Founded in a mustard field in 1880 when Los Angeles was still mostly ranchland, the evolution of the University of Southern California has mirrored that of the Southland: It grew, got wealthy, struggled with a flaky reputation among the East Coast elites it so badly wanted to impress, and finally started to matter when it began to accumulate serious money and influence. L.A. had finally become a global capital, and the real estate moguls and Hollywood execs that ran it were eager to have a university that could hold its own among the Ivies.
For much of its early life, USC was most famous for its athletic programs and affluent student bodyâby the early 1990s the Princeton Review noted that the school was best known for its festive fraternity parties and sports teams. It had a nearly 70 percent acceptance rate. A few strong leaders, one with a knack for fundraising and PR, eventually turned the university into a research and academic behemoth that began to shoulder its way among more established East Coast rivals. But respect proved elusive.
Enter Chrysostomos Loizos âMaxâ Nikias. A Greek-Cypriot engineer, Nikias was an ambitious, self-confident salesman comfortable hobnobbing with billionaires and fond of quoting the classics. Educated in Athens, he loved to play off USCâs mascot, the Trojan, and drolly referred to the school as âTroy.â He often talked of USC as âa new Rome of the Westââand aggrandized its importance at the center of an academic empire that spanned the United States and across the Pacific Rim. He learned early in his career how money could fuel his aspirations. He came to USC as an engineering professor in 1991, and by 2003, heâd managed to coax a $52 million donation from a cofounder of Qualcomm. As soon as Nikias took over as USCâs president in 2010 he launched an audacious campaign to raise money and finally enshrine the school as a top-tier institution. When the highest fundraising goal his advisers supposedly came up with was $3 billion, he impulsively doubled the figureâearning the nickname the âSix-Billion-Dollar Man.â He would meet that milestone 18 months ahead of schedule.
Nikias inherited a school on the rise, and it was already superior, financially and academically, compared to any time in its history. Financial aid was at an all-time high, the endowment was flush, the student bodyâs test scores had, at long last, surpassed those of its crosstown rival, UCLA. But Nikias had bigger plansâhe dreamed of turning the school into an intellectual powerhouse that would achieve âundisputed elite status,â mirroring the ascent of Los Angeles on the global stage. The pace of his climb was dizzying: In just seven and a half years, Nikias oversaw the largest financial aid pool, the largest increase in student applications and international students, the largest hiring spree of faculty and researchers, the most ribbon-cutting ceremonies for research centers, the opening of the largest building on campus, the largest development project, and the start of the longest sustained building boom, driven by the schoolâs most successful fundraising drive ever (which included the largest single donation in the universityâs history).

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His crowning achievement was an ambitious campus expansionâthe biggest development in South L.A. historyâwhich added 25 percent more student housing to the largely distressed neighborhood surrounding the school. It featured a 20-foot-tall bronze statue of Hecuba, the legendary queen of ancient Troy, and buildings that mimicked the Collegiate Gothic style of Yale (or Hogwarts at Universal Studios, depending on whom you ask), as well as subterranean outlets of Target, Trader Joeâs, and Abercrombie & Fitch. The unveiling of Hecuba at a star-studded ceremony in August 2017 was the high point in Nikiasâs bold plan to remake USC.
For once it seemed that USC had finally matched the status of elite schools that so preoccupied USCâs president. But Nikiasâs haste and hubris led to bad decisions and entanglements with wealthy but unscrupulous donors. Ensconced in his luxe presidential mansion, he ignored warning signals and wound up presiding over what may well beâonce the full extent of its toxicity is revealedâthe most corrupt university administration in Americaâs history of higher education. A run that saw an overdosed prostitute in a hotel room, an FBI sting of a basketball coach, disturbing sexual abuse allegations and cover-ups, and a shockingly blatant influence-peddling scheme. As a result it now faces a mountain of pending settlements.
