Illustration by John S. Dykes

In late October 2006, with speculation rife about a possible Barack Obama presidential bid, the student-run Program Board pulled off a coup when it got the junior senator from Illinois to speak at USC. In town to promote his new book, Obama agreed on short notice to participate in a Democratic rally outside Doheny Library organized by the Political Student Assembly. (This was just days ahead of the gubernatorial election.) But the students struck out finding an auditorium to put him in for a pre-rally environmental talk with actor Ben Affleck. So they fell back on their ace in the hole: Tommy’s Place.

A windowless basement-level room that holds – held, actually, since the wrecking ball will have felled it near the time this article appears – about 200 people. The jewel, as it were, of the Norman Topping Student Activities Center, it was one of a very few spaces on campus that students could truly call their own.

An earlier generation may remember it as a video arcade, but with the advent of laptops, that favored after-school activity migrated to the ether some time ago. Cleared of pinball machines and video Pacman, Tommy’s Place had become an all-purpose student rec room, furnished (when not needed for impromptu visits by presidential hopefuls and Hollywood superstars) with café tables and not-so-comfortable sofas, flanked at one end by folding ping-pong tables.

On that October day, Trojans squeezed shoulder to shoulder inside Tommy’s Place to hear Obama and Affleck extol the virtues of Proposition 87. Outside, students had to be turned away in droves.

“We’re taxed with capacity issues,” laments Michael Jackson, USC’s vice president for student affairs, who has been advocating for major improvements since he first set foot on campus in 1995. “We have thousands of students living on this campus, and there’s really no place for them to congregate. We have thousands of commuter students, and there’s no place for them to hang out.”

After more than a decade of lobbying, planning and fundraising, Jackson is now smiling a lot, because sweeping change is imminent.

Over the next two years, Trojans will see an expansive (and expensive!) environment-friendly, state-of-the-art campus center complex emerge at the heart of the University Park campus. Named for alumnus and trustee Ronald N. Tutor ’63, who contributed $30 million toward the project, this five-level, 192,000-square-foot facility is being heralded as the future hub of university life.

Divided into two wings, the Tutor Campus Center will nestle up against the historic Gwynn Wilson Student Union to form a sociable U surrounding an open-air plaza that faces Childs Way. Rising above this plaza will be the Steps of Troy, a wide, shallow stairway with landings that architects – perhaps taking a cue from Rome’s iconic Spanish Steps – hope will extend to Trojans an irresistible invitation to loiter.

“From the very beginning, I thought the heart and soul of the campus should not be a building but a space,” says David Martin ’66, design principal of A.C. Martin Partners. The firm has a dozen USC buildings in its portfolio: from Birnkrant Residence Hall (1963) and Musick Law Building (1970) to the Norris Medical Library (1968) and Norris Cinema Theatre (1976). More recent contributions include the award-winning Popovich Hall (2001) and Tutor Hall (2005). But of them all, says Martin, “I’m sure this will have the most significance for the campus.”

Projected to cost $130 million when it’s completed in fall 2010, the Tutor Campus Center will be many things to a great many people. Beyond a swank new “living room” with copious lounges, meeting rooms and public areas where students can mix and mingle, the complex will feature two major centers that physically link past, present and future generations of Trojans like never before. It will be home to the Epstein Family Alumni Center, named for trustee Daniel J. Epstein ’62, who donated $4 million to the project. And it will also house the university’s new Admission Center, as yet unnamed.

The implication is unmistakable, says Scott Mory, associate senior vice president for alumni relations. “This puts alumni right in the middle of student and university life,” he says, “and confirms that alumni are a vibrant part of this university.”

The new Admission Center embraces another key constituency that is sometimes overlooked: the more than 60,000 guests (many of them future Trojans and their parents) who come for campus tours and admission interviews during the year.

