Illustration by Dave Cutler

Issue: Spring 2003

How to Build a World-Class College

Dean Joseph Aoun’s vision is clear: he wants USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to be one of the top 10 private research colleges in America by the end of the decade.

By Alfred Kildow

The word is spreading: USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences is on the move. It started with an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, announcing that the university was prepared to spend $100 million to hire some 100 high-profile professors over the next three years, focusing on three broad thematic areas and increasing the size of the USC College faculty by 25 percent.

The Times called it “a bold stroke destined to draw attention to USC as an increasingly significant force on the national education scene.” Higher education officials agreed.

“It’s a very shrewd, very strategic move,” American Council on Education president David Ward told the Times. “They’re saying they’ve got a war chest, that they’ll be hiring in several thematic areas and that they’re giving themselves three or four years to do it…. That’s very attractive.”

Within days, USC officials report, their phones were ringing and mail and e-mail boxes were filling with inquiries, suggestions and nominations.

This is just what Dean Joseph Aoun wants. Aoun, a noted scholar who has been on the USC College faculty for 20 years and became its dean in 1999, makes no bones about his ambitions: “By the end of this decade, we will be one of the top 10 private research colleges in America.”

Working closely with USC Provost Lloyd Armstrong, Jr., Aoun is the architect of an aggressive plan titled “The New USC College.” The two have set their sights on greatly increasing the number of world-class faculty at USC College, along with creating parallel improvements in graduate education and providing state-of-the-art facilities to support them. “Over the last decade, we have witnessed remarkable accomplishments in the college,” Aoun says. “Now we are poised to build to greatness.”

The first step in Aoun’s plan is the $100 million “senior faculty initiative” that caught the media’s attention. But it’s not just the boldness of the plan that has educators buzzing.

Aoun doesn’t intend for USC College to build along traditional departmental lines, but rather to develop thematically, crossing disciplinary lines to attract faculty who work at the intersections of disciplines. This approach promises to change the faculty over time into one unusual for American universities, one whose diversity and entrepreneurial spirit will match the changing times.

The themes may evolve as the decade advances, but initially the focus will be upon three broad areas: the life sciences, an area of strength in which the federal government is expected to invest heavily; a second theme centered on the urban, international, interdependent outlook that is present-day Los Angeles; and finally, one that encompasses the study of the human experience – language, mind and culture.

In an unpublicized precursor to the initiative, more than a half-dozen blue chip professors have already been recruited, bolstering confidence in the college’s ability to scale the ranks to new heights. Among them are:

– Thomas A. Jordan, a geophysicist from MIT who heads the USC-based Southern California Earthquake Center;

– Kenneth H. Nealson, a geobiologist from Caltech and the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Laboratory;

– Lisa M. Bitel, a Harvard-trained historian who tends a remarkable multimedia resource called “Matrix,” which provides complex and detailed information about medieval women’s religious communities;

– Jean-Jacques Laffont, a global leader in the pivotal field of economic regulation, who joined the college’s Economics Department from the University of Toulouse, France, to take advantage of USC’s location at the hub of a new world built around urbanization and the evolution of a global community;

– Thomas Crow, one of the world’s leading art historians and director of the Getty Research Institute, the research arm of the Getty Museum, a position he continues to hold as he serves as a professor in the college’s art history department;

– Todd Sandler, an economist and policy analyst whose cross-disciplinary talents are increasingly sought for understanding the economics of terrorism; and

– James Higginbotham, a philosopher and linguist from Oxford University, where he held a chair in linguistics for seven years. He also spent 11 years at MIT.

“These are just a few of the new professors we have brought on board since we began this initiative,” Aoun says. “There will be more – many more – at the senior level. But we are also recruiting junior faculty and we are getting the pick of the crop – a sure sign that others have noticed the growing strength of USC’s brand of academics.”

Just what is “USC’s brand of academics”?

“The future of USC College is pegged to the life sciences and those programs that mirror the future of the planet, which is to say the growth of mega-cities around the globe and the accumulation and mutation of many cultures into new cultures in a rapidly changing world,” says Aoun.

