Illustrated by Jon Conrad

If knowledge is power, communication is the engine that generates it. And, as the first academic center for cinematic arts, an early adopter of online technologies for journalism and one of the birthplaces of the Internet, USC has been at the center of the communication revolution through much of its history.

Building on this tradition, the university now is moving to turn its unique combination of strengths into a mission: Find 100 of the world’s brightest young scholars at the beginning of their graduate careers, give them money and make room for them to do what has never been done.

That’s the bottom line of a decision by the Annenberg Foundation and USC to transform the 15-year-old USC Annenberg Center for Communication into a $120-million endowment fund that gives selected graduate students – 100 at a time, hand-picked from the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering – up to $35,000 per annum apiece. A total of $4.3 million is being awarded annually in fellowships, along with $600,000 in annual funding for interdisciplinary research in each of the schools.

“USC has been the place for communication,” says USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias. “The USC Annenberg Fellows program will now be a signature program in communication.

“We have strengths in the three partner schools that the program will synergize and unleash in a way that can create a generation of USC-trained leaders on one of the great frontiers of human endeavor.”

There will be no structure, no central command, no director, no specific plan: just a directive to search for the best and the brightest. Wherever possible, the students will be expected to inhabit the intellectual space where the three schools overlap. The idea is to encourage this intellectual cohort to interact: starting now and continuing through the rest of their lives.

The intersection between communication, cinematic arts and engineering can be linked to the lives of three USC pioneers.

When Ambassador Walter Annenberg – a giant of American publishing who served as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James in the United Kingdom and who became known as one of this country’s most prolific philanthropists – established the USC Annenberg School for Communication in 1971, it marked a significant step forward in USC’s efforts to bring a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to this field. (The Annenberg Foundation made an additional gift of $100 million to the school in 2002, reinforcing Walter Annenberg’s original mission statement, which begins: “Every human advancement or reversal can be understood through communication.”)

And when the Annenberg Foundation followed that up with a then-record $120 million gift in 1993 to create the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, it was a recognition of USC’s unique combination of strengths as well as the advantages of its location in Southern California, which President Steven B. Sample emphatically calls the nation’s true communication capital.

“There’s no question that the media future is going to be built from a cross-fertilization between science and art, technology and dreams,” said USC Annenberg Center founding executive director Elizabeth Daley at the time.

Just a few years after the founding of the USC Annenberg School, Cinematic Arts alumnus George Lucas ’66 would begin to revolutionize contemporary storytelling through his Star Wars series and his breakthroughs in visual and aural effects. His influence has permeated the USC School of Cinematic Arts, refocusing its attention toward both new technologies in cinema and using these new technologies in education.

Around that same time, the Viterbi algorithm – named after Andrew Viterbi Ph.D. ’62, another alumnus and the future co-founder of Qualcomm – was having a seminal impact on telecommunications, one which helped shape the school that is now named in his honor.

One of the early examples of the collaborative approach among the three schools – which could pool expertise in conventional media, digital media and creative storytelling – was the creation of  the USC Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) in 1996. This NSF-funded engineering research lab set out to devise new uses for and forms of digital media; one of its major achievements is an “immersive audio” technology that’s indistinguishable from live sound.

A similar alliance among these schools helped mold USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a $100-million project funded by the U.S. Army to create new digital training tools for soldiers. It debuted in 2004, at a time when electronic games (interactive media) were emerging as a major new digital art and instructional form.

Both the School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Viterbi School independently moved to create a series of classes leading to new degrees in game design and development, while the USC Annenberg School also was creating programs to study virtual gaming and its impact.

(In 2007 the Provost’s office established the USC Games Institute, described by vice provost for research Randolph Hall as an “umbrella” for games projects in USC Viterbi, ICT, Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg and the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, which by then had created its own Intermedia Division.)

In 1998, Cinematic Arts dean Elizabeth Daley, with the financial support of the Annenberg Foundation and inspiration from George Lucas, created USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy – a center designed not only to study the new forms of media but also to teach about their impact, with courses like “The Languages of New Media.” Since its founding, IML has worked with more than 100 faculty members at USC and beyond, in addition to scores of K-12 teachers, “to hone the philosophy and teaching methods of a postmodern notion of literacy based on multiple media – text, audio files, database-based resources and whatever comes next.”

