USC
Illustration by Michael Klein

Issue: Summer 2006

Whats New

News & Notes on All Things Trojan

Let There Be Enlightenment!

USC unveils ‘Visions and Voices’ – a bold effort to get students thinking and talking about core values.

What do Spike Lee, Oliver Sacks, Anna Deavere Smith, Quincy Jones, the Getty Villa and Miss Lonelyhearts (the opera) have in common? They’re all part of an ambitious university-wide commitment – unprecedented in USC history – to immerse all students in the arts and humanities.

At his installation last September, Provost C. L. Max Nikias had surprised faculty when he – an engineer – identified among his top priorities the need to “affirm what is most essential and most enduring within the human spirit.” Nikias called upon “all USC students to develop an appreciation of the arts and humanities – regardless of discipline.

“This is for the physicist as well as the philosopher,” he insisted, “for the mathematician as well as the musician, for the pharmacist as well as the journalist, for the engineer as well as the social worker.... It will enrich their lives.”

Now, less than a year later, “Visions and Voices: The USC Arts and Humanities Initiative” is set to roll out a bulging calendar of some 80 major cultural events over the 2006-07 academic year – on average three or four events a week for the duration of the school year.

This, notes executive vice provost Barry Glassner, who is charged with spearheading the initiative, is in addition to the hundreds of existing cultural programs already presented by the university’s arts and professional schools, academic departments and student affairs office.

All Visions and Voices events are free and open to students on a first-come, first-served basis. At a minimum, they will involve thousands of USC students – and not as passive spectators but as active interlocutors.

By design, each event includes a “reflective” component, in which participants are urged to explore USC’s core values through face-to-face dialogue with artists, authors and presenters. The university’s core values, laid out in the 2004 strategic plan, encompass academic freedom and the search for truth, caring, respect, appreciation of diversity, team spirit, commitment to service, informed risk-taking and ethical conduct.

While containing theatrical, musical, dance, filmic and intellectual elements, Visions and Voices events eschew neat compartments such as “conference” or “performance,” according to managing director Daria Yudacufski. Rather, she says, they’re deliberate category-busters designed to get students engaged, thinking and questioning on many levels.

Some highlights: USC’s first Indian film festival; a hands-on workshop with world-renowned dancer Mark Morris; and a free-wheeling, four-part exploration of arts and humanities as they intersect with technology and media.

Not all the programming is campus-based. A series of external events take advantage of the city’s many cultural venues – including professional theaters, a concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a guided tour of the Getty Villa and a visit to UCLA’s Visualization Portal and Experiential Technologies Center. Students attending these off-campus happenings receive free bus transportation and box suppers.

Each semester also brings a “signature” event, spotlighting the best of Visions and Voices offerings. A Dizzy Gillespie festival focused on the jazz legend’s historic efforts at pro-American public diplomacy is slated for the fall, and an open-ended encounter with filmmaker Spike Lee caps the spring. (A complete calendar of the Visions and Voices events is available at the program’s website (www.usc.edu/visionsandvoices.)

USC isn’t the only university to be embracing arts and culture. In 2004, the non-profit American Assembly produced a report titled “The Creative Campus,” which zeroed in on the many ways the academy and the arts relate to and reinforce one other. Spearheaded by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, the report prompted the creation of initiatives at Columbia, Stanford and Harvard.

“We’re not alone in acknowledging the value of arts and humanities,” says Madeline Puzo, dean of the USC School of Theatre and a leader in the Visions and Voices effort. “What’s unique here is the participation of strong professional arts schools.” Indeed, few research universities have anything like USC’s top-ranked music, cinema, fine arts, theatre and architecture schools in their midst. Visions and Voices draws heavily on these in-house resources.

The effort dovetails with a steady rise in the academic caliber and social engagement of students attending USC.

“I have seen a real change in the last five years,” says cinema professor Tara McPherson, another Visions and Voices organizer. “The students recognize that a university education is more than a chance to prepare for a high-paying job. It’s a chance to learn to address questions of ethics, to see what it means to be human in a world comprised of people with different histories and different beliefs. That’s a shift I find incredibly heartening.”

– Diane R. Krieger

Defining Relationship

At a press conference announcing the new institute are President Steven B. Sample, trustees Ronnie Chan and Herbert Klein, Provost C. L. Max Nikias and Elizabeth Garrett, vice president for academic planning and budget.

Photo by Jon Weiner

The China Connection

New U.S.-China Research Institute brings together scholars of relations between the two superpowers.

Members of the USC Board of Trustees, President Steven B. Sample and senior university administrators traveled to China in May, and they didn’t come home empty-handed. While there, they announced the creation of a new interdisciplinary institute at USC dedicated to the study of U.S. and Chinese relations.

Other institutions also study Asia, but this institute – the vision of USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias – will be unique in its focus on the relationship between the two superpowers.

“The primary objective of the USC U.S.-China Research Institute is to become the place scholars, policy makers, students, government officials and journalists worldwide turn to for cutting-edge social science research on significant questions and long-term trends related to U.S.-China relations,” says Nikias.

It is natural that USC be the home of such a center. Nearly all of its schools are involved in ongoing collaborations, study abroad programs, curriculum review or research in China. Institutional ties go back more than 100 years, and in 1978, USC was the first American university to visit China following the re-establishment of relations between the two countries.

Today, USC enrolls more Chinese students than any other American university – some 1,500 students – and counts more than 3,000 Chinese nationals among its alumni.

“The feeling here is that the U.S.-China relationship is the defining relationship of the world,” says vice president for academic planning and budget Elizabeth Garrett, who is leading the search for the institute’s founding director.

The research center, slated to open in September, will house about 30 scholars. One goal will be to develop innovative academic programs, including majors and minors for undergraduates and new areas of study for Ph.D. students.

“We don’t want to be a talking-head institute that simply comments on the day-to-day Washington debate about China,” associate vice provost Howard Gillman told the Los Angeles Times. “We want it to be a broadly defined institute that looks at all different variables like economics, natural resources, aging populations, cultural change.”

Drawing from all disciplines and schools, the university-wide institute will host fellows of various stripes each year: resident fellows from USC; visiting fellows from across the U.S. and China; media fellows who cover China and East Asia; and Ph.D. and post-doctoral fellows working throughout the world.

