that his charges toe strict ethical and moral lines.” Steven Sample was succeeded in 2010 after 19 years of service by Max Nikias, who was then force-exited in 2018 following two major scandals involving the former Dean of the Keck School of Medicine and a student health center gynecologist. In both cases, it was widely suggested that USC had seemingly failed to check inappropriate and egregious behavior that it knew about or otherwise should have suspected. Many people reactively sought to blame Nikias directly rather than his “charges” or subordinates, and indeed that became a popular sentiment, albeit a little mistaken.
Max Nikias was in turn succeeded by Interim President Wanda Austin, a trustee, who then gave way to current USC President Carol Folt in July 2019. Then last year, on November 8, 2024, President Folt announced her planned retirement. Now USC is in an entirely unusual and troubling move, naming its own General Counsel, Beong-Soo Kim, to be interim President pending a search committee hiring a successor. This should be triggering more red flags! It was only in February 2020 that Carol Folt and former Chairman of the Board of Trustees Rick Caruso agreed with the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), to all but firewall off the university’s legal interests from the administration of its Title IX compliance. The nation’s fundamental gender equity law is designed to protect students from abuses, and in USC’s case, OCR’s investigation had found that USC’s former general counsel, Carol Mauch Amir, had failed at its requirement to report the case of gynecologist George Tyndall to OCR.
USC was already in trouble due to its mismanagement of such complaints, having signed the prior agreement only months before the Los Angeles Times broke the Tyndall scandal news. Now here it was again egregiously dropping the ball in protecting student patients; it was a bad look and ended the Nikias era with a whimper. USC ended up having to payout a combined $1.1 billion in legal settlements. Never before in the history of USC has a general counsel served as president. The 2020 agreement reads in its first provision: “Under this structure, neither the Title IX Office nor the Senior Vice President for Human Resources report, either directly or indirectly, to the General Counsel.” But what if the General Counsel is serving as the President? For a brief period in 2018, Provost Michael Quick served as Acting President between Nikias and Austin. Undoubtedly, it will help that President Donald Trump has set out to hobble the Department of Education at large, which threatens to limit the OCR as an enforcement branch.
Even if the Department wasn’t being threatened with dismantlement, it remains highly suspect whether they even care to enforce the Agreement signed by the government on behalf of the Tyndall victims. For starters, until 2024, USC failed to release any summary information about Title IX complaints despite being obligated to provide information on its progress in reducing the occurrence of sexual violence. Then in August 2024, it released a single year of data quietly from 2021-2022. Neither OCR nor any other publication beyond The Daily Trojan, itself under threat of defunding, covered this matter, and their finding was that USC still had a higher than average rate of Title IX reports. Disturbingly, it was General Counsel Beong-Soo Kim who, alongside President Folt, sought to suppress student government response and public outcry in October 2021 when it was disclosed that USC had failed to warn students about drug-facilitated sexual assaults at fraternities. Kim is a former Kaiser Permanente executive and federal prosecutor.
The announcement that Kim, referred affectionately to as Beong throughout the memorandum, came not from Folt but from Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees Suzanne Nora Johnson and David Bohnett. They wrote, “In order to dedicate all of his efforts to being a faithful steward of USC’s work and responsibilities throughout this transition, Beong will not be a candidate for the permanent position.” The memo also announced that the search to replace Folt would be chaired by two USC Trustees who are also alumni, Carmen Nava and Mark Stevens, and in its composition in a break from the Caruso era, it included a staff member and a student. Caruso had explained to the Daily Trojan in 2018 that the search couldn’t have “an unlimited amount of people” involved in defending its composition. General Counsel Kim will take office starting June 30 for an undetermined amount of time pending completion of the search for a new president.
Carmen Nava was appointed to the Board of Trustees in December 2016 and is a retired AT&T executive; Nava previously chaired a governance reform committee created by Caruso. She earned her undergraduate degree from the Marshall School of Business in 1984. Mark Stevens is a billionaire venture capitalist and earned both an undergraduate degree and a part-time masters from the Viterbi School of Engineering in 1981 and 1984 and a masters degree from the Marshall School in 1989. Stevens has served on the Board since 2001 and received an honorary doctorate in 2016; along with his wife Mary, he’s donated more than $100 million to USC. The committee that they will lead principally includes other trustees and tenured faculty and includes former Interim President Austin. Non-tenured faculty, who comprise most of USC’s teaching faculty, are unrepresented; these faculty members have been pushing to unionize.
The committee features Professor Jacob Soll, who previously wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2019 regarding USC’s scandals, wrote that part of the problem was “entrenched mediocrity,” describing it as a barrier to “academic excellence.” USC has faced multiple lawsuits in the last year alleging the university continues to engage in Machiavellian schemes to cover up and dispose of perceived problems. USC has hired the search firm Russell Reynolds Associates to assist with the search. Whether the firm can identify and ultimately help secure a candidate who meets such standards remains to be seen. Previously, it’s believed that Folt was quickly advanced by Caruso and entered with a clear mindset to power through USC’s problems.
Johnson and Bohnett wrote of the effort: “As part of its advisory role, the committee will consolidate feedback from our community to define the characteristics we are seeking in our next president, and ultimately recommend a small number of highly qualified candidates to the Board of Trustees for interview and selection.” Just how non-mediocrely that actually happens is the million-dollar question, and if the recent game of musical chairs shows, USC is having a hard time finding new talent. On January 23, the university announced that Interim Senior Vice President for Human Resources, Stacy Giwa, would assume the position permanently following the departure of Felicia Washington to the University of Pennsylvania. Similarly, USC replaced Catherine Spear as Vice President of Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX with Linda Hoos after she left for the University of California. Folt’s selection for Provost from the University of Buffalo was succeeded by Gould School of Law Dean Andrew Guzman after stepping down.
Can USC reel in a big fish to be its next president, or will it catch a guppy? The failure to reform might just be its biggest liability; in addition to the lawsuits its facing, USC continues to struggle with a cultural divide. As an elite research university, it’s inspirationally obligated to reach for the sky, but in reality, at this point, it’s grasp is limited compared to competition. USC lacks the deep pockets of other top institutions, and even as President Folt has sought to continue the gangbuster fundraising of the Nikias era, USC has developed a structural deficit, which led to recent layoffs of staff. The continually disturbing reports regarding its Title IX compliance, whether failing to protect students or retaliating against staff for making reports, should draw caution from any new leader not to continue business as usual. Cancelling the valedictorian speech and even commencement last year over protests was an extra low point. USC try again.
UPDATE: The Daily Trojan is projecting that Kim’s appointment will run through at least June 2026 given the search process timeline described in the memorandum.
Link: OCR 2020 Findings and Resolution Agreement
Link: Trump administration drafting executive order to initiate Department of Education’s elimination
Link: EEO-TIX, OPE release inaugural report
Link: USC administration hosts Zoom town hall
Link: ‘Denied a seat at the table’: Presidential search committee fails to include students
Link: Carmen Nava 84'
Link: Venture capitalist Mark Stevens returns to USC Board of Trustees
Link: Op-Ed: USC has made great strides academically. We can’t let the scandals stop the momentum
Link: Announcing USC’s senior vice president of human resources
Link: Beong-Soo Kim named interim president
Please support my work with your subscription, or for direct support, use Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, or Zelle using zachary.b.ellison@gmail.com
Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost, from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant, supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost, among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign, including on their university-wide newsletter. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server and enjoys weekends in the outdoors. Zach is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club.