“What sets IML apart from traditional ‘media literacy’ initiatives is that it’s not centered on interpreting how others are using such media,” says Holly Willis, director of academic programs at the institute. “Rather, it is focused on enabling our students and scholars to be creators in their own right.”

This is critical because 21st-century academic products – studies, theses and so forth – are now themselves multimedia digital documents. The term paper is, more and more frequently, not on paper at all.

The traditional role of paper – in this case, newspapers – brings us to the third leg of the USC Annenberg Fellows triangle.

The USC Annenberg School – not to be confused with the newer USC Annenberg Center – has long been studying the new forms that digital media brought to journalism specifically, and to the human exchange of information in general; and its new dean, Ernest J. Wilson III, is committed to expanding this focus.

“Technology and globalization have profoundly altered the way humans interact,” he says. “More than at any other moment in history, communication – through various forms of new and traditional media, journalism, entertainment, public relations, public diplomacy and other areas studied at USC Annenberg – is the field drawing students who want to make an impact in the world.”

A complete list of USC Annenberg activities would triple the length of this article, but a few elements will illustrate the textures. There is, for example, the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, creating an academic repository that uses new digital resources to accurately quantify what had been vague suppositions. The jointly sponsored USC Annenberg-USC Viterbi Haptics Laboratory investigates the possibility of communicating via touch, again using digital tools and resources.

Communication psychologist Lynn Miller uses digitally created virtual environments – residing in engineering’s IMSC and elsewhere in the ether – for her studies of socially optimized learning. Organizational communication researcher Patricia Riley is developing and evaluating virtual models for leadership training.

On the journalism side, the school’s Knight Digital Media Center trains journalists in digital news-gathering; the school publishes the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, a leader in mapping the profession’s fluid frontiers, which are populated by such players as Facebook, YouTube, Flikr, Diggit, De.lici.ous, Reddit, text-messaging, blogs and all the other flavors of electronic information, with new flavors emerging almost daily.

USC Viterbi dean Yannis Yortsos points out that these unprecedented advances in modern communication trace their origins to the communication revolution pioneered by engineer Claude Shannon and advanced by giants in the Viterbi School over the last several decades.

He calls the communication group at USC Viterbi “one of the jewels in the crown” and has applauded the Annenberg Fellows program for its vision of integrating advances in the mathematics and engineering of communication with the creative and social aspects of modern communication practice.

The bottom line: Digital media have transformed communication completely, overwhelming the boundaries between disciplines. The USC Annenberg Fellows are going to try to make sense of this new world.

The first group of Annenberg Fellows was named last October, just six months after Nikias articulated his vision for such a program.

Teaching the tools needed to comprehend, study or create in the age of digital information is problematic, he argued, because in many cases the tools don’t exist yet. The USC Annenberg Fellows program is about building a cadre of young innovators on the brink of creating them.

“It will be all about the people,” says Nikias. “We want this university to produce the next generation of scholars of the Information Age.”

The vast stretch of possible subject matter in this rapidly changing field makes the enterprise rather like the old fable about the blind men exploring an elephant through touch and telling each other of their discoveries. The idea here is to identify very, very smart blind people, position their hands on remote parts of the elephant’s hide and, above all, keep them talking to each other.

The key to this, Nikias believes, is to assemble the pool of potential communication trailblazers who arrive on campus each year – from a huge range of disciplines, countries, interests and goals – into a fellowship.

The Annenberg Fellowships are part of a wider effort to increase significantly USC’s institutional support for graduate study in general. Graduate and professional schools are defined, to a large extent, by the students they attract: Schools that attract the best become the best. Reputation and excellence of faculty are obviously crucial, but without promising students, the whole structure teeters. And without financial support, many promising students simply can’t attend the university. 

Historically at USC, financial resources for Ph.D. candidates have lagged. Nikias has made a commitment that, from now on, it will not. “We have made the creation of new Ph.D. student fellowships a top priority,” he wrote in his March 2007 statement announcing the fellowship program. “This change will help spur the transformation of graduate research and education at USC.”

