October 31, 2017
Earlier this month, Niki and I were thrilled to welcome so many parents, alumni, and friends back to campus for Trojan Family Weekend. More than 4,000 of our students’ family members and friends visited USC, coming from 47 different states and 21 different nations. With them, we shared the great news that USC once again ranked fifteenth on the national ranking of 1,054 public and private universities, published by The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education. West of Chicago, only USC, Caltech, and Stanford ranked in the top 20!
USC Iovine and Young Academy
In a much-anticipated event, we officially broke ground on the new home for the USC Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation, a 40,000-square-foot, state of the art building that will rise at the corner of Watt Way and Exposition Boulevard. The new Iovine and Young Hall will open in the winter of 2019, and be home to classrooms and a variety of technology and materials labs for 3D printing and scanning, photo, video, and audio, as well as the fabrication of metal, wood, plastics, and electronics. The academy graduates its first class this spring, and its students are already making their mark, creating their own successful start-ups, and participating in life-changing research projects—all of which was made possible through the generosity and vision of the academy’s namesakes, Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young.
Trojans in Tokyo
Earlier in the semester, more than 500 members and guests of the Trojan Family came together in Tokyo for the USC Global Conference. This year’s event, Creating the Future, featured Kazuo Hirai, the president and chief executive officer of Sony, as well as General (Ret.) David Petraeus, who is a Judge Widney Professor at USC, and Dr. Koji Murofushi, sports director for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Our panel discussions covered a range of topics, including the release of a new Japan-based study on mobile device use by veteran journalist Willow Bay, the dean of our USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Our gathering began with a special performance by Midori, the world-renowned violinist and a member of USC Thornton’s faculty, and concluded with an inspired performance by the extraordinarily talented students of our Kaufman School of Dance.
USC’s newest “genius”
We were thrilled to learn that Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen was named a 2017 MacArthur “Genius” fellow. This distinction speaks to his singular place among our nation’s most gifted writers, and caps the tremendous critical success of his debut novel, The Sympathizer. His work—often praised for its subtlety and deftness—is broad in scope, and has already earned him a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Trojan Family takes special pride in Professor Nguyen’s success, as the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has been his academic home since 1997, the same year he received his Ph.D. and began his professional career. This also marks the second year in a row that a USC faculty member has received a MacArthur grant: last year, the foundation recognized USC Annenberg’s Josh Kun, one of our nation’s foremost cultural critics.
Intellectual property course at USC
USC is now offering one of the first undergraduate courses on the basic workings of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The course, “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Intellectual Property,” answers a very real need in today’s educational landscape, as intellectual property accounts for 38.2 percent of our nation’s total GDP and 30 percent of its total national employment. At USC, this course is particularly timely, as the new building for the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience opens on November 1. This center pioneers life-saving technologies and treatments, a task that would be impossible without the patents that drive nearly all investment in biotech research.
A closing thought
The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed I wrote, in which I ponder how leaders can use their time efficiently and not be distracted by our day’s endless chain of emails. Niki and I hope you enjoy the fall season, as we head into the holidays. We look forward to writing again next month.
Yours truly,
C. L. Max Nikias