Steven B. Sample has been called many things on this campus—darling of donors, beloved leader, brilliant scientist—but above all he is a master marketer. Mr. Sample, 69, president of the University of Southern California, delights in promoting his institution. After Time magazine named USC its College of the Year a decade ago, he had the article reprinted 600,000 times.
“Every living Trojan got at least two copies,” he says. “Every dead Trojan got at least one.”
When the popular president announced that he would step down in August, after nearly two decades on the job, he saw another, more unusual opportunity for promotion:
He spent more than $200,000 on half-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications, trumpeting the university’s accomplishments and announcing a national search for his successor.
Mr. Sample has plenty to crow about: He has engineered one of the great recent transformations in American higher education. Since 1991, the university’s endowment has quintupled, its undergraduate acceptance rate has plummeted from 70 percent to 24 percent, and its minority enrollment, once dismal, has surged.
None of that will make life easy for USC’s new president, who is expected to be named next month. The next leader must replace a living icon and try to sustain the university’s rapid ascent into the top academic ranks.
The provost, C.L. Max Nikias, is the likeliest successor, in part because he has helped Mr. Sample run the university. Like the president, Mr. Nikias is a respected electrical engineer, talented administrator, and prodigious fund raiser.
But for all of its success, USC is in a tough spot. The recession has reversed the rapid growth of its endowment and prompted freezes in staff hiring and faculty salaries. Pete Carroll, who coached the football team to a national championship in the 2004 season, announced his departure for the NFL in January after a disastrous season. And a high-profile NCAA investigation into benefits given to Southern Cal’s biggest football and basketball stars could lead to severe athletics sanctions as early as next month.
Warren G. Bennis, a professor of business who initially recruited Mr. Sample to USC, says the president is a brilliant fund raiser but had been “riding the economic tide.” In the recession’s aftermath, it will be difficult for the next president to find people to give money quite as generously, Mr. Bennis says. “I don’t want to say we’ve hit a wall, but whoever succeeds Dr. Sample will have a tough job. A coach would say in football, the last 10 yards are the hardest. I think the last 10 yards are going to be really hard.”
Selling Downtown L.A.
Mr. Sample’s direct, Midwestern style seems out of place in Los Angeles. It is a trait he uses to his advantage. The slender St. Louis native speaks in an informal tone, peppering his speeches with stories. After delivering an important line, he pauses and widens his eyes, giving the impression that he is letting his listener in on a secret.
He enjoys trying to debunk stereotypes about USC, which has long been denigrated as the “University of Spoiled Children” or the “University of Second Choice.” He deploys an arsenal of “counterintuitive hooks,” as he calls them: facts about the university that seek to persuade critics by being both outlandish and true. Did you know, he asks, that USC, with an enrollment of about 33,000, is the largest private employer in Los Angeles? (True.) Or that its students have higher SAT scores, on average, than the University of California at Berkeley’s? (True, if just barely).
“That’s always been a part of our marketing strategy, survival strategy, growth strategy, whatever you want to call it,” Mr. Sample says. “To pinpoint the areas which people think are great weaknesses and find a way to turn them into great strengths.”
The perception that the University Park campus is in a rough neighborhood is longstanding, especially when the location is compared with the tony Westwood area next to the even larger University of California at Los Angeles. USC’s densely packed, largely brick buildings sit incongruously in South Los Angeles, near the working-class black and Latino neighborhoods of Exposition Park, West Adams, and South Central.
Mr. Sample has developed stronger relationships with the university’s neighbors and repositioned USC in the minds of potential students since the city’s 1992 race riots, which destroyed nearby buildings and compounded fears about campus safety. The proportion of women among incoming freshmen dropped to 40 percent after the riots, which officials blamed on the reticence of parents to send their daughters here.
Since then, however, USC has taken advantage of the increasing appeal of big cities, wooing students and faculty members with the promise of a revived, dynamic downtown, just as New York University has done on the opposite coast. Mr. Sample also found a hook to allay some concerns about safety, noting that campus-crime figures for USC were, at times, lower than those at Stanford University or the University of California at Berkeley.
In advertisements, USC plays up its metropolitan side, employing aerial photos that set campus landmarks against a backdrop of skyscrapers. “He moved the university geographically in the minds of people, without a moving van,” says Morton O. Schapiro, president of Northwestern University and a former dean at USC.
On the whole, the rebuilding and rebranding of USC has worked. It has attracted one of the most racially and economically diverse student bodies of any major private university. It has used the diversity of LA to help attract some 7,500 international students, the most of any university, according to the Institute of International Education. And in 2008, it received nearly 36,000 applications for undergraduate admission, second only to NYU among private colleges.
Provost in Waiting?
Mr. Nikias, the provost, has assumed an increasing number of presidential responsibilities in recent years, substituting for Mr. Sample when he is away and serving as a second public voice of the university.
Mr. Nikias, 57, is seen on the campus as the most likely next president, in part because of his popularity among faculty members. He is also said to be the personal choice of Mr. Sample, who promoted him from the head of the engineering school to provost in 2005.
Like the current president, Mr. Nikias can smooth-talk potential donors. The two engineers also come from a similar intellectual mold, colleagues say: technical minds who are able to work across disciplines and attract a broad following. Even before Mr. Nikias was appointed provost, “Steve Sample and Max Nikias were so in key that they would finish each other’s sentences,” says Adam Clayton Powell III, vice provost for globalization.
