C. L. Max Nikias was inaugurated as the University of Southern California’s 11th president on October 15, 2010. In his inauguration speech, “The Destined Reign of Troy,” he sets an audacious goal for USC: achieving “undisputed status as one of the great universities of the world.”
To accomplish that goal, Nikias lays out five priorities for his administration: aggressively recruiting interdisciplinary superstars to the faculty, building a vast network of students capable of leading the future, providing resources to enable USC’s academic community to address the major problems of the age, integrating USC’s two campuses so that they “have one character and one shared identity,” and recognizing the university’s surrounding community as “the jewel that it is.”
He also speaks eloquently about the university’s role in the emerging Age of the Pacific. Noting a gradual westward migration over time in the world’s intellectual, cultural and commercial focus, Nikias describes how the Age of the Mediterranean, in the days of ancient Troy, yielded to the Age of the Atlantic, over the past two centuries. Invoking a “global Pacific age,” he calls Los Angeles “a unique intellectual crucible” and “the intellectual melting pot of the Pacific Rim.”