In a sit-down interview Tuesday with Annenberg Media and the Daily Trojan, outgoing president Carol Folt reflected on her last State of the University address, which she had given earlier that morning. “I’m not a person who thinks about my legacy,” she said.
Part of that legacy will be the process through which her successor is selected.
Folt, whose initial five-year contract was extended in July, announced her retirement in November with a university-wide statement. On February 5, the Board of Trustees named Beong-Soo Kim — the current senior vice president and general counsel for the university — as interim president following Folt’s departure. He will begin acting as president on June 30.
That is just the beginning of the journey to the next permanent president of USC, though.
At the same time Kim was named interim president, the Board of Trustees announced a presidential search committee tasked with seeking feedback from across university communities and, ultimately, recommending candidates for president to the Board. The 20-member committee includes trustees, administrators, professors and one graduate student.
The search committee’s assignment starts with “engagement sessions,” in which Trustees have been paired with different members of the university to hear varying opinions from students, faculty and staff.
That includes asking what the most important “opportunities and challenges” are for the university, defining important “experience and attributes” for the next president and identifying immediate actions the university could take to improve itself, according to Suzanne Nora Johnson, the chair of the Board of Trustees.
“We’re going to be looking for very specific attributes that our community helps define, but we also have to offer something that the best people will be interested in, because this is a very hard job,” Nora Johnson said in an interview. “It’s big. It’s got lots of different elements of it. It’s got a community that has lots of different views — we like that.”
The search committee’s sessions were planned to start in February or March of this year, and Nora Johnson expects them to take at least six months. At that point, the search committee will recommend a small list of candidates to the Board of Trustees, and the Board will identify a candidate to recruit. Nora Johnson said that the entire process could conclude by the start of the 2026-2027 academic year, but she is not rushing the search.
“We’re going to do the process so that we do it right. If it happens faster than that, then we’ll live with that. If it takes longer than that, we’ll do the right thing,” she said. “We’re not going to be pressured.”
This is the first time a student has been represented on a presidential search committee at USC. The search process has also changed because of the heavy vetting it requires following high-profile plagiarism controversies involving the presidents at universities like Harvard and Stanford, Nora Johnson said.
“Searches now require you, once you have final candidates, to do very deep dives on all of their research,” she said. “The other thing that’s different is [in the past] you never did deep dives in social media.”
At the end of the process, Nora Johnson thinks that the most important step the university could take to improve itself is to come together as a community. She said the university needs to “show that we can lock arm in arm, have different points of view and still understand that we’re committed to each other; we respect each other; we listen to each other.”
In her Tuesday interview, President Folt seemed to agree. She advised her successor to stay driven by their values.
“Have your North Star, and realize that the hardest part is that you’re not necessarily there to please people, but you’re there to make their experience and the university great,” Folt said.