Tutor’s and Epstein’s names should ring a bell. Both are university trustees and celebrated major donors. The $50 million Ronald Tutor Hall, also designed by A.C. Martin and dedicated in 2005, is the jewel of USC’s engineering quad. It was a $10 million lead gift from Tutor (who is president and CEO of contracting giant Tutor-Saliba Corp.) that got the massive teaching and research facility rolling.

As for Epstein, when the San Diego-based entrepreneur and real estate developer donated $11 million to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2002, the school said “thank you” by naming his old department after him: the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Other philanthropists have also stepped forward to underwrite the Tutor Campus Center, and the list will grow as the facility takes shape.

Over at Widney Alumni House, current Alumni Association president and trustee Michele Dedeaux Engemann ’68 and past presidents Leonard Fuller ’68 and trustee Alexander Cappello ’77 are actively beating the bushes and working the phones. And from his second-floor corner office in the Student Union, within earshot of the construction noise, Michael Jackson, who has nursed this baby for 13 years, is doing the same.

Space at USC being at a premium, when something goes up, something else usually must come down. This is certainly true for the Tutor Campus Center. While the signature 1927 Gwynn Wilson Student Union, with its historic façade enlivened by gargoyle apes and the busts of university presidents, and the five-story Trojan Bookstore will stay; the outdated Topping Student Activities Center and the architecturally uninspiring Commons building will go.

Alumni will remember the latter, a 1950 structure now wedged between the Student Union and the bookstore, as home to food courts on two levels. Here, generations of Trojans have queued and dined in crowded, uninviting spaces. Down below, a pub named Traditions beckoned with all the charm of an airport bar. On the ground floor, not all the panache of Wolfgang Puck pizza and Wasabi sushi bar, not all the warmth of Betty Crocker Kitchen and an organic marketplace could make students linger over their lattes and ahi tuna rolls.

Above, the Upstairs Café offered more refined tablecloth dining, an interesting menu and, alas, with its petite kitchen servicing a cavernous dining room, predictably long waits. Indeed, the whole building seemed calculated for inefficiency: kitchen lines and storage space distributed on three levels connected by one elevator, and copious space lost to stairs and landings.

It was not a situation that could be properly addressed by remodeling.

“If you design a building poorly, you get to operate for decades inefficiently, which leads to unhappy guests and a stressed staff,” explains Scott Shuttleworth ’87, director of TrojanHospitality and a member of the Campus Center Executive Committee charged with making it shine.

Recruited less than a year ago from SBE Entertainment Group, a rising star in the restaurant, hotel and nightlife business, Shuttleworth has launched and overseen operations for several high-end L.A. nightclubs and eateries, most recently the tony Katsuya sushi restaurants of Brentwood and Hollywood.

“My joining USC last summer was perfect timing,” he says. “We get a new state-of-the-art building, and I plan on leaving my fingerprints all over it.”

The new facility represents a dramatic increase in dining space: approximately 100,000 square feet, compared to just 60,000 in the Commons. The food court alone will have seating for up to 300 inside and another 300 outside on the plaza.

Shuttleworth says he is under more intense pressure from his immediate family – wife, sister, uncle are Trojans all – to “get it right” than from his boss, Dan Stimmler ’95, EMBA ’07, associate senior vice president for auxiliary services. (The mega-division, in addition to food services at 33 venues, runs all the university’s housing, parking, transportation, bookstore and Radisson Hotel operations.)

It won’t be easy. “As you stop and talk to students, or others you meet on campus, most will tell you that they are not impressed with the dining options,” says Shuttleworth, who has sat through enough meetings, seen enough focus groups and read enough student surveys to know.

He’s a pretty tough critic in his own right, and he has set the bar very high. The competition, as he sees it, isn’t UCLA or Stanford. It’s all of Los Angeles. Most university food services, he explains, are very similar and none get high ratings from guests.

Shuttleworth, however, is modeling his food court on successful, upscale malls in Century City and South Coast Plaza. He’s looking to develop specialty restaurants whose distinctive menus and innovative concepts can go head-to-head with the chichi bistros and trendy boîtes of the city’s well-heeled financial district.