Itâs also true that USC is, in many ways, a better institution after Nikiasâs tenure, with more resources and a more diverse student body. But his aversion to transparency and his outsize appetites eventually led to his downfall, setting the schoolâs reputation back decades. Now with USCâs central role in the massive college admissions scandal, the school is once more the butt of late-night television jokes. The âUniversity of Spoiled Childrenâ tag is back. Itâs as if Nikias is starring in his own version of a tragedy by Euripides.
In a skit that aired just days after the college admissions scandal broke, Saturday Night Live opened with a scene set at a campus much like USCâs. Cast members played college admissions counselors trying to decide which students to admit from a wait list. They ended up accepting one underqualified student who had photoshopped his face onto a picture of physicist Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair. They also gave the green light to the grandson of actor Lou Ferrigno, star of the â70s show The Incredible Hulk. âHe Hollywood; he fun!â hammed one of the characters.
The school was an easy target: One of the most famous of the 33 wealthy parents indicted, Lori Loughlin, was caught bribing her daughtersâ way into USC. And the schoolâs old reputation as a playground for rich kids was easy to resuscitate once it was reported that Loughlinâs daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli, an Instagram star who had bragged about going to school only for parties, found out sheâd become the wrong kind of famous while sunning in the Bahamas on a $100 million yacht. The vessel belonged to Rick Caruso, the billionaire owner of the Grove retail center and chairman of USCâs board of trustees.
Business and development have played a hefty role at USC ever since a gun-toting, real-estate-promoting teetotaler judge named Robert Maclay Widney founded the college in 1880. On the eve of a land boom in Los Angeles, he and a group of prominent local businessmen opened a white clapboard schoolhouse for 10 faculty members and 53 students, proclaiming it the University of Southern California.
USCâs rise in stature would parallel the ascent of Los Angeles, but in the schoolâs early years, a lack of funding prevented it from achieving much academic distinction. The trustees built a brand around Trojan athletics, high enrollments, fraternities and sororities, and supplying Southern California with dentists, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, educators, and, later, film, radio, and TV professionals. The university splurged on Trojan football stars and gold-medal Olympians, but the pay for faculty and the budget for library holdings and research was famously meager.
By the 1920s the schoolâs rich-kid rap had already begun to take hold. Things finally got more serious under president Rufus B. von KleinSmid, an imperious and autocratic leader who expanded the campus land and tripled the number of academic schools during his long run from 1921 to 1947. He was followed later by Dr. Norman H. Topping, a modern academic reformer who transformed USC into a prominent national research institute by the end of the 1960s. Still, by 1964, USCâs endowment was less than one-tenth the size of Stanfordâsâ$15.7 million compared to $160 million.
But by 1992, admission to USC was not yet worth the risk of a possible prison sentence. Hereâs âWhatâs Hotâ about the University of Southern California, according to the Princeton Reviewâs guide to best colleges published that year: âintercollegiate sports, fraternities, sororities, good-looking students, college newspaper, and dating. Whatâs Not: cost of living, town-gown relations, dorm safety, library, dorm comfort, alternative rock, living on campus, and interaction among students.â The schoolâs academic rating in the review, based on responses that Trojan students gave to survey questions about their college experiences, was 83 (out of 100). The campus quality of life rating was a dismal 71. The review contains a brief narrative explanation of the results in a section labeled student life, which reads: âFraternities play a huge role in the USC social scene, partly because the surrounding area is perceived as inhospitable, and partly because USC attracts the kind of students that love fraternity parties.â âWealthy students are ubiquitous,â a section labeled âAbout the Studentsâ continues. âOne student wrote that our reputation as the University of Spoiled Children and University of Special Connections is very fitting.â

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Dr. Lloyd Armstrong was recruited from Johns Hopkins University to become USCâs provost and chief academic officer in 1993, the year after the Princeton Review survey, and his recollection jibes with its findings. âIn large part, we had been that University of Spoiled Children,â says the now-78-year-old professor emeritus of physics. Those were days of near-open admissions (the acceptance rate in the â90s peaked at 70 percent) and a mostly white, mostly Californian student body. (At one infamous football game halftime show that took place in the Coliseum, the Stanford marching band memorably spelled out USCâs modest SAT scores.)
