What kind of person does it take to assume responsibility of a university marred by a $230 million deficit, a string of abuse and financial scandals and widespread dissatisfaction among students and faculty?
Someone, says interim President Beong Soo-Kim, with “something that is kind of miswired” in their head.
He’s talking about himself.
At a private lunchtime event held at the University Club on Monday, Kim spoke to an audience of about 70 faculty about his decision to serve as president, and about his leadership style over the first third of his interim tenure. Journalism Professor Miki Turner, moderating the event, asked Kim why he accepted the position in the first place.
In response, he called USC a burning house he couldn’t look away from.
“If I see a huge house on fire, or a huge challenge, it actually makes me more interested in wanting to jump in and see what I can do,” Kim said at the University Club event on Monday.
For Kim — the son of two Trojan alumni and who chose Harvard crimson over USC cardinal, only returning in 2020 to serve as the university’s top lawyer and senior vice president — that instinct to set the university right was a simple act of love.
“Ultimately, I said ‘yes’ because I love this place,” Kim said, referencing his parents’ experiences as international students, as well as the amount of research, partnerships, medical care and expertise hosted by the university. It was seeing that excellence fail, and what he called the university’s potential to impact the world, that motivated Kim toward bettering USC.
“When I joined as general counsel, we had gone through at USC a really, really difficult several years … It was painful for everyone who cared about USC and was in this region seeing us just limping along through crisis after crisis,” Kim said.
It was past time someone started making decisions about the university’s budget, he said.
“One of the opportunities of being an interim is that — I am very clear — my job is to make as many hard, painful decisions as need to be made to set this university up for long-term success. That’s my acute responsibility as an interim, and it’s something that I really embrace, because I want this university to be as shiny and well-founded as it possibly can be for whoever the long-term president is going to be.”
When Kim was appointed to the interim position, the university said he would not be considered for the job full-time. The Presidential Search Committee’s most recent update, published on October 24, said that more than 500 candidate recommendations had been reviewed.
Those “painful decisions” have led to the layoffs of nearly 1,000 people across the university and its healthcare systems and disrupted entire academic support staff teams in the Viterbi School of Engineering and Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
But Kim stressed that if he must make such decisions, he is guided by three principles: “listening, humility, curiosity.”
“If you’ve gone through the process of listening to people, involving them, and then explaining why you’re coming out the way you do, then people are going to accept that decision in a way that they wouldn’t if you just didn’t actually listen to them in the first place,” Kim said.
“Not just communicating directly about the need for cuts and layoffs, but also trying to put as much emphasis on why it’s worth it, why it matters, why we should all hang in there because of the impact that a stronger financial foundation is going to have on our ability to reach more students, control the growth of tuition, lead the country with respect to AI and civics and open dialogue and corporate engagement.”
Asked for clarification about what amounted to the $230 million structural deficit USC faced, Kim blamed the university’s recent legal settlements, nationwide inflation, fallout from COVID, “factors that apply to all universities” and what he called “decisions based on certain assumptions about research … that didn’t come to fruition.”
He told Annenberg Media in a late October interview that various cost-saving measures implemented since July put the deficit on track to be completely resolved over the next couple years.
Throughout the lunch event, the most resounding message of Kim’s leadership style was a commitment to transparency between Bovard and the university.
“What I am hoping is that, among other things, I can set a bar in terms of direct, brutally honest communications and engagement with the entire USC community, faculty, staff and students that will continue on,” he said.
It’s that philosophy of “listening first” that has guided Kim to host more than 40 town halls and meet with over 5,000 faculty and staff about the state of the university and its endeavors since taking office, he said.
But it was his decision not to join the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” where he gained the most practice in this principle.
Kim said he faced immediate pressure from advocates both for and against the compact to make a snap decision about USC’s involvement. Instead, he opted for a case study in campus communication, making a point to consider a wide berth of perspectives.
“The very first decision I made was that I wasn’t going to make an immediate decision,” Kim said, reflecting on the nearly two-week process he undertook of meeting with various campus stakeholders to determine whether USC would engage with the proposal.
“If I make a decision and then I go and talk to people, why should they even engage?” Kim continued. “I really wanted to model the kind of listening and engagement that we’re trying to teach our students.”
Ultimately, Kim said, the decision not to accept the Trump administration’s officer was founded largely in an excerpt from former USC President Steven B. Sample’s 1992 faculty address.
That address espoused the university’s private status, unrestrained by “political control,” but with strong entrepreneurial roots.
Kim said the nature of Trump’s compact was antithetical to that philosophy, and that it would have forced the university to “cede control over operations to the government.” He said, even if the campus community had agreed with everything in the compact, that fundamental issue of allowing federal influence over USC as a private institution would cause the university to “lose [its] identity.”
Kim’s position as interim president ends next summer. But he made it clear his plans for the next eight months are to set a foundation far beyond July.
“Being a leader, in my book, it’s not just about making decisions and listening. It’s also about providing a vision to people — of where we’ve been and where we are going, and what we can achieve in the future.”
He shared a memory of getting a campus tour from his father, remembering on the senior Kim’s days taking economics classes in the CPA building or studying in Doheny Library, with Kim’s mother. That walk into the past gave Kim perspective on USC’s history, and a nightlamp for the future amid dark days.
“It just shows how much USC matters to so many generations of Trojans. We think of USC as: This is what it is, right now … But there’s not just one USC. There are USCs that go back so many generations, that are so present and alive in the memories of so many people in California, across the world,” Kim said.
“Not only is there a light at the end of the tunnel, but the light is super bright and luminous.”