“I want to be the Pete Carroll of hospitality,” he says, grinning. “I want dining services to be a source of pride for faculty and students, just like our scholastics and sports are.”

When completed, the Tutor Campus Center will be the second-largest structure on the University Park campus. (No. 1 is the Galen Center, which opened just last year.) Interestingly, its most important element will be on the outside.

From the start, architect David Martin conceived of the project not as a building but as a “memorable space”: the heart and soul of the campus, physically located at the crossroads of student life, an ideal “hangout” clearly defined by surrounding architecture. Outdoors, pedestrian-friendly, capitalizing on the region’s mild climate. It’s something USC lacks, he says, the closest approximation being the Trojan Bookstore steps.

Martin is confident the plaza will do the trick. It has the five necessary ingredients: a place to sit outside, sun and shade, a sense of enclosure, food service and landscaping. “If you have all those elements,” the architect claims, “it will become a vibrant, successful space.”

Martin actually threw in a bonus element: comfort in the form of radiant heating. Woven into the concrete slab floor, a network of 3/4-inch plastic tubing will circulate warm water underneath the plaza in the cool morning hours and on brisk days and evenings. Relying on excess heat from the building’s mechanical systems to warm the water means no energy is wasted in the process.

Directly below the plaza lies another major new social hub – an enormous ballroom with a large stage. In dining configuration, it will comfortably accommodate more than 700 guests at 72 tables. In theatre configuration – tables and chairs discretely stowed in clever wall-storage units – it will be capable of seating 1,000 guests, double what Town & Gown can hold and big enough, in a pinch, to play host to Hollywood superstars and presidential hopefuls. When less will suffice, modular walls mean the room can be divided into two, three or four smaller public spaces. Adjacent to the ballroom, a “back of the house,” industrial-scale gourmet kitchen will advance Shuttleworth’s ambitious food-service goals as well as greatly increase TrojanHospitality’s campus-wide catering capabilities.

Sharing the basement level with the kitchen and ballroom will be thoroughly re-imagined renditions of Traditions and Tommy’s Place. The former will feature an exciting pub menu and dining options to rival that of any university.

Directly above them, under a pair of majestic old Moreton Bay figs trees that formerly shaded the Student Activities Center (and that demolition and construction crews have been instructed not to lay a finger on), a specialty restaurant – the campus center’s culinary crown jewel – will offer the choice of indoor or patio dining. For more casual fare, guests can stroll back to the plaza and ascend the Steps of Troy (or ride an interior elevator) to the new second-floor café. Occupying a desirable “end-cap” location overlooking Childs Way and Tommy Trojan, it too will tantalize with a distinctive ambiance and varied menu.

A final major focal point will be the Trojan Family Room. This grand rotunda will rise three stories over the plaza to form a majestic atrium. Inside, a huge fireplace will greet visitors on chilly days. Handsome but comfortable sofas and chairs will invite them to sit and chat with a friend or snuggle up with a book. The adjacent concierge will supply information, maps and cordial personal assistance.

Stairs hugging the rotunda’s walls will lead visitors on to their destination – be it the Epstein Family Alumni Center, the Admission Center, an eatery or any number of student-operated offices and meeting spaces.

Radiant heating in the plaza is but one environmentally sensitive element of the Tutor Campus Center. “A lot of the materials we are putting in are green,” says USC Capital Construction’s Stan Westfall ’69, MARCH ’71, project manager on the job.

When finished, the Tutor Campus Center will be USC’s first LEED-certified building – though Westfall is in friendly competition with fellow project managers in charge of two others now in the early stages of construction: the Student Health Center on the University Park campus and, on the Health Sciences campus, the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Integrative Biology and Stem Cell Research.

“It’s going to be close, but I think mine will be the first,” Westfall says cheerfully.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council that sets standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Since 1998, 14,000 projects in the United States have earned LEED certification, but on college campuses, it’s still a relative novelty.