President Sample was among the first to recognize that Los Angeles had become the de facto capital of the Pacific Rim – an insight he incorporated in the university’s 1994 strategic plan. Three years later, he co-founded the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, a consortium of 36 premier institutions located in China and 14 other countries. Today, more than 50 academic programs link USC and China: they include study of early fossils, the film industry, medicine, earthquakes, environmental changes and the use of the Internet in marketing and communications.

The USC Marshall School of Business operates a Global Executive MBA program out of Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. Its first class of 45 students recently graduated.

“By boosting our academic and research collaborations involving China, USC will better prepare our students – both domestic and international – for life and work in a global society,” Sample says.

– Jon Weiner and Allison Engel

Running the Numbers
Higher Ed in China: Growth from 2000-2004
Private universities 43 to 475
Private university students 0.26 to 1.4 million
Public universities (1994 to 2004) 1,080 to 1,980
Square footage of all campuses 5.1 to 15.8 billion
Total enrollment (1998 to 2006) 3.4 to 16 million
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

[ Travel ] Board on the Move

In May, the USC Board of Trustees held its meeting in two places at once. Convened in both Shanghai and Los Angeles, the trustees conducted the university’s business by teleconference. The meeting was one of many events scheduled over a week-long Asian trip by a delegation of trustees, USC President Steven B. Sample and university administrators. The itinerary included Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where USC established an international office more than four years ago. This was the third time that USC trustees have made an official visit to China. While in Beijing, Sample announced that the board has named Madame Lei Jieqiong, who received a master’s degree in sociology from USC in 1931, USC’s International Alumna of the 20th Century. The 100-year-old former government official, who once served as vice mayor of Beijing, is considered a key architect of China’s social service system and an early advocate for women and children.

For more information on the USC Board of Trustees, visit http://www.usc.edu/about/administration/trustees

People Watch

Illustration by Tim Bower

Conundrum Kids

Alumna’s work with gifted children shows that nobody is the wiser when you dumb down education.

She had been studying gifted children for more than a decade, but it wasn’t until Linda Kreger Silverman MS ’71 PhD ’72 started assessing them at a University of Denver-run child development center that she noticed a strange pattern.

About one-sixth of those she tested turned out to be “twice-exceptional”: both gifted and learning disabled. Many of these kids, she noticed, were being misdiagnosed with autism and dyslexia when their problems were really sensory (vision or hearing issues, for example). That was back in 1979. Silverman has been studying the “interaction between learning disabilities and giftedness” ever since.

Her identification of and advocacy for “conundrum kids,” as she calls them, traces back to USC. A native of Buffalo, Silverman came here to study with the late Leo Buscaglia, internationally known professor of special education and counseling. (She claims to be “the first person to get a double major in special education and educational psychology.”)

Her work at the University of Denver eventually led Silverman to establish the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development in 1986, with its two subsidiaries: the Gifted Development Center (www.gifteddevelopment.com) and the Visual-Spatial Resource.

The latter concentrates on the learning styles of all children, not just the gifted. As Silverman’s 2002 book, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, demonstrated, a quarter of students are auditory-sequential learners (analytical, “left hemisphere” thinkers who depend on words); a third are visual-spatial (“right hemisphere” types who think in pictures); and the rest are a combination of the two.

The problem is, U.S. schools are almost exclusively geared toward the auditory-sequential population – leaving the rest of the students bored, unable to learn and at risk of dropping out.

The No Child Left Behind requirements – with their focus on drilling and testing – have only exacerbated the problem, Silverman believes. But she remains hopeful the pendulum will soon swing the other way.

If not, she says, “we’ll continue holding back our brightest students on the insane assumption that this will magically bring up our lower ones. It won’t. It just brings America into the bottom of the race instead of the top, where we used to be.”

– Ross M. Levine

Former USC College Dean Joseph Aoun, USC trustee Y.H. Cho (chairman of Korean Air), Susan Ahn Cuddy and USC President Steven B. Sample.

Photo by Steve Cohn

[ Korean Heritage ] Home of the Free

The nearly 100-year-old Craftsman house – recognized in Los Angeles as a symbol of Korean independence – was rededicated last spring as the Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Family House, home of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Science’s Korean Studies Institute. It was moved two years ago from Downey Way to 34th Street, to be better integrated with the College and the nearby Korean Heritage Library. The rededication comes more than a century after Dosan Ahn Chang Ho arrived in California to lead an international movement to free Korea from Japanese colonial rule. Dosan became the spiritual leader of the independence movement while his wife raised their five children in the little red-roofed bungalow. At the ceremony, Susan Ahn Cuddy, 91, recalled her father’s last words to the family before returning to Seoul, where he died in 1938: “‘Be good Americans. And never forget your heritage.’”

– Pamela J. Johnson

For more information, go to http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/east_asian_studies/ksi/ahn_house.html

Armstrong’s Legacy

Provost Emeritus Lloyd Armstrong Jr., minus suit and tie, nowadays spends his spare time blogging about issues in higher education.

Photo by Philip Channing

Something ‘Quite Wonderful’

Presidential Medallion pays tribute to provost emeritus’ role in catapulting USC to new heights of excellence.

When provost emeritus Lloyd Armstrong Jr. talks about getting the 2006 Presidential Medallion, he makes the university’s highest honor sound almost like a Valentine.

“I love USC,” he reciprocates. “I’ve had the best years of my professional life by far here. To be recognized for something you love, I find quite wonderful. This is not something the university had to do, and I appreciate it.”

A respected physicist educated at MIT and UC Berkeley, Armstrong began his academic career as a research associate at Johns Hopkins University in 1968. He rose through the ranks, reaching full professor in 1977, department chair in 1985, and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was serving in that capacity when USC recruited him in 1993 to be its chief academic officer.

As the university’s No. 2 man, Armstrong has shown, in President Steven B. Sample’s words, “extraordinary foresight and skill” in moving USC into the top ranks of elite research universities. He announced his retirement in 2005.

“Provost Armstrong’s 12-year tenure will be forever inscribed in USC’s history as pivotal and far-reaching,” Sample said in remarks at last spring’s Academic Honors Convocation, where the Presidential Medallion was awarded.

Sample cited Armstrong’s enduring legacies at USC as the “remarkably successful” strategic plan he oversaw in 1994, its update in 1998 and the latest guide in 2004.

Armstrong took a fresh approach to strategic planning. Facing a brisk, five-month deadline, he decided not to mention any academic unit by name, instead focusing on broad university-wide themes. He also made the process open, releasing weekly working details of the report.

