Consider, for instance, the size of our student body: from 53 to 33,000.  And the faculty: from 10 to 3,100 full time currently, and with expertise in fields that were unheard of not only 13 decades ago, but even two decades ago: bioinformatics, nanoscience, computational biology, multimedia, video gaming. Even the massive expansion of disciplines, majors, minors and professional schools could not have been predicted by the first generations of USC’s leaders.

Think about our campuses themselves. Until recently city streets cut through the University Park campus. Streetcars dropped students off on campus. Quonset huts once dotted the campus, as did wood-frame bungalows, bare parking lots and straggling telephone poles and wires.

Now our University Park campus has been transformed into a park-like oasis, with fountains, trees, gardens and attractive buildings that are also exceptionally functional and conducive to teaching, research and living. We have now, I believe, the most beautiful urban campus in America.

There were very few buildings on our Health Sciences campus in the early days – absent were the research towers, the hospitals and the state-of-the-art consultation offices of today, which are the result of explosive growth primarily in the last 15 years.

Our new history book describes a rich, intricate institutional history. It is almost as though this university were a person, and this her biography. We see her in infancy, in her first steps, and we observe her increasing sense of self and destiny. We see her maturing into proficiencies and capacities which, like all individuals, might have been hinted at early on, but which needed the right circumstances, influences and opportunities to flower. We see, too, the missteps and mid-course corrections.

In the end an institutional history is not the story of an entity, a thing, impersonal and monolithic. It is the story of people, real human beings who together created, nurtured and built this university; people whose lives and destinies intersected at this place in a certain time; people who passed through, changing and changed, and who also stayed – physically and/or spiritually – connected to USC for life.

Throughout my presidency I’ve had a chance to read and hear many of your – our alumni’s – reminiscences. These are personal histories, and USC – the “institution” – constitutes a significant part of your human history. These two stories overlap and intersect, each bearing on the other, each transforming the other.

What I hear about most often is the life-changing events. Typically I’ll hear about how a couple met at USC, fell in love, and then married. I also hear many stories from students who tried stretching their intellectual wings and were rewarded with praise and encouragement from professors: “He gave me the first A+ I’d ever gotten on a paper, and I began to realize I was good at this!” And about professors who helped students determine their passions: an English major who took a class in gerontology and decided to pursue graduate work in health care; a music major whose experience in a chemistry class sparked a career in pharmaceuticals. Alumni tell me of having their eyes and minds opened through their contact with fellow students from every walk of life and every continent.

At USC – more so, I believe, than at other universities – the “institutional” history becomes part of our personal histories. The two are inseparable, intertwined, and symbiotic, each enriching and enhancing the other.

“Marvelous” indeed it is.