The $6 million annual USC Annenberg Fellows program, “combined with the university’s recent commitment to triple other fellowship funding, will bring total funding to $15 million annually,” Nikias says. “Few if any universities in the United States can match this level of commitment.”

The commitment to communication, however, goes beyond the dollars. Jean Morrison, USC’s vice provost for graduate programs, sits at the center of the effort to grow commonality and find ways to encourage the 100-plus fellows to knit themselves into a vibrant community, forge ongoing interdisciplinary work relationships and lay the groundwork that will encourage them to self-identify as USC Annenberg Fellows throughout their professional lives.

It won’t happen overnight, acknowledges Morrison, who is a geologist by training. The first batch of fellows, in fact, includes some who were already students here and designated Annenberg Fellows after the fact.

On Sept. 11, 2007, most of the 103 graduate students who compose the first cohort of Annenberg Fellows gathered for a reception hosted by Nikias and the three deans. Circulating around the room and avidly discussing their study plans were 34 students from USC Annenberg, 40 from Cinematic Arts and 29 from USC Viterbi.

Not all the fellows are creating multimedia or digital tools. Many of those pursuing degrees in cinematic arts and communication will produce theses built on traditional roots, sources and methods. But the world being studied is itself undergoing digital changes. As the fellowship program evolves, the participating schools expect their Annenberg Fellows to naturally take the lead in studying and applying these changes to their work.

Morrison, an energetic administrator with a ready smile and abundant pictures of her children on the wall, insists on the need to avoid haste, stand back and let the seedling grow to its organic shape. She also directs USC’s Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program, which is an innovative recruitment and retention effort funded by a $20 million gift and aimed at attracting women faculty to programs in engineering and science. WiSE programs – which support graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs and faculty – have proved to be remarkably successful.

“We’re at the beginning of the creation of this program,” she says of the Annenberg Fellows, “and we” – referring to the three academic deans, herself and the provost – “all agree we want to make something unique. We don’t want to jump in so quickly that we put in mundane, traditional structures. When we establish activities that are going to define the program, we want them to be innovative.”

The emphasis, Morrison notes, is on having structure and interaction come from the students themselves, from the ground up.

Some resources are being assembled. Already in the works is a Web site to serve as the virtual hub of this scholarly community. There’s talk of special seminars or classes. Perhaps prizes for general or cross-disciplinary brilliance.

Real estate will help. The program will be centered in Kerckhoff House, the former home of the USC Annenberg Center. It’s a stately 1906 Tudor Revival mansion on West Adams Boulevard, complete with a coach house and an adjoining modern structure, designed by famed modernist Richard Neutra, which already houses Cinematic Arts’ Institute for Multimedia Literacy. On the ground floor of the gracious old house will be lounges, seminar rooms and public space where Annenberg Fellows can mix and mingle.

While the details are still to come, the enthusiasm for the new program is tangible.

“These fellowships provide much-needed support for outstanding graduate students,” says Daley.

“We are tremendously proud to have the Annenberg name associated with the School of Cinematic Arts, and these students will no doubt advance the theory and the practice of film, television and interactive media in ways that might not have been possible before.” 

Yortsos echoes her sentiments.

“I think that technology and engineering are enabling,” he says. “But engineers who have very good tools sometimes aren’t exposed to other disciplines that have a different texture, or a different layering.

“Conversely, academics in other areas may be unaware of the power of engineering and mathematical tools. The USC Annenberg Fellows type of collaboration will allow tools from engineering to attack problems in other areas and enable the solution of non-trivial, complex problems. It has the potential for learning about problems that exist in corresponding areas.”

Ernest Wilson, the USC Annenberg School dean, talks about “creating an epistemic intellectual community of scholars who dare to do exceptional things.

“My dream,” he adds, “is that 10 years or a generation from now someone will make a discovery, will find a new way of explaining the world, and say: ‘This was because of that wonderful experience of collectively interacting with people way outside my specialty.’”

To learn more about the USC Annenberg Fellows program and see profiles of all current fellows, visit www.usc.edu and search for Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Program. Additional information can be found at www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14362.html

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