The 1994 plan’s most far-reaching initiative called for renovating undergraduate education to emphasize interdisciplinary study and reflect the strengths of the university. “It pulled us to our roots and modernized these roots,” Armstrong says. At that time, USC was accepting 70 percent of its undergraduate applicants and had trouble attracting top-flight faculty.

The 1998 plan spoke to the university’s international focus and the intent to make Southern California “a laboratory for the future of the world.”

When Armstrong and his committee began in 2003 to plan the 2004 guide, they realized that almost all the initiatives proposed a decade earlier had come to fruition. USC had become vastly more selective, accepting fewer than 30 percent of its undergraduate applicants. Faculty members felt better about USC’s institutional status. And top faculty recruits were eagerly snapping up job offers.

The 2004 document focused on strategic capabilities the university will need for the next 15 years. A hundred faculty members took part in “scenario planning” exercises, looking at current political and educational flashpoints in the news and theorizing how USC could best respond.

Now, more than two years after the 2004 document was completed, Armstrong reflects, “the more I look at it, the more I think we hit” the target.

Visibly relaxed and dressed more casually than during his years as provost, Armstrong now channels his energies in new directions – such as his blog, www.changinghighereducation.com. “I’ve enjoyed it,” he says. “It’s helped focus my thoughts by putting fingers to the keyboard.”

– Allison Engel

Talking POINTS

›› SPIN CYCLE With the appointment of Fox News commentator Tony Snow as President Bush’s spokesman, some pundits openly worried that conservative talk radio is taking over the White House briefing podium. “It’s called the right-wing noise machine,” quipped USC communications scholar Marty Kaplan in an April 26 New York Times story, “and now you have one of the chief noise-makers being given the microphone and podium in the people’s house.”

›› BORDER DISPUTES USC policy expert Harry Pachon weighed in on the significance of the May 1 boycott and marches supporting rights for illegal immigrants. Quoted in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Pachon noted: “What the marches have done is give a human face to the immigration issue in the United States today. For many years, these undocumented immigrants – as well as individuals who sympathize with the plight of this community – have been very quiet and passive. When you have 100,000 people out in the street, that gives reality to potential political power.”

›› STICKY FINGERS In an April 30 New York Times article, USC business law and ethics scholar C. Kerry Fields discussed the pervasive problem of employees taking more than their share of Post-It notes and scissors from the office supply cabinet. “I think everyone is doing this to some degree,” Fields observed, but “you can only take the ethical theory of relativism so far until it hits you: This is wrong.”

›› HOME ECONOMICS People with names like Rodriguez, Garcia and Hernandez bumped Brown, Miller and Davis down the list of most common home buyers in 2005, reflecting Hispanics’ rapid advance into the middle class. A study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC projects 2.2 million Hispanics will buy homes between now and 2010. “It’s startling how rapid the changes are,” USC policy and planning expert Dowell Myers told USA Today, commenting on the study for a May 11 article. “People assume that Latinos are poor and that they’re not a factor in homeownership. But they’re really integrating economically.”

For the latest USC faculty observations and research updates, visit http://www.usc.edu/uscnews

STORM TROOPER

Gulfport, Miss., on the day Katrina hit hard.

Photo by Jim Reed

Shooting the Breeze

Photographer and alumnus Jim Reed chases weather the way some shutterbugs chase celebrities.

Jim Reed BFA ’83 always loved Gulfport, Miss. “It’s kind of a Norman Rockwell town,” he says.

At least it was – until Hurricane Katrina hit the city on August 29, 2005.

Reed was in Gulfport that day. Intentionally. As an extreme-weather photographer and storm chaser, he was tracking Katrina from a beachfront Holiday Inn, awaiting its landfall. It arrived with a vengeance, slamming a 10- to 15-foot wave into the five-story structure.

“When the cars started coming in the lobby, we realized it was becoming too dangerous,” says Reed, who was one of 11 people still at the hotel. “We retreated into the stairwell, which became our makeshift shelter. We kept going up and down and onto the other floors to monitor what was going on.”

Reed and colleague Mike Theiss photographed and videotaped the entire catastrophe, capturing the full evolution of Katrina’s storm surge and its devastating aftermath: homes leveled, vehicles demolished, casinos and barges washed ashore.

“The most disturbing thing we saw was that our hotel was the only one left standing in that one-mile stretch,” says Reed, whose images of the worst storm in U.S. history made the news.

Reed’s path to photojournalist/storm chaser was as unpredictable as the natural disasters he covers. Growing up in tornado- and blizzard-prone Springfield, IL, he was no stranger to severe weather. Going to college in Los Angeles, his disaster experience naturally broadened to include earthquakes, mudslides and wildfires. But as a USC drama major, his primary focus was on the entertainment industry. After graduation, he tried his hand at movie producing, voice-over acting, film archiving and screenwriting. Oddly it was a spec screenplay sale in 1994 that blew him toward the extreme-weather photography biz.

“It gave me enough money to buy high-quality Nikon camera gear and to fund an expedition to Alaska with a meteorologist friend of mine,” says Reed. “That’s what really, almost without even realizing it, accelerated my photo career.”

Since opening his Columbia, S.C. business – aptly named Jim Reed Photography: Severe & Unusual Weather – Reed has logged a million-plus miles on the road, documenting hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards and floods. His images have appeared on CNN, the Weather Channel and other TV outlets, as well as in magazines, museums and a book he co-authored, Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of Storm Chasers.

Though as well-informed and prepared as any professional storm chaser can hope to be, Reed has occasionally found himself in life-threatening situations. While he and a meteorologist were in Florida documenting Hurricane Charley, the storm quickly intensified from a category 2 to a strong category 4.

“That neighborhood just literally came apart,” Reed recalls. “We were being hit by flying debris. And the sounds were just amazing.”

The filmmakers took cover under a collapsed carport. “I videotaped a goodbye to my mom and my girlfriend. It was like a plane going down. We thought, ‘This is it.’”

– Sandy Siegel

A Conversation with Adam Clayton Powell III

Riffing on Technology

The multi-faceted “ACP3.0” heads a futuristic center where reality bytes back.

