Harvard graduate. Former vice president of a national health plan provider. Lawyer. Cello player. Behind these impressive credentials is USC interim President Beong-Soo Kim, who officially took the office after former President Carol Folt left the position at the end of June.
Kim inherited a tumultuous state of the university, with some criticizing the school’s handling of antisemitism within campus and a budget deficit of over $200 million.
Legacy admissions
A decision that shocked many students and faculty in late September was the choice to keep legacy admissions in place, in defiance of California state law.
“Legacy admissions, in many ways, prevent people from underserved communities from breaking their way into higher [education],” said Troy Nevil, a junior majoring in political science. “As much as I love the school, I think it should have done its best to follow California law.”
Although James Moore, professor emeritus of industrial and systems engineering, recognized the economic incentive for maintaining legacy admissions, he noted that incoming students should be judged on their academic records and ability to succeed at USC.
“I would rate their parent’s largesse much lower on the important scale than [President Kim] seems to,” Moore said.
In an interview with campus media in September, Kim called the decision not to factor in a student’s legacy status as “perverse,” especially when they indicated USC as being their first-choice school.
Budget deficit
One of Kim’s first courses of action before students returned to campus earlier this semester was announcing “painful” layoffs in order to maintain a “broad array of academic, professional, extracurricular and athletic programs of the first rank.”
Over the months, his announcement has been followed by over 1,000 layoffs across several schools, suddenly placing faculty members and academic advisors out of work.
“I don’t envy where he is right now,” said public policy and business professor Richard Green. Green knows Kim personally; they are neighbors and have shared several meals at each other’s homes.
In a late October interview with Annenberg Media editors, Kim acknowledged the human impact of his decisions.
“[It] never feels good for anyone in my position, or any other position in the university to have to experience,” Kim said. He did point out that he worked with deans across different schools to come up with plans specific to their school’s needs.
“What we all agreed was that we need to make some difficult decisions, but we need to minimize any kind of impact on the student experience in the academic mission,” Kim said at the time. “We wanted to target enough budget savings so that we could truly kind of put this episode behind us.”
On the budget deficit, Green acknowledged Kim’s ability to make difficult decisions quickly.
“He has to think about basically every dollar that we can bring into USC at the moment to maintain its excellence, and how to avoid spending money that doesn’t enhance its excellence,” Green said. “From everything I am seeing, he is doing the best that anyone could do given the circumstances that [he’s] been placed under.”
Ryo Sanabria, professor of gerontology, also acknowledged Kim’s difficult position and offered a perspective on Sanabria’s thought process.
“I think in terms of a purely logical, emotionless financial decision, looking at it like an accountant would, this is what had to get done,” Sanabria said. “I think that the primary definition of how President Kim functions is purely through logic and reason.”
Sanabria reasoned that when handling a major financial crisis, putting emotions aside and working purely on logic was important. But they also were concerned with the aggressive nature of Kim’s plan to resolve the budget.
“We are human beings, we have emotions, we have feelings, and I think that when you cut too deep, sometimes the pain and the lasting negative effects can’t heal,” Sanabria said.
Kim previously shared that USC’s budget efforts aim to resolve the current deficit and a predicted larger deficit in the coming months. He also said that the bulk of the layoffs are over, with a projection of the deficit being completely resolved in the next few years.
Education compact
Both Sanabria and Green were part of a panel in October discussing the Trump administration education compact. The panel was a part of Kim’s Open Dialogue Project, aiming to create a forum for university-related issues.
Green and Sanabria stressed the importance of having a formal discussion with differing opinions, with it maintaining the civic health of the country in its divisive state. Both supported Kim’s decision to reject the compact.
“I just think that it’s so fundamental to the whole purpose of a university, which is to expose students and faculty members to different ideas,” said Kim on the importance of open dialogue in an interview with Annenberg Media editors. “I think that the faculty also appreciate the emphasis that we’ve been placing on making USC a place where no one feels like they need to self-censor.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum is James Moore. He wanted Kim to sign the compact on the grounds that he viewed it as a pledge to simply follow federal law. Although he was disappointed when Kim rejected the compact, he still holds guarded optimism for the rest of the interim president’s tenure.