“That is why we won’t let ourselves be constrained by traditional departmental boundaries. We know that many of our greatest strengths are unrecognized because they fall outside normal bounds. For example, our economics department is small – only 20 faculty, although they are top rank. However, across the university there are more than 50 economists – in the business school, primarily, but also in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, even in pharmacy and medicine. Our challenge is to bring these economists together in their teaching and research without regard to departmental or school turf. And there are many other examples.”

A second priority is improving the college’s graduate programs.

“We must greatly increase the quality of doctoral students,” Aoun says. “These Ph.D. students are essential to the research and teaching missions of the college. As our graduate students get better, they will attract higher caliber faculty. And the presence of world-class faculty and great graduate students will burnish the undergraduate population as well.

“To get these top graduate students we must compete head-to-head with the Harvards and Yales and Stanfords, and we are doing just that. At the beginning of the year we announced a new package of support for graduate students. Our Ph.D. students can get five full years of support with stipends that are significantly higher than those listed by any other university. Our support includes summer supplements and health care. We believe this is unprecedented in American graduate education.

“Moreover, we are echoing the thematic portion of our faculty recruiting strategy by offering competitive Strategic Theme Awards in East Asian Studies, Urban and International Studies, Computational Studies and Studies in Language, Mind and Culture to underscore the college’s commitment to all areas of knowledge.”

The new initiatives will change the landscape at University Park. Four new buildings are envisioned; one, for molecular and computational biology and experimental genomics, is scheduled to begin construction this spring in front of Kaprielian Hall; another is expected be added alongside. Two others would be built during the course of the decade. Meanwhile, building renovations and upgrading will be going on throughout the campus, bringing USC College firmly into the 21st century.

One benefit of the public visibility generated by the media interest in the college’s far-reaching plans is its expected influence on national rankings, Aoun and Armstrong believe.

“We naturally want to improve our rankings as best we can,” says Aoun. “However, we are looking less at the year-to-year popular rankings [such as U.S. News & World Report] than we are at building long-term, taking aim on the 2013 National Research Council survey.” This survey, published every 10 years, is the most highly regarded by educators and researchers, because the NRC is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which is chartered to provide independent advice to the Congress and the executive branch of government.

“By 2013,” he continues, “our hard work will have born fruit and we will be worthy of high rankings in many areas.


Photography by Philip Channing

“More importantly, our focus on building thematically will set us apart from our peers. I believe that we will lead a change in the way people think of colleges, and we will rise to the top.”

Armstrong and Aoun are not unaware that other universities are trying to move up as well. But their strategic plan, which was developed as a cooperative effort involving many college faculty, foresees another advantage for USC: geography.

USC College is at the heart of a vibrant and diverse urban environment, and has the unique advantage of being part of a private university in Los Angeles, “a modern Pacific Rim metropolis brimming with a wealth of people and cultures and rife with opportunities,” the plan notes. The university takes advantage of these resources to provide the best possible preparation for a diverse student body that will become the next generation of scholars and leaders at the local, regional, national and international levels.

“Put more simply,” Armstrong says, “L.A. is what the rest of the world’s cities aspire to become. USC and USC College are at the southern hub of the new downtown Los Angeles, and this is the city of the future.”

The kind of growth envisioned by the college’s strategic plan will require a major infusion of capital, says Armstrong. “Recruiting and retaining the best scholars is expensive.”

The total amount of money needed to move USC College to the top 10 among research institutions is, by historical standards, astounding – $1 billion.

“This would be unprecedented for USC College,” notes Aoun, “but we are propelled by our aspirations.”

In addition to aspirations, Armstrong and Aoun feel that USC is well-positioned financially, and also is at a special moment in time, giving them what they are calling “the USC advantage.”

Like most major private research universities, USC suffered losses in its endowment portfolio because of the downturn in the stock market. But USC derives a larger portion of its revenues from tuition than do its peer universities. The university raised more than $2.6 billion in its just-completed capital campaign, more than any other university save Harvard and Columbia. And USC has been largely debt-free, which has made it possible to borrow money at very low interest rates. When all these factors are weighed together, USC ranks near the top of all private universities in the strength of its current financial picture, below only MIT, according to the latest “Lombardi Report,” a University of Florida annual measurement of the performance of American universities.