Talk about a media Renaissance man! Adam Clayton Powell III has been a television station manager, on-air commentator, CBS News manager/producer, vice president for news at National Public Radio, ABC cable news director, vice president of technology at the Freedom Forum. He is now the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, a visiting professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Powell is the son of famous parents: Hazel Scott, jazz and classical pianist, singer and actress, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., civil rights activist and U.S. Congressman. The plugged-in Powell spoke with USC Trojan Family Magazine’s Allison Engel.

You’ve been described as a “creative technologist.” What, exactly, is such a person? I’m not certain I’d agree that I am such a person, but I would say that any good technologist is creative. Research and invention are creative acts. Technology is the new jazz. As with jazz, there is more hard work than most fans appreciate. But great technology – think of the first time you used the Web – is like Paul Gonsalves’ legendary 27-chorus tenor sax solo at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival: it’s electric, it changes the course of history (in this case, it brought the Ellington band out of eclipse) and it changes your perception of what is possible and what is human.

How do the technology-savvy communicate with the technology-challenged? Even computer literates are being left in the dust. This is becoming more and more of a problem. A few years ago for an assignment for the USC Online Journalism Review, I interviewed John Markoff, technology correspondent for the New York Times, and he said he is having difficulty staying abreast of what’s happening. If John is having trouble, what does that mean for non-experts?

You have described the Integrated Media Systems Center as the intersection of engineering and creative content media. What does the center do? IMSC conducts research that will help invent the future of how we work, learn and play. IMSC technologies use audio, video and haptics [tactile data] to augment reality and present the illusion that you are somewhere other than you are – with no goggles or earphones. John Seely Brown, a member of the center’s board, describes IMSC as “sensing the edge.” It’s a nice three- or four-way pun: IMSC is out on the edge, and we work with technologies that intersect with the human senses.

There’s virtual 3-D modeling for almost any spot on earth, and live video can place a viewer directly there. What are the applications and ethical implications of this technology? The applications and the ethical issues are identical to those of photography 150 years ago. The difference is that it’s live – Walter Cronkite called it “You Are There, for real.” And it’s digital, so it can be manipulated. Instead of worrying about truth in photography, it’s time to worry about truth in reality. You will swear you saw it – and that you were there.

Virtual modeling relies heavily on surveillance cameras, traffic cameras and satellite pictures. Do you think that individuals should be able to “opt out” of surveillance? This question is moot: Opting out is no longer an option in modern society. What lawyers call the “expectation of privacy” is rapidly becoming an anachronism.

There are already two Adam Clayton Powell IVs. Will the name continue into the fifth generation? And what are the perks and pitfalls of having a famous name? There already is an ACP5.0: he’s my brother’s son. The name certainly is useful for getting phone calls returned – for good or ill. Twice I was told I couldn’t be hired because of my name, and one CBS News executive told me I had to change my name if I wanted to be successful. Of course I have been able to get great access, [being] invited to closed meetings on Capitol Hill or in Hollywood wearing my “ACP” hat (or, even though I’m 60, as “Adam’s son” or “Hazel’s kid”). But there are often concerns, as voiced by my father when I had my first job at CBS News in 1964: “You’re not going to tell them what really goes on [in politics] are you?” I laughed and replied, “If I did, they wouldn’t believe me.”

Adam Clayton Powell III directs USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center.

Photo by Philip Channing

Milestones

›› Vice Provost Jerome A. “Jerry” Lucido, former vice provost for enrollment policy and management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been named USC’s vice provost for enrollment policy and management beginning this fall. Lucido, considered a national leader in university admissions and enrollment management, is a member of the board of trustees of the College Board, which administers the SAT, PSAT and Advanced Placement programs. He also serves as chair of the College Board’s National Guidance and Admission Assembly Council. Working with Lucido on enrollment issues will be L. Katharine Harrington, named dean of admission and financial aid after serving in the position on an interim basis for the past year.
›› Executive Former USC College Dean Joseph Aoun takes office this month as president of Northeastern University in Boston. USC College’s 19th dean, whose career here spanned a quarter century, was honored at a standing-room-only farewell reception. His major accomplishments during his six-year tenure as dean include a Senior Faculty Hiring Initiative, which boosted College faculty from 350 to nearly 500; an unprecedented 51 percent increase in sponsored research funding; construction of two state-of-the-art science buildings; and several important institutional partnerships.
›› Engineer Yannis C. Yortsos has been named dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He had served as interim dean since June 2005, when past dean C. L. Max Nikias was appointed provost. Previously, Yortsos was USC Viterbi’s associate dean and senior associate dean for academic affairs; he also chaired its chemical engineering department. Yortsos first joined the USC faculty in 1978, and was named the Chester F. Dolley Professor of Petroleum Engineering in 1995. He is a graduate of the National Technical University in Athens, Greece, and earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech.

For a complete list of USC trustees, senior officers and deans, visit www.usc.edu/about/administration

Shelf Life

Book photo by Mark Tanner

Live and Unlearn

Unforgettable? Two USC psychologists explain how memories are made, stored and lost over time.

Memory: The Key to Consciousness
By Richard F. Thompson and Stephen A. Madigan
JOSEPH HENRY PRESS, $24.95

Those who pride themselves on having a good memory may be surprised to learn there’s little variation in how quickly one’s memories fade. Instead, the key difference seems to lie in how well the memory initially was formed – or learned. Learning, argues a new book by two USC psychologists, occurs faster for some people, but forgetting affects everyone at the same rate.

In Memory: The Key to Consciousness, Richard Thompson and Stephen Madigan pose some intriguing questions about forgetfulness. Do our memories “fade,” or are they “over-written” like a computer file? Could it be that lost memories remain stored away in the brain but simply become inaccessible over time? Is forgetting an active or passive process?

Thompson has pioneered the study of learning and memory for nearly 50 years. His research tracks the minute physical changes occurring in the brain as learning takes place and memories are coded, stored and retrieved. Madigan’s work focuses on mental imagery, short-term memory, forgetting and age-related changes in visual memory.

Offering a “tour through the fascinating and many-chambered structures of memory,” the 250-page book, written for non-scientists, tackles many intriguing questions:

Do people have photographic memories? Can we remember better while hypnotized? How do we learn language? Can we have false memories? Can emotions influence memories? How can we improve our memory? Where are memories stored in the brain? Can we someday read memories by measuring the activity of the brain? Can our brains someday be “plugged” into computers?