Back in the 1990s the crisis at USC was not ethical but financial. âAll universities depend on a freshman class showing up, and ours was not showing up,â Armstrong says. He and the schoolâs shrewd and gentlemanly new president, Steven B. Sample, concentrated on improving academics, steadily building the endowment, and turning around the schoolâs reputation for affluent mediocrity, which was easier said than done.
The image problem was so pervasive that they decided on a risky PR campaign that winkingly acknowledged the reputation. As USC revamped the general education program, it sent recruitment brochures to high school counselors that said, in effect, âCome to USC, the university that will spoil your children with a great education.â
âIt really caught everybodyâs attention. It took what was a negative image and turned it around and said, âWhy shouldnât your children be spoiled?ââ Armstrong recalled. âYou have to grab the bad and make it good.â
Sample and Armstrong worked to transform the university, raising academic standards, raising the endowment to new heights, reining in the worst excesses at Greek organizations and football game-day celebrations, and catapulting the schoolâs national ranking to the cusp of the Top 25. When Armstrong stepped down in 2005, Sample chose Nikias, who had risen to become the dean of the engineering school, to take over as provost.
Sampleâs signature is on Nikiasâs diploma. The former was president of the State University of New York at Buffalo the same year Nikias completed his doctorate with an expertise in radar and sonar there. They had a rapport as engineers, and many interpreted the appointment as a sign that Sample was grooming Nikias to be his eventual successor, especially since the younger man had a track record of raising eye-popping amounts of money for the university.
Within five years of his arrival in the early â90s, Nikias won a $12.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to open the countryâs first national engineering research center for multimedia. He had beaten out 116 other universities for the award, including Columbia and UC Berkeley.
The prestigious award triggered millions more in commitments that Nikias raised from the corporate and government sectorsâan ensuing $46.4 million raised drew notice and gave Nikias the inside track for dean of the school of engineering when the position opened in 2001. Three years later, dean Nikias closed the largest individual donation in the history of the department, a $52 million gift from Andrew Viterbi, PhD (â62), cofounder of Qualcomm and a member of the USC board of trustees. In recognition the school was renamed the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
As provost, Nikias made big-money moves and became an indispensable executive to a powerful group of school officials
Armstrong says that as Sample began to succumb to Parkinsonâs disease, Sample became less active and gradually began relinquishing power, making Nikias the de facto president in the eyes of the trustees. âSteve had a hard last set of years,â Armstrong says, âand Max was there to carry the ball.â As provost, Nikias made big-money moves and became an indispensable executive to a powerful group of school officials. What brought the team together, aside from the immense wealth of the trustees, was that since most were West Coast-based, USCâs rise to prominence as a world-class Los Angeles institution reflected well on them all. Nikias tailored his appeal masterfully to what they most desired: to be associated prominently with a great university and academic hub connecting the city to a world centered around the Pacific Rim.
Nikiasâs Mediterranean manners and warmth charmed campus notables everywhere from the medical school to the school of cinematic arts. âMax is one of those people who leads so well that he never has to look over his shoulder to see if anybodyâs following him,â said trustee Bruce Ramer, an entertainment lawyer who successfully negotiated with Nikias for the school to obtain a video archive of thousands of Holocaust survivorsâ testimonies that belong to Steven Spielberg, another trustee.
Nikias oversaw the $275 million purchase of two private hospitals from Tenet Healthcare Corp. It was a prelude to the founding of an academic medical center on the site, named in recognition of a $150 million gift from the family foundation of trustee William Keck II (â64).