Meanwhile, public universities are seeing their subsidies from state governments sharply curtailed because the states are experiencing sharply reduced revenues.

Financial support for growth will also come from increases in research grants, which bring with them support for infrastructure costs. Of the faculty that will be hired, the plan calls for about two-thirds to be in the natural and social sciences, fields in which faculty can attract funding. This would double the current funded faculty, boosting national visibility, especially among peers. Federally funded research is peer-reviewed. The most highly regarded researchers in each discipline pass judgment on grant proposals. Higher funding volume yields greater opportunities for national recognition.

“The federal government has committed itself to major increases in funding the life sciences,” Aoun says. “This coincides with areas of emerging great strength in USC College, especially in neuroscience, marine biology, bioinformatics and molecular biology. And that is why, right away, we are investing in a new $50 million science building and the corresponding infrastructure and program support.”

In fiscal 2002, the College had $47.4 million in contracts and grants, up sharply over the previous year. According to the plan, as the faculty expansion rolls out, by the end of the decade that annual total will rise to more than $100 million.

Fund-raising is also a front-burner topic at the college. Building major programs requires investing now in the future education of USC College students. For while there are many strengths, there are weaknesses that must be addressed: endowment is small per student; fellowships are few; classroom remodeling is essential, as is the need for increased space and support for research and graduate programs; computer support trails competitor schools; many departments are too small and the faculty lacks diversity.

Top universities have large endowments, and this is true of USC, which ranks 22nd nationally with more than $2 billion. Within the college, current endowment is about $240 million. But the number of endowed chairs and professorships, crucial for attracting outstanding senior faculty, lags behind the competition. USC College has 35. Penn has 83, Princeton 171.

One goal is to double the number of endowed chairs by the end of the decade.

Fortunately, Aoun says, there are many generous supporters: USC ranks 11th nationally in total annual giving from alumni and donors. The college plan calls for doubling annual gifts to the college, to $60 million per year, by the end of the decade.

No matter how you slice it, coming up with an additional $1 billion over the next seven years is a staggering challenge for the USC College. Aoun faces it pragmatically.

“Look, we only rank 65th nationally in terms of endowment per student,” he says. “We have $84,000 per student. Princeton has $1.3 million, Harvard $1 million, and so on down the top 10 to Duke at $239,000 and Penn at $161,000. There’s much room for improvement.”

Although USC traces its roots to its College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, which was created at the founding of the university in 1880, USC saw its reputation grow over the decades primarily through the creation and nurturing of its many professional schools.

By the beginning of the 1990s, most university leaders recognized that further success for USC was unlikely without substantial improvement of the original core of the university – USC College.

“What’s special about the college,” Armstrong says, “is that issues can be addressed from many perspectives. There are many disciplines represented in the college, and there are many possibilities for collaboration across departmental lines to solve problems or to take advantage of opportunities.”

Aoun observes that the relatively new field of computational biology arose here at USC, in the college, precisely because both biology and mathematics coexist only in the college.

USC president Steven B. Sample has made the college a top priority of his administration, as is evident in the university-wide strategic plan adopted by the Board of Trustees in 1994, which emphasized undergraduate education and areas of research central in the college.

Today’s vision for a “New College” is a commitment to an internationally distinguished faculty with undergraduate and graduate programs that are among the best.

The strategic plan to accomplish this lofty goal accelerated when Aoun was named the college’s 16th dean in 1999, after six years as dean of the college faculty. A member of the faculty for 20 years, Aoun worked closely with his long-time faculty colleagues in identifying four key elements essential for reaching their goal: continued improvement of the undergraduate program; recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty; advancement and visibility of graduate programs; and fund-raising success to provide the necessary financial resources.

The undergraduate program has advanced dramatically. USC now competes head-to-head with the Ivies and Stanford for the best high school seniors.