Thompson and Madigan describe the development and structure of memory, as well as its unreliability. Avoiding overly technical language, they explain how scientists have figured out what they know about memory. Simply stated, the brain encodes a memory by changing the physical structure of synapses between neurons. When something new is learned, neurons sprout additional synapses and strengthen existing ones.

Memory, it turns out, is not a video camera, attending to every detail with equal weight. Most memories leave out the majority of sensory information from an experience. That means new learning may cause some forgetting when it overwrites an earlier, similar memory through a process called interference.

There are some ways to prod memories gone hazy, however – including environmental cues. One study showed that elderly people who returned to their high school campus were able to recall many more names of long-lost classmates than when they were asked to list classmates’ names from memory.

Interestingly, Thompson and Madigan cast doubt on the very idea that we might repress truly traumatic memories. Intense emotions like fear and anger tend to enhance the formation of memories. In fact, most people haunted by memories of war, abuse and crimes remember their harrowing experiences all too well and may develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

– Eva Emerson

Heretical History

Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity, 1500

Mystical Nativity © The National Gallery, London

Telling Mary’s Story

An influential – it inspired Renaissance masters – but little-known gospel fleshes out the life of Jesus’ mother.

The Banned Book of Mary:
How Her Story was Suppressed by the Church and Hidden in Art for Centuries
By Ronald Hock
ULYSSES PRESS, $10.95

USC religion professor Ronald Hock, an expert on the historical Jesus, recently turned his attention to the Virgin Mary. In his book, The Banned Book of Mary, the author analyzes a long-forgotten document, The Infancy Gospel of James – written around 150 ACE by an unknown Christian.

Though excluded from the Bible and suppressed by the church, it may be the most influential of all gospels, Hock contends. The document was the basis of many masterpieces by Renaissance artists from Giotto to Raphael.

“It’s a lovely story,” Hock says. “I appreciate the way it influenced Orthodox Christianity directly; how it influenced Latin Christianity indirectly; and how we can still see its influence in manger scenes and Christmas cards.”

The Infancy Gospel describes a childless couple, Joachim and Anne, whose prayers are answered when Anne delivers a daughter, Mary. Raised by priests in Jerusalem, the 12-year-old girl is betrothed by her guardians to Joseph, a man with grown sons. Joseph protests that he is too old to be Mary’s husband, but agrees to be her legal guardian.

While Joseph is away, an angel informs Mary that she will bear a divine child, whom she is to name Jesus. Joseph is outraged, but he relents after an angel tells him that she has conceived by the Holy Spirit.

En route to Bethlehem, they stop in a cave – not a stable – and Mary delivers a son. Deviating again from the New Testament, The Infancy Gospel features two midwives visiting the cave. One declares a virgin has given birth; the other is skeptical. When the latter tries to examine Mary, her hand burns. After touching the baby, her hand is healed.

The decision to suppress this gospel was largely the work of Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus – known today as St. Jerome, the patron saint of librarians and translators. He had problems with The Infancy Gospel because it clashes with Luke’s account of Mary, not a midwife, wrapping her newborn in swaddling clothes. It also conflicts with the Gospel of John, which cites Jesus’ first miracle as turning water into wine. But the biggest problem with The Infancy Gospel was mention of Jesus’ “brothers,” suggesting that Mary was not a perpetual virgin. Jerome wouldn’t have that.

“The truth is we don’t know the circumstances of Jesus’ birth,” Hock notes. “If Paul was right and it was an ordinary birth, he was probably born at home in Nazareth, with Joseph and Mary and family in attendance.”

– Pamela J. Johnson

Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity
By Joanna Demers
University of Georgia Press, $19.95

Is music property? If so, under what circumstances can it be stolen? USC music historian Joanna Demers looks at the tension between intellectual property, musical meaning, and artistic freedom. Overzealous IP litigation, she argues, both stifles and stimulates musical creativity; and, in circumventing licensing and copyright issues, defiant artists tap new sources of creativity.

Ritual House: Drawing on Nature’s Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design
By Ralph Knowles
Island Press, $35

Through shelters as diverse as a Berber tent, a Spanish courtyard and the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, USC architect Ralph Knowles shows us the future. His concept of “solar access zoning” offers a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities – proving that we can engage nature in our designs and create shelters that are unique to their climate, their region and their relationship to the sun.

To Be Sung on the Water
CD by Michelle Makarski
ECM New Series, $14.98

Violinist Michelle Makarski puts composers born more than 250 years apart – Baroque maestro Giuseppe Tartini and contemporary USC faculty member Donald Crockett – into dialogue in this unconventional recording. Tartini is represented by three sonatas for solo violin; woven between them are Crockett’s Mickey Finn and the title track, To Be Sung on the Water. “The sequence turns out to be uncanny,” observes the Los Angeles Times.

Lab Work

Illustration by Tim Bower

Our Man in Washington

A ‘unique enterprise’ connects faculty with funding agencies and promotes socially relevant work.

Unions have lobbies. So do many industries. It stands to reason that universities should have them too. But USC is going one better than membership in higher education associations that perform lobbying functions. Recently, it opened its very own Office of Research Advancement in Washington, D.C.

“We want people to see USC as a model for solving societal problems and transcending traditional boundaries,” explains industrial engineer Randolph Hall, the university’s vice provost for research advancement.

Hall recently hired Steven Moldin to spread that message loud and clear on Capitol Hill. The veteran National Institute of Mental Health official is now the go-to guy charged with enhancing USC’s reputation on the East Coast and promoting research to address society’s problems.

At NIMH, Moldin was responsible for the management of $200 million in contracts and grants. He’ll be working the other end of the equation for USC – hooking up faculty with federal agencies and decision-makers while pushing to enhance USC’s research reputation on Capitol Hill.

“USC is already an outstanding institution when it comes to scientific research,” Moldin says. “But given the Byzantine structure of government and funding agencies, our faculty need to know who to call, who to work with, and how to develop the best proposals. I will be bringing faculty together from across disciplines to strengthen USC’s position not only in Washington, but throughout the East Coast.”

Hall describes the Washington office as a “unique enterprise in academics – because we have not established it as an office to lobby Congress or to direct political action but to offer leadership from people who truly know the research and can speak on a peer-to-peer level to people who make funding decisions in the nation’s capital.”

The objectives of the Washington office echo those of the 2004 strategic plan, which stresses the importance of USC’s relations with policymakers and its ability to address societal problems by strengthening socially relevant research.