By the time Sample made known he was stepping down as president, the accession of Nikias was such a foregone conclusion that some trustees reportedly questioned the point of interviewing other candidates or conducting a national search. On the day of the presidential inaugural ceremony, Edward P. Roski Jr., chairman of USCâs board and chairman and chief executive of one of the oldest and largest privately held real estate companies in the country, introduced Nikias as âa remarkable and inspiring leader, a brilliant scholar, and the best possible person to lead our university forward.â
Donning the University medallion of glittering gold, symbol of the Trojan president, over his heraldic robe of scholar, the bald and bespectacled Nikias laid out a vision for USC that was not a change of direction from his predecessor so much as a dramatic acceleration, a commitment âto run the next marathon at a sprinterâs pace.â People who had known him for years observed a pronounced shift in his personality and management style. It was more top-down, less consultative, less tolerant of bad news. His circle of advisers shrank, and he grew isolated from the universityâs day-to-day life. Negative feedback rarely reached his ears. âSample did tend to listen to people who disagreed with him,â says William Tierney, a professor and scholar of higher education at USC since 1994 who nominated Nikias as provost and recommended him for president. âWhen Max became president, it became an imperial presidency, and he really stopped listening to people.â
Early in his tenure, Nikias expanded the board of trustees to its largest size ever, adding Hollywood players, L.A. business tycoons, and Pacific Rim financiers and industrialists. The move facilitated billions in additional gifts to the university. Yale has 17 board members; Harvard has 29; Stanford has 31; USC had 49 before Nikias grew it to 58. He handpicked members of a small executive committee to be the decision-makers, with him at the head. âThatâs not healthy,â says Dr. Michael B. Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Nikias was the king of the campus. He held afternoon teas with 20 students a couple of times a month. He taught a freshman seminar on Athenian democracy. He marched across the grounds in his dark suits, bearing a Trojan lapel pin and a pocket square. He enjoyed all the trappings of grandeur associated with the USC presidency. He and his wife, Niki, and their two daughters moved into the presidentâs house, a 13,000-square-foot American Colonial mansion secluded behind a high gate in the Estate District of San Marino. Built in 1932 by the same architect who designed Santa Barbaraâs Biltmore Hotel, it housed a swimming pool, rose garden, and a rolling lawn that could fit hundreds of guests. Nikias and his wife hosted a dinner for 400 students who had nowhere to go on Thanksgiving.
In the first six and a half years that Nikias was president, the university raised more money than it had in the previous six and a half decades. USC became one of three schools in the country to rank among the top five largest university fundraisers for five consecutive years; the others were Harvard and Stanford. The trustees awarded his progress with a bonus of $1.5 million in 2015, making him the third-highest-paid university president in the country that year.
In the first six and a half years that Nikias was president, the university raised more money than it had in the previous six and a half decades.
Under his leadership, USC built 19 research centers and institutes for the arts and humanities, social and natural sciences, and engineering and technology. The size of the fundraising staff doubled. Measured in square feet, the academic and residential footprint of the university increased by nearly a third; the average amount of gifts and pledges given annually more than tripled; the universityâs endowment nearly doubled. It was, as Nikias declared, âa decadeâs worth of progress in just a few years.â
With USC thriving, questions which have since clouded its reputation seemed less pressing. Even after dozens of students and staff accused the campus gynecologist of abuse, he remained at his job. A slew of faculty members complained about the dean of the medical school who had driven drunk from public events and hit on students. Nevertheless, the dean, who Nikias described as âa fundraiser of singular quality,â was reappointed.
