Beong-Soo Kim was unanimously elected the 13th president of the University of Southern California, the Board of Trustees announced in a university-wide email on Wednesday.
Kim has served as interim president since July 2025 and was elected after a selection process with more than 1,000 candidates. He will assume the presidency immediately, being seen as a “next-generation leader,” said Suzanne Nora Johnson, Chair of the USC Board of Trustees.
Following the announcement of Kim’s presidency, his office held a joint interview with student reporters.
“When I was appointed interim president, the board strongly encouraged me not to lead as an interim president but as president for an interim period of time,” said Kim.
They began the search for the new president around the beginning of 2025, following former USC President Carol Folt’s announcement of her retirement.
Kim said that he was not initially part of the presidential search process. However, at the end of October, the USC Board of Trustees reached out to ask if he was interested in participating in the search process.
“I was very happy to do so because No. 1: I love USC, I love the work that we do,” said Kim, age 53. “My parents were international students here. So I’ve always had an incredibly strong emotional attachment to the university, and I’ve always believed in its potential to extend its impact across the world.”
Johnson noted that during the fall semester, the university received a surge of community campaigns pushing for Kim to join the presidential search process.
“Students, faculty, deans, alumni, donors, parents, every category of person kept reaching out, saying we have been inspired by [Kim’s] leadership. He has an extraordinary mind. He has extraordinary ethics. Why don’t you consider him in the process?” Johnson said in the interview on Wednesday.
Now that Kim has taken the presidency full-time, he plans to focus on the university’s long-term success.
He explained that part of the reason why he began the Open Dialogue Project last year was “to create alignment within our community, so that we are really leaning into these future opportunities.”
The Open Dialogue Project is a mission that encourages “Trojans [to] embrace and embody the principles of academic freedom, free expression and open discourse,” according to its website.
During his presidency, Kim hopes to continue this project and similar initiatives to strengthen USC’s future research, he said. Kim broke ground on private-sector and public-sector partnerships, including the recent OpenAI partnership, the creation of the AI strategy committee and the inaugural AI summit.
At the beginning of his interim presidency, Kim inherited a budget deficit of more than $200 million, prompting the university to lay off more than 1,000 employees and undertake a broad fiscal restructuring.
As a result of these budget cuts, USC is on track to eliminate the deficit by the end of the 2026 financial year, Kim has said.
Kim, a lawyer, first joined USC in 2020 as a senior vice president and general counsel. He has since been involved in the Athletics program and has served as an adjunct professor at the Gould School of Law.
As a lifelong cellist, Kim has had the opportunity to showcase his musical talents at the Thornton School’s long-running Music@RushHour series in September.
Despite not coming from an academic background, Kim said he is confident in his ability to lead the university through this transition period.
“I think the most important thing is to have a leader who truly values, respects and wants to advance the academic mission of a university,” said Kim. “That’s part of the reason that the deans, the faculty advisory committee and other faculty members have been so supportive of my interim leadership. I think they recognize how much I care about advancing that academic mission.”