As our spring semester moves forward, I want to share a copy of my annual address to USC’s faculty, which covers a range of timely and important topics. It will give you a sense of our community’s most recent successes, as well as the tremendous opportunities that await our university. I hope you will take some time to read through it.
I also want to share the magnificent news that University Professor and Distinguished Professor Solomon Golomb received our nation’s highest honor for scientific innovation: the National Medal of Science. Earlier this month, in a special ceremony at the White House, President Obama praised Professor Golomb’s pioneering work on shift register sequences. The mathematical structures of these sequences—with their seemingly random strings of zeros and ones—make them tremendously useful, with applications that range from radar to cell phone systems to space communications. For this reason, Professor Golomb’s groundbreaking work touches everything from Tetris to the Mars Rovers.
In garnering this honor, Professor Golomb joins other USC luminaries who have received National Medals: Kevin Starr, Morten Lauridsen, and Andrew Viterbi. Professor Golomb first joined USC’s faculty in 1963, which means—and I say this with deep, abiding pride—USC has been his academic home for the past five decades, and it’s from here that he has contributed so much to our world’s understanding of mathematics and engineering. His achievements are both extensive and extraordinary.
From Professor Golomb, I want to focus on another venerable member of our faculty. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a wonderful profile of Provost Professor Scott Fraser, who joined the university last fall. In the piece, Professor Fraser discusses his decision to leave Caltech, explaining that USC is among only a handful of universities in our nation that offer “the possibility, on a single campus, of putting in place a program that could make it effortless for people to move from engineering to medicine or chemistry or whatever it takes to attack and solve a problem.” His words are inspired, and speak to the tremendous optimism we all feel at USC.
In this same spirit, I also want to share the news that the USC Viterbi School of Engineering ranked first on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the best online graduate engineering programs. The enclosure shows the full rankings for online programs, as well as a link to the complete story. We welcome this news with great enthusiasm, but we also know that it reflects the university’s longstanding successes in this area—successes that date back decades. In addition to USC Viterbi, our Rossier School of Education and School of Social Work have developed highly regarded online graduate programs, thanks to the stellar leadership of their deans. Today, USC’s online education programs enroll more than 5,000 outstanding students remotely in master’s-level degree programs and executive education programs. And we expect to double our enrollment and degree offerings within the next five years.
To be sure, total annual revenues for online USC professional, graduate, and continuing education programs are expected to exceed $100 million this year, a figure that is unprecedented for a top American research university. We certainly applaud U.S. News & World Report’s recent recognition of USC Viterbi, and will continue to build a model for online education that remains firmly rooted in the university’s foundation of excellence.
Thank you again for your ongoing service as a USC Ambassador. I appreciate all that you do for the university, and send you my warmest wishes for the coming spring.
Yours truly,
C. L. Max Nikias
President