The University of Southern California — one of the nation’s leading research universities and Los Angeles’ largest private employer — has a new leader.
Beong-Soo Kim was formally installed as the school’s 13th president on Friday and has wasted little time in setting a new academic mission.
“Few universities can do this as well as USC because few cities contain as much as the future as Los Angeles,” Kim said during the ceremony.
Higher education is under stress. Student loan debt, declining job opportunities and rising costs have led to a nationwide decline in enrollment. Kim sees it all as an opportunity.
“We have amazing faculty who actually are from industry. They might be business leaders. They might be technology leaders. They come to USC, and they teach our students and even some our faculty what’s going on at the frontier,” Kim said in a sit-down interview. “We want to make it easier for those kind of back-and-forth interactions to benefit our faculty and our students and our staff.”
Kim attended Harvard undergrad and law school and is a lawyer by trade, a profession that requires assessing all sides of any argument — an ethos that has been underappreciated on many campuses.
“How do we teach students to come to their own conclusions and own beliefs of the world in a critical, self-reflective way? That’s what’s most important, not that we just produce ideological clones of what we ourselves might believe personally,” Kim said.
For him, the new job is a full-circle moment. A Calabasas High graduate, his Korean immigrant parents both attended the school he will now lead.
“My mother passed away back in 1996 … It’s incredibly meaningful to me that my father is still around to see this happen, and I think that both of us are probably processing the reality of this moment,” Kim said. “But this is not a celebration of me. This is a celebration of USC and the incredible future that we have in front of us.”