“The push is to align the office’s goals with those in the strategic plan, which also mesh with objectives of the most important funding agencies,” Hall says. “We would like to see our faculty more engaged with decision-makers.”

Another function of the D.C. operation is to provide an East Coast outpost for faculty when they travel, and to encourage get-together with policymakers while in town. The office is conveniently located on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“A lot of the power-elite in science are cloistered within the area surrounding D.C., so it’s important to have a presence there and to help faculty feel they are a part of this world,” says Moldin.

An associate editor of the journal Genes, Brain, and Behavior, Moldin has conducted research at New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University and was a faculty member at the Washington University School of Medicine.

He has published more than 50 papers and book chapters in the areas of psychiatric genetics, schizophrenia, autism and neuroscience and is co-editor of Methods in Genomic Neuroscience and Understanding Autism: From Basic Neuroscience to Treatment.

His commentary on the future of autism research, co-authored with UC San Francisco psychiatrist John L. R. Rubenstein and Harvard provost and neurobiologist Steven Hyman, appeared in the June 28 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

In addition to his post as executive director of USC’s Washington office, Moldin also holds a faculty appointment in psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

– Karen Newell Young


Running the Numbers
Research Grants 2005-2006
Total sponsored research $430 million
Medicine 40 %
Information science 13 %
Engineering 12 %
Natural sciences 11 %
Creative technology 6 %
Gerontology 3 %
Other 15 %

Inquiring MINDS

›› ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT The great search for extraterrestrial life has focused on water at the expense of a crucial element, say USC geobiologists in the May 5 issue of Science. They propose searching for organic nitrogen as proof of the presence of life. Nitrogen is essential to the chemistry of living organisms. “It’s hard to imagine life without water, but it’s easy to imagine water without life,” says Kenneth Nealson, the Wrigley Professor of Earth Sciences. “If you found nitrogen in abundance on Mars, you would get extremely excited because it shouldn’t be there.”

›› STATE OF THE FUTURE Do changing demographics mean changing policies for the Golden State? Probably not, according to a USC study. Californians who vote are so demographically different from the overall population that the policy decisions they make now may actually jeopardize the state’s future, says Dowell Myers of the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. “The non-Hispanic white population has fallen to minority status – 45 percent of the state’s population and only 32 percent of the schoolchildren – but that ‘minority’ holds a 70 percent majority at the voting booth.”

›› RUSH TO MEDICATE A review of published research has found no evidence that early episodes of schizophrenia without medication result in long-term harm for patients. “The question is whether we should rush to treat early episodes with anti-psychotics, often before a clear diagnosis has become evident,” wrote John Bola, USC School of Social Work assistant professor, in Schizophrenia Bulletin last spring. The controversial findings could clear the way for identifying the large number of patients who do not need the drugs for their condition to improve.

›› RARE DISTINCTION By advancing its work in a rare blood disorder, the Keck School of Medicine has been named a Center of Excellence by the Myelodysplastic Syndromes Foundation. MDS is a relatively rare collection of diseases in which the bone marrow does not produce enough blood cells, sometimes leading to leukemia. USC’s recent recruitment of Allen Yang, who is researching new treatments for MDS, signaled the university’s commitment to finding cures for MDS.

For the latest on faculty observations and research, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/

Future Shock

Science Friction

Experts at Conference 125 forecast an uncertain future with no guarantees of American scientific dominance.

“We cannot take for granted the continuation of America’s technological and scientific leadership,” warned USC President Steven B. Sample at a major meeting of minds held here last spring.

Conference 125, titled “Global Horizons: America’s Challenge in Science and Innovation,” brought together experts in science policy for a forum on global challenges to American preeminence in science and innovation. The April 11 event was organized in celebration of the 125th anniversaries of both USC and Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

AAAS president Alan I. Leshner, head of the country’s largest scientific society, offered a pessimistic view, citing the decrease in federal funding for pure science and in the American share of influential scientific papers, as well as gloomy regulatory and political weather.

The nearly full house in Davidson Conference Center saw perhaps the year’s most distinguished panel on this sobering topic: in attendance were acclaimed futurist Raymond Kurzweil, Nobel Laureate and USC chemist George Olah, Silicon Valley guru John Seely Brown, China expert and international banking advisor Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Qualcomm co-founder and USC trustee Andrew J. Viterbi, stem-cell pioneer Martin Pera and moderator Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”

Most had a guarded prognosis for America’s scientific and technological health. USC researcher Donald B. Kohn, director of the gene, immune and stem cell therapy program at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, warned that cash-strapped academic medical centers lack funds for basic clinical research. “I think we’re really in danger,” he said, “not only of losing the lab leaders, but losing a whole generation, down to the lab technicians.”

Ironically, Kohn’s comments came a day after USC officials learned that the Keck School of Medicine had received a three-year, $3.16 million stem cell training grant as part of the first round of awards by the California Institute
for Regenerative Medicine. Earlier in the year, philanthropist Eli Broad had pledged $25 million to the Keck School in support of the Broad Institute for Integrative Biology and Stem Cell Research.

Back at the conference, Kurzweil spoke of a world on the threshold of ubiquitous computing where body and machine interface seamlessly. “In general my predictions have been considered radically optimistic,” he admitted, “but invariably they end up being conservative.”

USC and Science magazine held the event in response to a broad consensus that American research and education must do more to compete in a global economy.

– Carl Marziali

Orocopia Mountains, Box Canyon, Calif.

Photo by Tony DiMauro

[ Long-Distance Earthquake] A Jarring Thought

Even from a distance of almost 150 miles, an earthquake at the south end of the San Andreas fault could inflict unexpected damage on Los Angeles, according to new simulations commissioned by the USC-based Southern California Earthquake Center. A strong earthquake centered near the Salton Sea, the study reveals, could launch seismic waves that would be amplified and guided into the Los Angeles area by the sedimentary basins south of the San Gabriel Mountains. “L.A. is pretty far from this fault, and we’re surprised by how high the amplitudes are,” notes SCEC director and USC professor of earth sciences Thomas Jordan. In the hardest hit areas, the speed of ground motion could exceed two meters per second. Any shaking over one meter per second is considered very strong. (Watch a simulation at www.scec.org/sanandreas/images/TeraShake.mov). The study does not include damage estimates, but the overall impact on the L.A. area could be far more severe than for the Northridge earthquake of 1994. The simulations, carried out at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, assume a magnitude 7.7 fault rupture toward the northwest.

