Steven B. Sample, USC’s 10th President

Steven B. Sample took office as USC’s 10th president in March 1991 and was the inaugural holder of the university’s Robert C. Packard President’s Chair. Throughout his presidency, Sample remained an active member of the university faculty, regularly co-teaching with management expert Warren Bennis a popular spring-semester course for juniors and seniors titled “The Art and Adventure of Leadership.”

USC marked many major milestones under Sample’s leadership. The university recruited some of the most academically talented freshman classes in the country, more than doubled sponsored research to $430 million a year, and completed two comprehensive, university-wide strategic planning processes designed to take USC to new levels of academic excellence. It also mounted the most successful fundraising campaign, raising $2.85 billion and becoming the only university to receive four separate nine-figure gifts in one campaign: $112.5 million from Alfred E. Mann to establish the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, $120 million from Ambassador Walter Annenberg to create the Annenberg Center for Communication, $110 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation for the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and a second gift of $100 million from the Annenberg Foundation to support the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Important new facilities that opened under Sample’s watch included USC University Hospital, Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library, Jane Hoffman Popovich and J. Kristoffer Popovich Hall, the International Residential College at Parkside, Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Ronald Tutor Hall and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center expansion project, to name a few. What is more, USC was named “College of the Year 2000” by Time magazine and the Princeton Review for the university’s extensive community-service programs.