For his part, Nikias grew more confident with each annual windfall. He launched a $6 billion capital campaign when USC had only $1 billion in hand. A chaired professor in the business school relayed a story heâd heard around campus that Nikias convened a meeting of fundraising consultants that heâd hired who recommended he set the goal at $3 billion. âAll right then,â Nikias said, pounding his fist on the conference table for good measure, â$6 billion it is.â
In terms of dollars and square footage, USC Inc. had seen an immense amount of success in a short time. But administrators also cut corners, ignoring or overlooking the dubious motives and associations of some of the schoolâs splashier donors and dismissing any clouds that shadowed USCâs ethical guidelines. Nikias secured a commitment of $20 million from the former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to found an institute at the school of public policy, while Schwarzenegger was still facing allegations from six women who accused him of groping them. The school of cinematic arts took $5 million from inside trader and hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen at around the time that Cohenâs twin daughters were admitted to the top-flight school. Nikias made Frank Fertitta, a Las Vegas casino and resort magnate who graduated from USC in 1984, a board member after Fertitta donated a âmajor capital giftâ of an undisclosed amount to the USC Marshall School of Business. Fertittaâs daughter is a 2012 graduate of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Equally concerning was the universityâs involvement with many of the #MeToo eraâs most egregious figures. The school took $5 million from X-Men director Bryan Singer the year before he was accused in a civil lawsuit of sexual assault of a minor. It has since removed Singerâs name from the film and media studies department and taken down a commemorative plaque that bore his name. Last October, the school of cinematic arts rejected a $5 million scholarship endowment by alleged rapist Harvey Weinsteinâintended to fund projects by women filmmakersâafter a student-led Change.org petition labeled the gift âblood money in exchange for [USCâs] soul.â Most recently, the school decided not to add Les Moonvesâs name on a $59 million Annenberg school media center that heâd helped fund after the CBS boss stepped down amid allegations of sexual assault.
USCâs central role in the college admissions scandal comes at the end of a two-year run of scandal that is unprecedented in the annals of American higher education.
âI canât think of anything close,â said Michael Useem, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvaniaâs Wharton School who specializes in catastrophic risk management and corporate governance. âThere are very few examples where youâve had so many different parts of a university affected at almost the same time.â
In 2016 the dean of the Keck School of Medicine, Carmen A. Puliafito was revealed to have been in a hotel room with a drugged-up 21-year-old woman; he was allowed to remain on faculty, continue attending to patients, and go on raising money for the university until July 2017. His successor was ousted just months after it came to light that the university had ignored a sexual harassment and retaliation claim brought against him by a young woman researcher. A vice president who helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars stepped down after the university opened an investigation of multiple complaints of sexual harassment against him. An FBI sting caught the menâs basketball associate head coach pocketing thousands of dollars in bribes from a sports agent.
Most shocking, though, was last summerâs bombshell that campus gynecologist George Tyndall had sexually abused hundreds of young patients over a period of three decades. Though the complaints began in the â90sâbefore many of the doctorâs later victims were even bornâTyndall continued seeing patients until 2017, when top administrators allowed him to resign quietly with a financial payout. School officials declined to inform his patients or report him to the state medical board. It wasnât until a health center nurse went outside standard reporting channels and filed a complaint about the doctor to an on-campus rape crisis center that the university finally acted. The schoolâs eventual settlements with plaintiffs in the Tyndall case will likely top the record-breaking sum of $500 million that Michigan State University paid to the victims of disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar. USCâs eventual settlement of the Tyndall case will likely top itâconceivably hitting upward of $1 billion.

By August 2018 the Tyndall scandal would prompt Nikias to step down as president. But the move was akin to closing the barn door after the horses had escaped. The contagion of shaky oversight and money grabbing had long ago metastasized into the universityâs DNA. The blow delivered by the admissions scandal wouldnât just tarnish USCâs academic reputation, it would aggravate the rawest spot in the Trojan psyche: As Trevor Noah quipped on The Daily Show, âThe whole country has been rocked by the news that hundreds of parents have been accused of bribing their kidsâ ways into elite collegesâand also USC.â
USC was one of eight schools targeted by the mastermind of the admissions scam, a Newport Beach-based private life coach and college counselor named William âRickâ Singer, but its role easily overshadowed the rest of the institutions implicated in the indictment. Of the five schools that accepted falsified athletic recruits, USC let in twice as many as all the other schools combined. It also had the most university employees charged, including current and former coaches, as well as the lone administrator.
The contagion of shaky oversight and money grabbing had long ago metastasized into the universityâs DNA.