The research team chose the southernmost portion of the San Andreas fault for the simulation because it has gone the longest without rupturing (since 1690, compared to 1857 for the central portion and 1906 for the portion near San Francisco). Jordan described it as the part “where the spring has been wound tightest.” SCEC conducted the study as part of its ongoing TeraShake simulation project, funded by the National Science Foundation. Headquartered at USC, SCEC is a consortium of 54 institutions with funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey.

– Carl Marziali

For more information on this study, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/12471.html

Now PLAYING

›› Mazur on Dante Twin exhibitions at USC’s Fisher Gallery reassess The Divine Comedy through the eyes of Boston-based monoprint pioneer Michael Mazur. “The Inferno of Dante” presents a complete suite of 41 original etchings by Mazur, accompanied by text translations by U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Simultaneously, “Michael Mazur and Dante: A Different Paradise” assembles 28 drawings, prints and paintings of the divine. September 6-October 28, USC Fisher Gallery.

›› Noises Off The USC School of Theatre presents Michael Frayn’s backstage view of the drama world. Rivalries both romantic and professional seethe in the wings as members of a repertory company take the fictional farce “Nothing On” from dress rehearsal to opening night and well into the play-within-a-play’s imaginary run. October 5-8, Bing Theatre.

›› Dizzy Gillespie Trumpet player/producer Quincy Jones and the USC Thornton Jazz Orchestra pay tribute to Gillespie’s history-making 1956 world tour – a public diplomacy triumph built on the quintessential American art form. October 12, Bovard Auditorium.

›› Walt Disney Hall The USC Thornton Symphony appears as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Sounds About Town” series. Principal conductor Carl St.Clair leads the student orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1; faculty composer Frank Ticheli’s Shooting Stars; and Joan Tower’s Violin Concerto, with alumna soloist Michelle Kim. October 15, Walt Disney Concert Hall.

›› Threepenny Opera For its fall musical, the USC School of Theatre presents Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s jazzy-satirical masterpiece tracing the adventures of a womanizing thief on the run in London’s criminal underworld. October 26-29, Bing Theatre.

›› Powder Her Face USC Thornton Opera presents the chamber opera sensation by Thomas Adès, set in the glittering salon and scandalous boudoir of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll – whose divorce trial drew gasps in the 1950s. The composer conducts an orchestra made up of USC Thornton and L.A. Philharmonic players. November 17-19, Bing Theatre.

For daily updates on arts events and other campus happenings, visit http://www.usc.edu/calendar

Art & Culture

Melon Eaters, by Victory Ufimtsev

Raiders of the Lost Art

Documentary exposes unknown avant-garde paintings and intrepid efforts to preserve Soviet dissident art.

Two years ago, USC film professor Amanda Pope and cinema-television alum Tchavdar Georgiev MA ’01 were working on a documentary about emerging leaders in the former Soviet Republic when they stumbled upon an even better story.

In the remote western desert of the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, they learned of the existence of an extraordinary collection of 50,000 museum-quality paintings representing repressed avant-garde Russian art from the 1920s through the 1950s.

This collection, largely unknown to the Western world, had been amassed by Igor Savitsky, a determined Russian archaeologist and art collector. Many of the paintings’ creators had been executed or deported to Siberia after running afoul of the official Soviet style. Savitsky often obtained the canvases by befriending the artists’ widows.

The remote location of Savitsky’s collection, in the city of Nukus, far from the watchful eye of the KGB, helped ensure its survival. If it hadn’t been for his “lunatic” efforts, art historians say, the paintings would have been destroyed, robbing history of an unusual intermingling of East and West.

When Savitsky died in 1984, responsibility for his collection passed to a family friend, Marinika Babanazarova, who has been fiercely protecting it ever since.

What could be a more compelling topic for a documentary, thought Pope?

An associate professor of production in the USC School of Cinema-Television, Pope already had some experience making films about art: she had written and directed the 1983 documentary Jackson Pollock Portrait.

She and Georgiev, who is fluent in Russian, cobbled together money from foundations, individuals and a Zumberge Interdisciplinary Grant. The duo made two difficult trips to Nukus, wrangling with Uzbek authorities to allow their equipment through customs and filming under trying conditions, including in 135-degree heat. It was worth the effort. At the state museum, which also houses folk crafts by Karakalpak artisans and antiquities from the Khorem province of Uzbekistan, the filmmakers found thousands of unknown world-class paintings, many hanging unframed from strings.

Their documentary, tentatively titled Art Rescuers of Nukus, is not yet completed, but a 12-minute clip was screened when Pope brought Babanazarova to USC last spring to lecture and meet with area museum officials.

“Amanda and Tchavdar have done important research work that our museum itself hasn’t been able to do,” Babanazarova says. “There is no serious description of art in Russia during this period, and the film will be of great historic and scientific importance.”

– Allison Engel

Poseidon Adventure

The chorus as oarsmen

Minimalist Mozart

Love, duty and piety clash during the Trojan post-war era in USC Thornton Opera’s stylized Idomeneo.

Prince Idamante of Crete loves Princess Ilia of Troy, and she loves him. Sounds promising. There’s a bit of a snag, though – what with Ilia being a hostage and her conquered people enslaved. Luckily, the prince is only too willing to liberate the Trojans to win his lady’s smiles. Now if only Idomeneo – that’s Idamante’s dad – weren’t under orders from Neptune to render up the first person he meets (you guessed it, his very own boy) as a human sacrifice...

Welcome to Mozart’s operatic retelling of the tough choices facing Homer’s “lance-famed Idomen of Crete” – returned victorious from the Trojan Wars to find his island kingdom terrorized by a sea monster that can only be appeased by the prince’s blood.

In late April, USC Thornton Opera presented this 1781 opera seria in a stylized production imagined by guest stage director James Marvel. “It’s a fantastic story,” says Marvel, “with echoes of great tragedies like Agamemnon and Oedipus Rex and many subplots – only, strangely, it ends happily.” After Idamante heroically slays the sea monster – and is nearly beheaded by Idomeneo in a pagan variation on the sacrifice of Isaac – a disembodied “voice” saves the day with a crowd-pleasing bit of merciful divine intervention.