Mr. Sample himself, who declines to comment directly on the search for his replacement, praises Mr. Nikias’s intellectual breadth, citing his study of history in his native Cyprus. Mr. Nikias is “the best provost I’ve ever known anywhere,” he says. (That’s saying a lot considering that the previous provost, Lloyd Armstrong Jr., is often cited as the main force behind the university’s revitalization of its undergraduate curriculum.)
Members of the search committee insist that although Mr. Nikias is a candidate, they are conducting a national search and have attracted the interest of several prominent leaders at other universities, public and private.
USC, which has not selected an internal candidate as president since 1970, faces some difficult questions with its choice: Who can best position Southern California as the premier university of the Pacific Rim, as it hopes to be known? And is Mr. Sample’s choice the best person to extend Mr. Sample’s legacy?
“It’s less risky if you go internally,” says John O. Wynne, rector of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors. But “it may not be the right thing to do.”
Mr. Wynne, who would not comment specifically on USC’s search, led Virginia’s recent presidential search, which selected an outside candidate. An honest national search, he says, is crucial to establishing the credibility of the new president in the event an internal candidate is chosen.
“You can’t ignore institutional knowledge and pull that someone has in the institution,” he says. “These things are very, very valuable. But great people make up for it in a period of years.”
Marketing vs. Reality
Mr. Sample’s golden touch in promoting the strengths of USC has masked the university’s underlying challenges. Its high sticker price—tuition, room, and board reach just above $50,000—deters many lower- and middle-class students, officials say, especially in California, a state with a public-university system that, despite recent cutbacks, is still regarded as the nation’s best.
In its quest to improve, USC has lost many of those low-income students. Its number of Pell Grant recipients, who typically come from families earning less than $40,000 per year, fell by 30 percent from 2000 to 2005, the most recent data available.
“As USC continues to get more selective and more academically competitive, we’re going to need to continue to pay attention to this,” says Timothy Brunold, director of undergraduate admission. USC loses hordes of talented students to public universities like Berkeley and UCLA because of “cost more than anything else,” he says.
Like many private universities, Mr. Brunold says, USC may be approaching an upper limit on its tuition: “I just worry that at some point, how much more are we going to be able to charge?”
One of the ways Mr. Sample has helped bolster USC’s academic reputation is by seeking to lure local valedictorians with large merit-based scholarships, whether they need them or not. The awards were designed to influence other students, who might not believe that their top-ranked classmates would choose USC.
“She had perfect SATs, she was a jock, and she was president of the student body—and her daddy made $800,000 a year,” Mr. Sample said during an interview here in January, candidly describing a potential target of the scholarships.
Some of USC’s attempts to demonstrate its progress have backfired, victims of overzealous marketing. For example, in an effort to prove that its student body wasn’t as wealthy as people thought, USC took out advertisements proclaiming that average family income was higher at Berkeley and UCLA.
But the state agency that was the source of the claim disavowed it, saying it was based on unreliable statistics, the Los Angeles Times reported. Although the wealth gap of undergraduates had narrowed, the proportion of students with family incomes above $200,000 was more than twice as high at USC than at the two public universities, the newspaper found.
Despite its wealthy students and alumni base, USC has been hit hard by the recession. Officials say the university is not in bad financial shape, especially compared with California’s beleaguered public universities. But USC’s endowment lost more than a quarter of its value during the recession, falling from $3.7-billion to $2.7-billion. Last year it froze staff hiring and faculty salaries and shuttered the German department.
At the same time, the university is expanding its infrastructure, both on the campus and abroad. It is in the first stages of a new master plan, which looks forward several decades. The plan envisions adding 7,600 beds to USC’s lackluster, cramped student housing, including demolishing a grocery store north of the campus to build an eight-story apartment complex.
The project, which is expected to break ground in about a year, has already generated some neighborhood opposition, and it promises to test the new president’s abilities to placate neighborhood groups and civic leaders.
The Limits of Diversity
USC uses its large international-student population to demonstrate its growing diversity. But the vast majority are graduate students, and the university has a long way to go before it can claim the national reach of many other top private institutions.
A study by the University of Denver recently found that USC still enrolls 60 percent of its students from within 200 miles of Los Angeles. The admissions office has intensified recruiting visits to high schools across the country—it now schedules more than 1,000 stops a year—in a bid to increase the national applicant pool, especially in the Northeast and the South.
And despite Mr. Sample’s progress in neutralizing campus stereotypes, the perception that USC is a party haven in a bad neighborhood has proved difficult to break. The new president will need to face down many of the same weaknesses that Mr. Sample has dealt with.
Some of the largely residential neighborhoods surrounding USC still have relatively high crime rates, and personal safety is still one of the first things that many potential students mention. One faculty member who lives south of the campus says the neighborhood is one that “a lot of people frankly wouldn’t live in, a lot of my colleagues wouldn’t set foot in.”
Ryan Eletto, a senior majoring in journalism, says he was attracted by the greenery and brick buildings of the USC campus. He believes that the area’s reputation for crime is exaggerated. He produced a blog, Crime at USC, that discussed campus safety and cited statistics showing the crime rates at Berkeley and Stanford were comparable.
But some areas close to the campus are still dangerous, he says, and sometimes it’s nice to escape to the neighborhood surrounding, say, UCLA.
“That’s like USC students’ date spot,” Mr. Eletto says. “The Grove and Westwood and Santa Monica is where we go when we want to escape our little corner ghetto.”