The universityâs immediate response to the crisis was to assure Trojan faithful that this scandal stood apart from the rash of scandals that preceded itâthis time, USC was the victim. Interim president Wanda Austin, who stepped in after Nikias was removed from office last May, said in a statement, âThe government has repeatedly informed us that it views USC as a victim and that these employees purposefully deceived USC.â
But with USCâs track record, few were inclined to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. Concerned Faculty of USC, a prominent group of hundreds of professors that formed to call for Nikias to step down and was instrumental in bringing about his eventual resignation, said in a statement: âWe bear an extra burden to act on this case with the highest level of transparency, accountability, and faculty governance.â
Singer helped wealthy and, in some cases, famous parents sneak their academically underqualified children into Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Wake Forest, the University of Texas at Austin, and UCLA. He helped children cheat on exams to earn higher SAT and ACT scores, and bribed college coaches to knowingly misrepresent middling applicants to the admissions boards as prospective athletes, even when it was doubtful they ever played a sport. But in no other school was Singer so confident in the likelihood of the scamâs success as he was with USC. âIf you want [U]SC,â he said in an email to actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, who allegedly paid $500,000 in bribes in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team, âI have the game plan ready to go into motion.â
The âgame planâ involved USC associate athletic director Donna Heinel, third in command in the athletics separtment, who allegedly accepted more than $1.3 million in bribes from at least 16 parents from 2014 to 2018. The scheme required parents to make a $50,000 down payment to âUSC Athleticsâ once they received preliminary notification of their childâs acceptance to the school. As Singer explains in an intercepted phone conversation with a parent transcribed in the indictment, Heinel works the scam by placing the names of his student clients on a list of ârecruited walk-ons,â or nonscholarship athletes. When they donât show up for practice, Singer says, âCoaches are OK with that because, essentially, donations are going to help their programs, and they know that.â
Six days before the federal indictment was released, the USC Athletics Department announced that it had raised $748 million for the Nikias-led campaign. Its original goal was $300 million.

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Kirk Brennan, USC director of undergraduate admissions and second in command to the dean, raised concern last year about a male student who was accepted to play water polo for USCâthe NCAAâs national champion that yearâwho had attended a high school with no water polo team. The studentâs father was the CEO at an L.A.-based provider of drinking water and wastewater systems and had allegedly paid $250,000 to secure admission for his son; a guidance counselor at the high school the student attended had raised concerns with USC admissions staff.
In response, Heinel sent a tersely worded email telling Brennan the boy âparticipates in tournaments in Greece, Serbia (how he met Jovan [Vavic]) and Portugalâ and â[h]e is small but he has a long torso but short strong legs plus he is fast which helps him win the draws to start play after goals are scored.â To which Brennan replied, obligingly, âIf you donât mind, Iâll pass an edited/paraphrased version of your note along to the school, to assure them weâre looking at this stuff. They seemed unusually skeptical. ⌠I read a good deal about tennis, some basketball, but not much else in the way of athletics.â
Since the departure of Nikias, board chairman Rick Caruso has stepped into the breach, putting out fires and pledging to root out what Caruso called systemic misconduct on campus. A handful of major donors who remain loyal to the ousted president have resisted the implications of the push. But USCâs leading role in the admissions bribery scandal has strengthened Carusoâs mandate as chair: The universityâs reputation is now very much at stake.
Caruso has won the support of Concerned Faculty of USC, the group of professors pushing for an administrative overhaul. This despite what one chaired professor called Carusoâs âGilligan momentââa TMZ report that placed Olivia Jade Giannulli on the developerâs yacht in the Bahamas at the time news of the scandal broke.
Still, some faculty members are hopeful that an unofficial policy of suppression has reached its end. âRick Caruso has made it known he wants people to come forward,â said Ariela Gross, a professor of law and history and the head of Concerned Faculty of USC. âSince there had been this culture of cover-up, it seems inevitable to me thereâs going to be more before this is over. It all has to come out before we can move forward.â
Some faculty members are hopeful that an unofficial policy of suppression has reached its end.
