USC’s chief sustainability officer, Mick Dalrymple, will leave the university at the end of August after five years in the position, according to an email sent to faculty, staff and students in a sustainability working group obtained by Annenberg Media.
Dalrymple, who also serves as co-chair of the Presidential Working Group on Sustainability in Education, Research and Operations, is the university’s first chief sustainability officer. In an email sent Aug. 13 to members of the working group, Dalrymple said his departure had “been in the works for quite a while.”
Dalrymple was hired by the university in 2021 following a slew of sustainability efforts put forth by Carol Folt, who made the topic one of her signature issues. Prior to his time at USC, he served as director of university sustainability practices at Arizona State University beginning in November 2015.
He did not provide a reason for leaving USC. He and his wife intend to move to Mallorca, Spain, where Dalrymple will take a “sabbatical” focusing on “my photography and some writing projects that have been sitting idle for much of the past 10 - 30 years.” He added that he is “experimenting with AI as a tool to combine all of this and 25 years of sustainability experience to catalyze climate action through sustainability edutainment.”
The university has not formally announced Dalrymple’s departure. It is unclear what the future of the position is or whether current President Beong-Soo Kim will keep the working group in operation.
In the email, Dalrymple said he and fellow co-chair of the presidential working group, Mahta Moghaddam, a professor of electrical engineering, have “participated in several senior leadership discussions about sustainability over this summer.” He described USC as operating in a “resource constrained environment,” but said he remains optimistic about the future of sustainability at the university.
In an interview with Annenberg Media in March of last year, Dalrymple said, “[Sustainability is] really critical to our future and to our students’ future, so I don’t see it being diminished.”