USC is shooting for silver certification, the second of four possible LEED levels, determined by a 69-point scoring system that ranges from the mundane (energy-efficient electrical systems) to the esoteric (planting grass on the roof).

Everything that goes into the new building – “the type of wood we’re using (easily reforested bamboo), the way we configure our lighting (high-efficiency fluorescent), the colors of the materials (heat-absorbing hues), the kind of paint (non-toxic) and insulation (the thicker the better)” – is chosen for maximum LEED points, Westfall says.

The same goes for everything that comes out of the old buildings, too. “It’s not going to be ‘knock it down as quick as we can, haul it to a dump and bury it,’ ” says Westfall. “We’re actually going to use great care.”

Demolition crews will separate construction materials as much as possible so that concrete can be recrushed; rebar metals can be smelted down into new steel products. The rest will go into so-called “Loony Bins” – giant trash containers that recyclers will haul away and sift through at their leisure in search of reusable detritus.

Once the campus center opens, more green thinking will be in evidence: low-volume toilets and water-saving dishwashers, trash compactors that separate out biodegradables, special grinders that allow discarded food to be bagged and mulched.

“From the type of utensils we use, to the degree of carbons in packaging and paper products, to pulp for recycling, we are going to make sure this slingshots us forward in terms of green issues,” says Shuttleworth.

The same amenities that make the new Tutor Campus Center great for students will resonate no less with devoted alumni. Just “having the ability to mingle with current students and be part of the center of the university really reinforces the notion of the Trojan Family and ‘lifelong and worldwide,’” says the Alumni Association’s Scott Mory.

But the Epstein Family Alumni Center also represents a major improvement for the overall alumni relations operation. Currently headquartered in historic Widney Alumni House, the program needs room to grow. Already, a third of its full-time staff is in temporary offices at University Village.

“Alumni House is a beautiful historic building, a real symbol of the university, and we’re honored to be here,” says Mory. “The house is limited, though, in its ability to sustain a growing program.”

The new Epstein Family Alumni Center will be flush with administrative offices and meeting rooms, as well as adjacent spaces for the Mexican American Alumni Association, the Black Alumni Association, the Asian Pacific American Alumni Association and the Lambda Gay+Lesbian Alumni Association. In another big improvement, the new facility will include an alumni volunteer center. Fashioned after an executive lounge, it will give alumni leaders – who, Mory can attest, often spend many hours a week on campus – a place to relax between meetings, sip coffee, read a magazine or watch CNN.

“I think we’re going to have the best of both worlds,” says Mory, “in that we get to retain the historic Widney Alumni House as part of the division’s portfolio and legacy. And we also get to be in the middle of campus, in a state-of-the-art facility.”

With space freed up in Widney – the university’s oldest structure and a California Historic Landmark – the first floor will be converted into a “living room” and exhibition space where USC’s proud alumni history can be tastefully displayed.

The prospect of more space has Mory thinking creatively: The expansion, he says, “will allow us to do more reunions (currently only the 50th is celebrated university-wide), more regional programs, more support for alumni special-interest groups and the ability to consider more and different types of events.”

Can you remember your first visit to USC? It probably involved an unassuming room on the ground level of Trojan Hall student dormitory. A reception desk, a doctor’s office-style waiting area and a no-frills presentation area furnished with 40 stackable chairs, a white board, overhead projector and a wall-mounted TV. That pretty much sums up USC’s Admission Center.

“We have between 60,000 and 70,000 guests a year who start their visit to USC at the Admission Center,” says dean of admission and financial aid Katharine Harrington. It’s not unusual to find the presentation room filled to capacity and beyond.

For decades, this 2,000-square-foot space has been the “front door” to the university. Given its obvious limitations, Harrington congratulates her nimble staff on having “done an extraordinarily good job, I think, with very constrained resources.”

Distributed across five buildings on two campuses, her crew also processed and evaluated a dizzying 36,000 student applications this year for an enrolled freshman class of only  2,600. Undergraduate admission staff members also visit more than 750 high schools, conduct thousands of interviews and travel to dozens of cities on recruitment trips.