In August, Sebastian Ridley-Thomas was removed from the school of social workâs faculty after an investigation raised concerns involving a $100,000 donation from a campaign fund controlled by his father, L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas, whose district includes USC. In December Austin fired the dean of the school of business, James Ellis. At issue was Ellisâs nonresponse to sexual harassment and discrimination claims made against faculty and staff in the business school, but the facts of the case remain confidential.
On March 20 Caruso introduced biologist and educator Carol L. Folt as the universityâs 12th president. âIf nothing else,â he said, âthis last nine months have shown us that this university can handle whateverâs thrown at us. We are as ready, we are as strong, we are as courageous, we are as clear-eyed and principled as that Trojan warrior sitting out in front of Bovard [Auditorium]. And we are ready to move forward.â
Folt, 68, is the first female president in USCâs 139-year history. A native of Akron, Ohio, and the granddaughter of Albanian immigrants, she softens up tough crowds with tales about the seafood shack where she waited tables during her studies at Santa Barbara City College and later UCSB. She was a professor of biological sciences on the faculty at Dartmouth College and later became a dean and chief academic officer before taking on a supercharged stint at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Folt softened up the crowd at her introductory press conference with a story about working at Moby Dickâs restaurant as she earned a degree in aquatic biology from UC Santa Barbara. It was a humble departure from the âdestined reign of Troy.â
Folt is no stranger to scandal. At UNC, she inherited a mammoth case of academic fraud, possible NCAA infractions due to misreported athlete attendance, and the politically charged removal of a Confederate memorial statue known as Silent Sam. All the issues were handled with relative aplomb: She dodged athletic sanctions, got the school reinstated to a regional commission on colleges after firing nine employees, and ordered Silent Samâs commemorative plaques and pedestal relocated amid threats of violence from alt-right protesters.
Folt was the unanimous selection of a search committee that interviewed 100 candidates, according to the Los Angeles Times. Something that may have tipped the balance in her favor: She says experience has taught her that âheavy-handed, top-down determinationâ doesnât reform anything.
On March 27 Gross and other members of the USC faculty group met with the new president, whom Gross described as âpersonable and energetic.â Folt surprised them by expressing support for a key demand of Concerned Faculty: involving members of faculty, staff, and the student body in the oversight and investigation of admissions and athletic recruitment.
USC is hoping that Folt is the down-to-earth, battle-tested president the university needs to get beyond the crisis and get it back on course, but sheâll have her work cut out for her. The federal probe into the college admissions scandal continues, and in a separate but related matter, the U.S. Education Department informed USC in late March that it is opening a preliminary investigation into possible violations related to federal financial aid programs. On the Tyndall front, a federal judged stalled an attempt by USCâs lawyers to settle the $215 million class-action suit by hundreds of former patients. The law firm that USCâs board hired to investigate the allegations against the doctor has not finished its work; it is unclear if the physicianâs alleged victims will ever see the firmâs findings.
âClearly we have issues that are being dealt with in the immediate time frame by president Austin and others,â Folt said via phone, âbut theyâre going to continue, and Iâll have to be intimately involved with the decisions made so that we can focus on the future.â Two weeks after speaking with Folt, Austin announced that provost Michael Quick and general counsel Carol Mauch Amir, both close advisers to Nikias, would depart before Folt takes office in July. As Folt said, âItâs up to me to determine if we need to put in checks and balances.â
Nikias was officially removed from office last August. The now-president emeritus is taking a sabbatical and plans to return to USC in 2020 to teach classes and resume research, a university spokesman says. The statue of Hecuba that Nikias commissioned as the centerpiece of the universityâs campus expansion still stands proudly in the central piazza of USC Village; the inscription chosen for its base seems almost prophetic. Itâs a phrase in Greek from Euripidesâ play Hecuba, in which the dethroned queen admonishes the head of the triumphant Greek army. âThose who have power ought not exercise it wrongfully,â she says, ânor when they are fortunate should they imagine that they will be so forever.â
NOTE: This story was updated after publication to identify Concerned Faculty of USC on first mention.
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