The U. of Southern California Is on the Rise. Why Is It a Hotbed of Scandal?

Justin Tafoya, NCAA Photos via Getty Images

When visitors to the University of Southern California first set foot on campus, they marvel at its red-brick buildings and memorable statuary. Tall spires and neo-Gothic arches evoke a sense of grandeur symbolic of the prestige the university craves. The aesthetic gives USC, as a former president, C.L. Max Nikias, once said, the “1,000 years of history we don’t have.”

Once a second-choice commuter school known for its powerful athletics program, USC has risen to meet the promise of its architecture. It has made a swift rise in rankings, reputation, and fund raising over the past two decades, establishing itself as an internationally recognized research institution.

Its ascent, however, has been shadowed in recent years by scandal, culminating last May in the forced resignation of Nikias. Much of the scandal has swirled around USC’s longtime stronghold, the athletics department.

A federal investigation, unveiled on Tuesday, struck the latest blow. An athletics administrator, a nationally recognized water-polo coach, and two former women’s soccer coaches were indicted in a racketeering conspiracy. They allegedly received more than $1 million in bribes to facilitate admissions for more than two dozen children of wealthy parents. USC was the only one out of eight institutions where an administrator was indicted.

The bribery scheme follows athletic and institutional incidents that have repeatedly injured the university’s reputation. The NCAA placed sanctions on USC’s athletics program in 2010, citing a lack of institutional control over the football, men’s basketball, and women’s tennis programs. An assistant coach of men’s basketball was charged in 2017 with facilitating bribes to players. (He pleaded guilty in January.) Exposés by the Los Angeles Times that year shed light on a former medical-school dean’s drug-fueled lifestyle and sexual-harassment allegations against that dean’s successor.

Currently the university is weighing a $215-million settlement with hundreds of former and current students who have said they were sexually abused by a campus gynecologist. Last month a separate group of students filed a lawsuit against the university and another former campus doctor, alleging sexual abuse.

While the colleges identified in the admissions scheme were not themselves charged with wrongdoing, the case has set off larger discussions of the outsize role that wealth and social connections play in college admissions. At USC, it has left students and faculty members pondering the institution’s transformation over the past 20 years. The university raked in more than $6 billion in fund raising under Nikias. Under his predecessor Steven Sample, who led the university from 1991 to 2010, it jumped 25 spots in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of national research universities. USC also became significantly more selective in admitting students under the tenures of Sample and Nikias.

Amid all that growth, athletics still occupy a central role in the university’s identity. That success remains a point of pride for students, alumni, and donors, but as USC grows in academic prestige, the focus might have to shift, said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education.

“As USC moves in this direction of being a global university,” he said, “a part of this transition could be de-emphasizing the back-door recruitment tactics the university, like many others, used to rely on.”

The new scandal exposed problems in the admissions process of many elite universities, especially those with strong athletic ambitions, said Ben Carrington, an associate professor of sociology and journalism. “Head coaches are effectively admission officers for their recruits, which is a scandal in and of itself,” he said.

On Tuesday the university announced that it had dismissed two athletics employees who had been charged by federal authorities: Donna Heinel, senior associate athletic director, and Jovan Vavic, water-polo coach. The other two women’s soccer coaches charged, Ali Khosroshahin and Laura Janke, were fired in 2013 after a three-year streak of disappointing seasons, according to The Orange County Register.

Like the other colleges involved, USC is seeking to distance itself from those charged.

“The government has repeatedly informed us that it views USC as a victim, and that these employees purposefully deceived USC,” said the interim president, Wanda M. Austin, in a written statement.

“I don’t see it as akin to the other issues we have had,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “but our response is we are an ethical university, and we are holding all of our members to that standard.”

Austin told The Chronicle in an email that the university is conducting an internal investigation to guide any further employment decisions.

“As our work on culture continues,” she said, “we will take the appropriate action when we become aware of behavior that is contrary to our values.”