And while there are many outstanding faculty members in the College, including Nobel Laureate George Olah and a small number of members of the National Academy of Sciences, USC College needs a larger number of renowned faculty members and the stronger graduate programs they will support.

This is because success breeds success, on many fronts. Great professors are drawn to a rich intellectual environment where they can thrive from the interplay and cross-fertilization of ideas and innovative research. As the pool of outstanding faculty grows, it becomes easier to recruit others like them. Top senior professors attract promising junior faculty. Together, they draw the best postdoctoral and graduate students. Good graduate students in turn provide the incentive for more top-quality professors to join the college faculty, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of improvement.

Despite its long history at USC and the fact that nearly all undergraduates study in the college at one time or another, the role of a liberal arts college within a major research university isn’t particularly well- understood, Armstrong says.

“We are fond of saying that USC College is the heart and soul of the university,” he says. “And that’s true. The college is home, at one time or another, to all of our undergraduates. The core of undergraduate education takes place in the college, and for many undergraduates, all of their education is in the college.

“In addition, most of the non-professional graduate education takes place in the college. Most basic research in most scientific fields takes place almost exclusively in the college – physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, earth sciences. Scholarly research in a wide range of the humanities is exclusively in the college – classics, English, art history, philosophy, history.

“Biology has a strong presence in the college, and basic biological research also takes place in several professional schools, including medicine, pharmacy and dentistry. And there are strong collaborations among the schools as well.”

USC College looms large on the University Park campus, with more than two dozen academic departments and programs, as well as many other administrative, instructional and research units.

Undergraduates in the college can major in nearly a hundred subjects and dozens of minors. More than 13,500 applied for admission as freshmen for fall 2002, 4,400 were admitted and 1,200 enrolled, numbers that clearly demonstrate that students are clamoring to come to USC College. The entering freshman class in the college had mean SAT scores of 1331 and GPAs of 3.97, which stacks up well alongside competing institutions.

There are more than 1,300 full-time graduate students in the college, most enrolled in the 37 doctoral programs. Uncounted undergraduates take advantage of the rich research environment to conduct original research with faculty supervision.

This exhilarating environment presents many opportunities, and many choices, for Aoun and his trio of supporting deans – Beth Meyerowitz for faculty, Sarah Pratt for academic programs and Donal Manahan for research. With defined resources, they could choose to focus on building the weakest programs that are a drag on overall rankings, or they could focus on building the strongest programs to elevate the college.

What they have chosen to do is build upon strength without regard to current programs, and to build the faculty with professors who are comfortable working “outside the box.”

The gains in academic excellence over the next few years may not seem spectacular as they occur, certainly not turning heads the way the galloping improvements in undergraduate education attracted notice in the 1990s. Improvements in graduate programs will be incremental, accumulating slowly over the next seven years.

And, as USC College nears the top, the competition will get stiffer, for the very best schools aren’t planning to collapse any time soon. The ladder to the top will be climbed one rung at a time. However, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, USC College will be among the top 10 colleges of America’s research universities.

That’s the plan.


Breaking The Boundaries: Life Sciences
Kenneth H. Nealson

“The interface between geology and biology has never been properly crossed.... I think this is probably going to emerge in the next 10 years as one of the most vibrant areas of science.”

When Ken Nealson left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to join USC, one of the key attractions for the geobiologist was the college’s interdisciplinary approach to research.

“I’d been offered positions at geology departments before, but I always turned them down,” he says. “Most departments discourage these interdisciplinary attempts. But USC is ahead of the curve in fostering cross-disciplinary research.”

USC College Dean Joseph Aoun says that’s by design.

“Here in the college, we strongly encourage bringing scientists of different backgrounds and training together and to take their ideas and thinking far outside normal bounds,” he says. “One day Nealson’s ambitious strategies for cross-disciplinary research will be the norm for scientists throughout the world.”

Nealson, who holds the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies, joined the college’s earth sciences department in 2001 to set up the Program in Geobiolgy – an area of science that tackles the still largely unexplored domain where the chemistry of life and the Earth’s
mineral-metal chemistry intersect.