A seasoned director with more than 30 opera productions under his belt, the New York-based Marvel teamed with USC Thornton Opera conductor Brent McMunn in a production that was all jagged edges and geometrical shapes, evoking the craggy Cretan shoreline. In one stand-out piece of minimalist staging, Marvel suggested the tide-tossed rowboat waiting to bear Idamante into exile with nothing more than the synchronized rolls of its oarsmen.

Instead of the conventional dungeon, the opening scene finds pretty Ilia atop a 15-foot precipice berating her wayward heart for loving the enemy prince. Costume designer Jennifer Broussard playfully picked up Marvel’s angular motifs. She styled Elettra (plucked unaccountably from Argos to play the woman scorned in Crete’s royal-family crisis) after Marilyn Manson, coiffed as if recently emerged from a wind tunnel.

The four performances were sung in Italian with English supertitles; all the leads were double-cast. Idamante, voiced as is customary by lyric mezzos, was presented manfully by Natasha Flores and Rochelle Martin, alternating between evening and matinee shows. Tenors Randy Bills and Bong-Su Kang wrestled royally with the competing claims of piety and fatherly love. A lilting foursome of sopranos gave golden-throated turns as Ilia and Elettra. Jessica Owen and Jacquelynne Fontaine sang the role of the Trojan princess torn between passion and patriotism; while Erica Miller and Ashley Wheat brooded tragically over their loveless fate. Nor should the chorus be overlooked – true to the Greek form, its role is both musically and thematically central.

At once light and dark, Idomeneo blended Mozartian elegance with bursts of high romance for a monstrous good time.

– Diane Krieger

[In Print] Art of Repetition

In the half-century after Henry Ford rolled out the first factory-made automobile, multiplicity went from cultural conundrum to aesthetic credo. Individual markings by the artist’s own hand gradually lost relevance. Last spring’s USC Fisher Gallery exhibition, “Variations on a Theme: American Prints from Pop Art to Minimalism,” pinpointed printmaking’s coming of age. In the 1960s and ‘70s, print rose from second-class status to the medium of choice in a new aesthetic built around repetition, variation, similarity and change. Take Roy Lichtenstein’s Bull Profile Series (1973): in six lithographs he recapitulates the history of 20th-century art from representation to abstraction, systematically deconstructing Picasso’s Bull (1945) into a grid of flat lines and colors. Drawn from the private collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, the show featured works by a dozen artists, including Jasper Johns and David Hockney.

– Diane Krieger

For more information on the show, visit
http://www.fishergallery.org/index.php?page=exhibitions&action=viewExhibition&exhibitionID=56

In Support

Photo by Brian Morriz

Life Lessons for Future Engineers

USC Viterbi launches ‘first of its kind’ institute to give undergraduates a leg up in leadership and networking.

Alumnus Ken Klein ’82 was the epitome of cool at the March kickoff of his $8 million institute. Waving T-shirts stamped with the word “KIUEL” – that’s USC Viterbi School of Engineering nomenclature for the “Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life” – a crowd of students, faculty and administrators cheered at the sight of him.

The mission of the Klein Institute, the first of its kind in the nation, is to provide services to help engineering undergraduates develop skills in leadership, networking, community service and cross-disciplinary activities. Building on existing programs, it offers social and academic counseling, personal development, tutoring, mentoring, coaching and career guidance.

“Thanks to Ken’s support, we have created new and much-needed resources – a facility so special that it will set us apart from all other engineering schools,” said Yannis Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School. “KIUEL will enrich our students’ lives outside of the classroom and add to their sense of community.”

Before the celebration, Klein, his wife Natalie and son Sean were escorted to the Office of Admission and Student Affairs on the first floor of Tutor Hall, where Yortsos unveiled an elegant glass sign bearing the Klein Institute name. Because of the institute’s tie-in to other student services, the program will be administered through that office, making Tutor Hall 110 the natural nerve center for all activities related to undergraduate engineering student life, in addition to student government and engineering club activities.

“I wish that I had had an institute like this to turn to when I was an undergraduate,” says Klein, who earned dual bachelor’s degrees in biomedical and electrical engineering, “because I know how tough the engineering curriculum can be and what a little help can do.”

Today, he is president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Wind River Systems, a global leader in device software optimization.

Joining the celebration were some of KIUEL’s key supporters: Provost C. L. Max Nikias; Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Jackson; and members of the USC Viterbi Board of Councilors.

“The Klein Institute is more than an act of generosity,” said Nikias at the opening. “It is an act of vision.”

Despite the praise, Klein’s demeanor was humble. “If KIUEL enables one student to stay in school and graduate as a Trojan engineer,” he said, “then I will take great pride in knowing that we were successful, that I did a good deed, that I made a difference.”

– Diane Ainsworth

Support REPORT

›› CHILDREN’S HOUR Plans for a new 460,000-square-foot facility at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles leaped ahead with word that, as of April 2006, $556 million had been raised in its three-year “Living Proof” campaign. “What we have accomplished here is unprecedented in the hospital’s history and among the freestanding children’s hospitals in the United States,” said board co-chair Marion Anderson. The 280-bed facility is expected to open in 2009.

›› THE GIFT OF MUSIC USC trustee Flora L. Thornton has donated $5 million, enabling the USC Thornton School of Music to proceed with plans for a new state-of-the-art facility to ease the increasing space needs of students and faculty. Her 1999 naming gift of $25 million was, at the time, the largest donation to a school of music in the United States.

›› BRAIN GAIN USC Trustee David Dornsife and wife Dana pledged $5 million to establish a pair of endowed chairs in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The inaugural holders of the David Dornsife Chair and the Dana Dornsife Chair, respectively, are neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio. In 2003, the Dornsifes gave an $8 million lead gift to establish the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center. The center played a pivotal role in recruiting the Damasios to USC.

›› THE GOLD STANDARD Longtime USC supporters Ilene and Stanley Gold have pledged $1 million to establish the Gold Family Fellowship at the USC College. The fellowship will help graduate students pursue overseas study opportunities. Ilene Gold serves on the USC College Board of Councilors; her husband, Stanley Gold JD ’67, is chairman of the USC Board of Trustees. In 1996, a $1 million gift from the Golds established the Gold Family Trustee Scholarship, which sends two undergraduates abroad each year.

›› THE ART OF RESEARCH Randell L. Makinson, director emeritus of USC’s Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., has made gifts totaling $300,000 to the USC School of Architecture. The gifts will establish an endowment for research in architectural history and preservation and a design studio in historic preservation under Makinson’s name.

For the latest on gift and research news, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/