‘An Institutional Issue’

The university shouldn’t be held accountable for the misdeeds of bad actors, said Carrington, the sociologist, who serves on the university’s Oversight Committee for Athletic Academic Affairs. But, he added, athletics programs there operate under a general lack of institutional accountability and oversight. (Carrington added that those are his own opinions and are not representative of the committee’s view.)

“Technically the universities are the victims, and they’ve been scammed,” he said. “But that is only possible because most give way too much autonomy to athletic departments.”

USC has a pattern of hiring former football stars to run its athletics department. Among them, Lynn Swann, the current athletic director, and his predecessors, Pat Haden and Mike Garrett, did not have management experience at any athletic department before their hiring.

At its heart, though, the current scandal shouldn’t be seen as solely an athletics problem, said Josephine Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. A former member of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, she helped investigate USC’s athletics department in a process that led to sanctions in 2010.

“It’s an academic scandal with tentacles in the athletics department,” she said. The scheme runs counter to what many colleges fear about athletic recruiting, she explained. Exploiting loopholes to admit star athletes is a common concern; falsifying athletic credentials to get students admitted, as the USC coaches are accused of doing, is relatively unusual. The fact that an administrator allegedly facilitated the wrongdoing might have allowed it to persist without notice, she said.

Admission Through the ‘Side Door’

Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.

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“If the person who is committing the violation is sufficiently high on the food chain,” Potuto said, “it shows that there is an institutional issue.”

Austin’s statement that the university is a victim is “premature,” said Ariela Gross, a professor of law and history at USC. “Without a thorough investigation, we don’t know who all the victims are and who bears responsibility.”

She noted that USC had not publicly released information on its internal investigations into the former campus gynecologist and former medical-school dean. The university hired independent law firms to conduct the probes last year to look into allegations of misconduct.

The USC Board of Trustees, which oversaw the firms’ hiring, said through a university official that it is managing reviews of the investigations. “Any future updates related to these reviews will be communicated at the discretion of the board,” said the board’s chairman, Rick Caruso, in a statement to The Chronicle.

“One of the big problems USC has is a very top-down, imperial style of governance where everyone reported to the president and the provost,” Gross said. The new admissions scandal offers the university a chance to be more transparent, she said, rather than “letting wrongdoers leave quietly and sweeping things under the rug.”

Those sentiments were echoed in a letter signed by nearly 700 faculty members last August, which demanded President Nikias’s resignation.

‘Lumped In With the Cheaters’

When news of the bribery scheme broke, the campus was quiet. It was the second day of spring break. But that didn’t stop students from going online to share articles, exchange reactions, and create memes related to the scandal.

The incident felt “ridiculous and gleefully funny,” said Kylie Harrington, a junior majoring in journalism. Students had grown desensitized to the university’s reputation for spectacle, she said.

“So proud we almost made it like six months without a national scandal being investigated by the FBI,” read one post on Facebook, which received more than 1,000 likes. Students also mocked the university’s official response, creating content that featured the phrase “USC is a victim.”

Previous scandals had been serious and troubling, said Hannah Ceselski, a junior majoring in screenwriting, but this one, while upsetting, was easier to make light of. “The issues we’ve had with sexual misconduct at the health center, that was devastating on a grand scale,” she said.

The scandal has also provided room for dialogue, Ceselski said. Students and alumni have talked online about broader systemic issues, like how the admissions process favors privileged students over those from disadvantaged communities. They discussed the wealth disparities evident on campus and the struggle of juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet. USC has said it would create a scholarship fund for underprivileged students with the donations tied to the scheme.

Still, the experience is hurtful for students who worked hard to get admitted, especially for first-generation or low-income students, Ceselski said. “Now you feel lumped in with the cheaters, the bribers, and the people who didn’t work hard to get here.”

Updated (3/16/2019, 2:22 p.m.) with a statement from the USC Board of Trustees.

Correction (3/16/2019, 2:22 p.m.): A previous version of this article stated that a petition demanding Nikias’s resignation was signed last May by nearly 500 faculty members. It was signed last August by nearly 700 faculty members.

Follow Terry Nguyen on Twitter at @terrygtnguyen, or email her at terry.nguyen@chronicle.com.