But campus tours are a hallmark. Guests can make reservations online, choosing between the hour-long guided tour (led by an upbeat, backward-walking student guide) or the half-day Meet USC program, which also includes a personalized tour of the academic unit of their choice. A third option – self-guided virtual tours downloadable on-site to guests’ PDAs and iPods – is in the planning phase.

“We know from surveys that our campus tour programs rank higher than any other experience our guests report having,” says Harrington. “We also know empirically that if we get somebody on campus, we have a two or three times better chance of them enrolling. That’s not about the facility, it’s about the people.

“But,” she adds, “it sure isn’t going to hurt to have an appropriately sized, appropriately resourced space.”

The new Admission Center will more than double the current space in Trojan Hall. And imagine what Harrington’s crack team of admission counselors and student tour guides could do with a high-tech auditorium that seats 150 guests (no more standing-room-only presentations). Imagine a waiting area flanked by big-screen monitors flashing scenic campus photos, student video testimonies and the latest 60-second NCAA television spot.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” Harrington enthuses. “It’s going to be state of the art and it’s just going to shout ‘USC.’ Which is exactly what we want.”

Not that Admission needs help. On the contrary, recruitment has been going gangbusters. Applications continue to rise, as do SAT scores and GPAs. Yield – the rate of students who, when offered admission, say ‘yes’ – jumped from 32.5 percent last year to 35 percent this year. “That just doesn’t happen,” says Harrington, genuinely awed. “Doesn’t happen.” Except it did.

Trojans like their school, and visitors can sense that. Crossing McCarthy Quad with a couple dozen applicants and their parents hanging on his every word, an amiable backward-walking Admissions Center tour guide recently had this to say “When students get together, it’s at Leavey Library. You may not believe it, but someday, you will be grateful that it’s open at 3 a.m.”

A little while later, pausing in Alumni Park, he confided that when looking for companionship, whatever time of day, students will make their way to Trousdale, where – like Parisians in the cafés of Montparnasse – they can always count on seeing three or four friends.

Endearing. But also troubling. Students shouldn’t have to depend on the library or the main pedestrian walkway as their primary hangout.

USC is remarkable in its ability to create a small-school feeling despite its big-school reality, says Harrington.

But USC is no small school. Its student population stands at 33,500, split roughly half and half between undergraduates and graduate students. With NYU and Northwestern, it shares the distinction of being one of the largest private universities in America. USC also enrolls the most international students of any university in America, and has done so for six years running.

All this on a core campus of 226 acres. Smaller than St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota – student population: 3,040.

It was the students themselves who lit the spark that, 13 years later, exploded into the $130 million campus center now under construction.

So keen were they for change that in 1995, with recession tightly cinching university budgets, they voted to put up $35,000 of their own cash – taken from student activity fees – to commission the feasibility study that got the ball rolling.

“Without that study, we wouldn’t have even gotten people’s attention,” says Jackson, who gives full credit where it’s due.

Succeeding student leaders have soldiered on unselfishly, knowing neither they nor their classmates would be around to reap the rewards. Year after year, undergraduate student presidents kept the issue on the front burner.

Outgoing Undergraduate Student Government president Sahil Chaudry, who graduates this month with a double major in international relations and political science, put in untold hours over the past two years as a student representative on the Campus Center Executive Committee.

He has been a strong advocate. “In order for us to compete with the best,” he says, “we have to have a campus center like this.”

Rival schools like Stanford, NYU, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Duke and Cornell all have state-of-the-art campus centers and student unions. 

Around the country, student union construction projects and improvements are frequently funded by student fees, and USC students are grateful for the $130 million coming from university coffers and individual donors.

“We feel that having this living room for the campus is crucial. Right now, you have students spread out all around campus. They’re segmented into their own organizations, clubs, social groups and dorms. This will bring everyone together.”

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.