“The interface between geology and biology has never been properly crossed and is probably one of the most exciting things going on in science today,” Nealson says. “A lot of earth scientists are coming to appreciate that many of the things happening on and near the surface of the Earth” – matters traditionally credited to geochemical processes alone – “are in fact being done by microbes.”

Nealson intends to make the geobiology program interdisciplinary at its core. He has intentionally placed the program’s laboratories in the Hancock Building next to the marine sciences labs. “I want the geos and the bios to work in the same lab space,” he says. “They get trained to speak different languages, and I want to overcome that.

“Just saying you’re interdisciplinary isn’t enough; the students have to spend all day talking to each other and having coffee together. Then in another 10 years there’ll be a generation of geologists and biologists who actually understand each other.”

There are few geobiology groups in the country so far, Nealson says, but he expects other research universities to play catch-up in a few years.

Geobiology promises a range of scientific discoveries, he says, from new ways of harnessing microbes to solve engineering problems to better understanding life’s history on Earth and informing NASA scientists of the best assays for seeking signs of life on other worlds.

Some applications for geobiology may include control of corrosion, better and faster ways to reduce sewage and other forms of waste, and better control over many types of surface chemistry.

“In the future it may be possible, for example, to make a biofilm that would stop barnacles from attaching to ships,” Nealson says. “Such geobiological approaches might also allow us to stabilize coral reefs, which are disintegrating worldwide. This could have a major impact not only on the global carbon cycle, but with regard to preservation of the diverse reef ecosystems.

“I think this is probably going to emerge in the next 10 years as one of the most vibrant areas of science.”


Breaking The Boundaries: Urban Studies and Globalization
Thomas H. Jordan


“Information technology is an increasingly important part of the infrastructure of all scientific research. SCEC is a truly distributed community, involving over 30 universities spread out across the country, and we need strong information science tools to collaborate effectively on our research.”

The Southern California Earthquake Center might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of USC College’s strengths in urban studies and globalization, a cornerstone of the college’s strategic plan.

But the center’s director, distinguished geophysicist Thomas H. Jordan, sees things differently. He was among the first to see Los Angeles as an urban laboratory for the rest of the world to study.

“SCEC is the largest organized effort for the study of earthquakes in the country,” says Jordan, professor of earth sciences and holder of the W.M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences. “If you study earthquakes, this is the place to be. Half the nation’s earthquake risk is in Southern California, with the biggest portion right here in Los Angeles County.

“Trying to get at what’s going on with earthquakes is very difficult. But here we have an opportunity to really get up close and personal with them.”

As director of SCEC, a consortium of 15 partner institutions and 25 participating institutions headquartered at USC, Jordan oversees both the research aspects of the center, which focus on understanding the mechanisms of earthquakes, and its extensive educational and outreach programs that address societal needs and policy.

Attracted by the earthquake center, the quality of the faculty in USC College’s earth sciences department, and the natural laboratory Southern California offers to earthquake researchers, Jordan left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join the college faculty in 2000.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Jordan earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Caltech. He taught at Princeton and Scripps Institution of Oceanography before going to MIT, where he headed the earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences department for a decade. He has received top awards from the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, and served as chair of the 2001 National Research Council’s Committee on Basic Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences.

His reputation as an innovative researcher is well-deserved. He devised a novel seismological technique to make a series of major discoveries about the three-dimensional structure of the earth’s interior. He uses the waves from earthquakes to look deep inside the earth in an effort to understand the machinery that drives plate tectonics. He is also the author of a theory that describes the structure and evolution of the continents.

In addition to his structural studies, Jordan has organized and led oceanographic cruises and geophysical field expeditions and done seminal work on plate motions, plate-boundary deformations, slow earthquakes and seafloor morphology.

Tom Jordan’s influences on SCEC can already be seen. The center now has a new base of funding, more faculty members and a renovated facility in North Science Hall. His leadership has helped in the recruitment of stellar graduate students and new faculty to the USC College.

In 2002, SCEC’s original funding from the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Centers program expired. Jordan kept SCEC alive by applying for and receiving new five-year grants from other NSF programs and the U.S. Geological Survey totaling $5.9 million per year. As part of the process, he outlined a plan for the center to evolve and broaden its research.