“I think there’s a lot of optimism about what he might accomplish for us. Everybody’s unhappy about the pain that we’re going to experience,” Moore said. “But it’s work that has to be done if we’re going to survive, and I think most people understand that.”
Many students praised Kim’s rejection of the education compact, with it giving a message of defiance against the Trump administration.
“I’m very much with Kim on the view that signing would be a mistake,” said Andy Zhang, a senior majoring in computer science and linguistics. “The letter offered funding for universities contingent on their alignment with the current administration’s political views, which may be an unlawful or even unconstitutional overreach of government on higher education.”
“That decision I overwhelmingly support,” Nevil said. “I’m very thankful that we did not stoop down to the demands of the Trump administration, and I’m very happy that President Kim listened to the voices of many students on campus.”
Unionization efforts
Among these major decisions by Kim are other issues that have clouded the university for years.
USC has continued to deny Research, Teaching, Practitioner and Clinical (RTPC) Faculty the opportunity to unionize, arguing that it would be unconstitutional to allow faculty members to unionize.
Kate Levin is a member of United Faculty-United Academic Workers and a professor of writing in Dornsife. She is one of 2,500 faculty members that signed a letter in December of 2024 urging the university to recognize their want for union representation.
“We want to be able to work with more security, more dignity and more control over our working conditions,” Levin said. She detailed her colleagues’ struggles with pay and having health benefits and the number of classes cut abruptly.
“All of these are the kinds of things that can be simply negotiated right and put in a union contract so everybody knows what’s going on, but we don’t have that, which leaves people in a really precarious position,” Levin said.
Despite her disapproval of Kim continuing the university’s precedent of fighting unionization efforts, she credits Kim’s embracing of perspectives from students and faculty. However, she still thinks there is still room for improvement.
“It’s not that faculty never get a chance to speak their opinion…That is very different from being able to sit down and negotiate which is a legally binding process, so that has not happened,” Levin said.
Moore shared much of Levin’s sentiment towards educators’ lack of bargaining power with the university, criticizing USC’s continuation to challenge the legality of the unionization effort.
“So USC has done something a little bit disingenuous in my opinion,” Moore said. “There’s a huge number of faculty at the university who really don’t have academic freedom, because I have seen far too many of the RTPC faculty fired for taking positions their supervisors didn’t like.”
From Kim’s previous commitments, Levin believes Kim to value the importance of open dialogue and hopes that he will acknowledge faculty perspectives on the unionization issue.
Campus visibility
As interim president, Kim has been involved with major decisions in trying to stabilize the state of the university, and faculty and students are already drawing comparisons with previous administrations.
Sanabria emphasized Kim’s logical thought process in trying to tackle the major financial decisions of the university.
“In comparison to other presidents, I think [Folt] was the complete opposite, where she put the emotion, heart and character number one,” Sanabria said. They noted Folt’s outstanding outreach towards students.
Other members of the USC community offered an opposite view on Folt’s visibility towards students and a more positive perspective on Kim’s visibility.
“Interim President Kim has obviously had a shorter time to prove himself, but I have a slightly more positive image of him compared to Folt,” Zhang said. “Kim does seem more open to meeting with students and the media compared to Folt.”
“I think he’s being very proactive and putting himself out there, and that’s not easy for a president to do,” Nevil said. “Getting to talk with students is very valuable.”
Looking forward
As the semester comes to a close, Kim’s decisions on behalf of the university will most likely last beyond his interim position.
Suzanne Nora Johnson, the chair of the USC Board of Trustees, said in March that she expects the Presidential Search Committee’s process to end at the start of the 2025-26 school year.
In its most recent update in October, the committee said that it was in the “quiet phase of the process, focused on candidate assessments.” The update released no names on which candidates they were considering. However, according to USC Today, Kim will not be considered as a candidate.