SCEC’s primary mission remains the same: to gather and organize information about earthquakes in Southern California, educate the public and use the information to develop models that could one day give scientists the ability to predict earthquakes and other seismic events.

But Jordan has also looked to the information sciences to help build a new digital library of seismology research and the infrastructure necessary to create a virtual community of scientists from across the nation.

In fact, he was partly drawn to USC by its strength in the information sciences. “Information technology is an increasingly important part of the infrastructure of all scientific research. SCEC, for example, is a truly distributed community, involving over 30 universities spread out across the country, and we need strong information science tools to collaborate effectively on our research.”

A key aspect of SCEC’s research program is a seismic network comprised of 250 global positioning system stations distributed throughout the Los Angeles basin. The GPS units can detect very slight changes in position, providing a measure of strain accumulation and release.

The center also developed the primary data repository and distribution center for seismic networks in the region and was key in coordinating the field observations and scientific analysis after the Lander, Northridge and Hector Mine earthquakes.

Ultimately, Jordan expects SCEC research to increase earthquake awareness, reduce economic losses and save lives, in Los Angeles and around the globe.


Breaking The Boundaries: Language, Mind and Culture
Lisa M. Bitel


“Most people have a very narrow view of women’s role in the Middle Ages. Our hope is that documenting this diversity in detail will contribute to a more informed understanding.”

History professor Lisa Bitel is a sharp contrast to the medieval women she studies. With short spiked hair, contemporary glasses and an affinity for multimedia, she might be described as “punky.”

Since this Harvard-trained historian and mother of two joined USC College two years ago, her presence has inspired students while raising the department’s prominence in medieval research and gender studies – subjects Bitel has studied for more than 20 years.

In college corridors, the word “Matrix” often follows her name. It means “inspiration” in Latin. But Matrix also depicts the name of Bitel’s prize research project – an intricately designed Web site that features hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, vibrantly colored images and ancient documents dating back from 400 to 1600 C.E., the phrase medievalists use to describe the common or Christian era.

“These women lived extraordinary lives for their time,” Bitel says. “They were literate, participated in the community, worked alongside of men and were part of major religious endeavors.”

Matrix is among the first Web sites to document the participation of Christian women in the religious society of medieval Europe. Each piece reveals a sliver of the story of how women participated in society centuries ago. Bitel has collaborated on the Matrix project since 1994 with historians at Yale University, Boston College, Hartwick College and the University of Kansas, where she directed the women’s studies program before joining USC.

The “Figurae,” an intricate visual library, is the hallmark of the site, which contains hundreds of illuminated gold and silver manuscripts and unusual artwork. “These are exquisite 13th-century manuscripts and among the most detailed of the time period. In a very beautiful way, they document how women worked, prayed and cared for their families,” says Bitel, who collaborates with scholars in Europe and around the globe to obtain such hard-to-find pieces.

The “Monasticon” features 2,600 community profiles of the ecclesiastical and lay institutions women influenced, such as hospitals, congregations, asylums and house churches. Another section of the site, the “Carularium,” traces age-old documents like foundation charters, testaments, contracts, papal letters and other records from medieval religious communities. The databases are a powerful draw for Medievalists, who up until a few years ago had no centralized digital resource to supplement gender-focused research.

Bitel spends hours in the college’s multimedia history lab translating research about women’s religious communities from dusty 1960s-era punch cards to easily searchable Web archives.

“Most people have a narrow view of women’s role in the Middle Ages,” she says. “Our hope is that documenting this diversity in detail will contribute to a more informed understanding.”

Bitel is currently working on a project with USC’s art history department documenting the spirituality of nuns in Ferano, Italy, during the 1500s and is collaborating with colleagues in the School of Religion at USC College to share digital photographs of religious orders.

But her cultural focus isn’t exclusively limited to medieval times. “I love the civilization of Los Angeles as opposed to rural Kansas,” she says. “It didn’t take me long to become a complete Trojan convert.”