Interim President of USC Beong-Soo Kim Sits Down with LAEDC’s Stephen Cheung

Stephen Cheung: Tell us about your journey. How did you get to be the President of USC?

Beong-Soo Kim: How did I get here? Well, this was not in the plans, but the board asked me if I'd be willing to step up into this role. As mentioned, I got into the Trojan family the easy way. I didn't have to apply for and get a degree. I was born into it through my parents, who are both international students from Korea. I've always loved USC. I've always understood the importance of USC to Los Angeles and around the world. When I was given the opportunity, I said, “Of course, I'll do anything for USC.”

I was the general counsel for the last five years. I came in after USC had gone through a really difficult period. Litigation, investigations, public relations crises, a lot of leadership transitions, and I joined during the pandemic. It was a really interesting time, and during those first couple of years, I was focused on trying to do the right thing and putting all of those controversies in the rear-view mirror. 

I'm very pleased that for the last several years we've been really focused more on building, sharpening our impact, reaching out to the community, and fortunately, we really haven't been in the news for the wrong reasons, but for the right reasons. 

As the General Counsel, it was especially gratifying to work with other members of the team, including Sam Garrison, and as the General Counsel, I was so privileged to be able to work across the entire institution, from athletics to academics to the health system, so it's been a pretty seamless transition.

Stephen Cheung: USC is one of the largest private employers here in the City & County of Los Angeles. We are talking today about the impact of the importance of research to this entire region and around the world, as well as a major athletic operation and one of the largest healthcare systems in Southern California. With that type of portfolio, we're curious to hear about your top priorities as you're entering this role. What do you see as important for yourself and for the university as we're moving forward?

Beong-Soo Kim: One of the top priorities is developing greater resilience as an organization. It's no secret at all that we've been going through an incredibly volatile period in higher education, where there have been a lot of questions and uncertainty around funding sources from the government that are not as reliable in the same way that we've grown accustomed to over the years. Trying to figure out how to deal with this new normal has required a lot of organizational change, a lot of conversation with the community, and that's really one of the things I've been most focused on during my first month or two. 

Second, I would say, is focusing back on why we exist. In particular, student outcomes. USC, as many of you know, is not cheap, and we have an obligation to provide our students the best return on investment that we can. The leadership team and I are focusing very much on very basic things – graduation rates, employment after college, and internships during college. Are students graduating with them? How can we improve all those metrics to make sure that all of our students are really getting the best return and investment that they can? 

Part of that is also about how we prepare students for a workforce and a world that's being transformed by AI. How do we make sure that students not only have AI literacy, but even more importantly, critical thinking skills? 

That's going to be a big challenge, because so many students now are writing through AI. They're not doing the hard work of thinking and writing, and we've got to figure that out. At USC, I have a committee that is trying to position us as the national leader in how we can conduct AI in research and AI in education and the classroom.

Another thing is values. I think that some universities have been a little bit shy over the years about talking in a full-throated way about what we stand for. What our institutional values are. At USC, we keep it really simple. We are a pluralistic community. We have many international students. It's always been that way, since well before my parents attended USC, and we are a community that believes in freedom of speech and mutual respect.

All of you know about the horrific murder that occurred two weeks ago in Utah. Charlie Kirk came to USC last year, and he set up right in front of my office. I saw hundreds of students lining up surrounding him, trying to get a word in, debating him. There were a lot of students who actually said, I agree with everything you said, or I agree with a lot of what you said, and there were a lot of students who said, I completely disagree, and here's why. They had exchanges, and it was a full-throated debate on both sides. 

Agree or disagree, that's the kind of environment and academic communities that I want to nurture. I want to make sure that every single member of our community feels empowered to speak their own truth, whatever they might believe. I'm trying to encourage students that listening is at least as important as talking. If we can all become better listeners in this country, if we can graduate students with those skills, I think they're going to be much better off, able to thrive professionally, and also able to embrace their obligations as citizens in a democratic society. On that note, we had Governor Schwarzenegger on campus a couple of weeks ago. There’s a lot of debate over Proposition 50, and that's what you want to have happen at a university campus. 

The last thing I'll talk about is engagement. Engagement with all of you; engagement with our surrounding community; engagement with businesses, private corporations, and foundations; engagement with civic leaders, including many of you in this room. 

With Sam's leadership, we've put together a community engagement plan that we are going to be really focused on over the coming year. It involves engaging with all of these different communities and demonstrating that we want to partner with the community. We want to do that with respect to economic opportunity. We want to do that with respect to our health system and create healthier communities. We want to provide educational opportunities to people in our surrounding neighborhood through the neighborhood academic initiative and other programs like that. We also want to share some of the excitement at USC around arts and athletics in particular, because, among other things, we also have a football team. 

Stephen Cheung: What are some of the challenges that you see in terms of community engagement, especially for a region as large as Los Angeles? How do you reach the very different communities across the region?

Beong-Soo Kim: First, it takes a lot of time, effort, and intentionality. If I didn't have Sam with me, who was a partner in coming up with a vision for how we can engage the surrounding community, things wouldn't happen. You have to start with a vision, you start with intention, and then it's not that hard to figure out. 

Okay, how do you get there? This is the start of a little tour we're going to be making, speaking with the Urban League, speaking with other clubs downtown, and trying to make sure everyone's received the message that USC is here to be a good citizen and a great partner. 

It is not easy in this current environment to bring people together in partnership. There are a lot of forces – technological forces, social media forces, political forces – that appear to be trying to divide people and polarize issues. It makes it that much harder, but in my mind, that just means we need to work even harder at meeting people. You're doing it through LAEDC, and so many other great organizations are doing it, but it takes a lot of work. 

There are a lot of communities out there – I live in Pasadena and I go down to San Gabriel Valley – there's some parts of San Gabriel Valley that are just kind of empty now, and I think that we've all been kind of seeing that in different parts of the community, and there are a lot of communities out there that are anxious and fearful. 

What we're trying to do at USC is create a space where people can have conversations and partner on things that really do good. I'll mention one example. Through the Dornsife College Public Exchange program, we have something we just announced called Shade LA. The idea is simple, but also kind of amazing. The idea is to deal with one of the most critical issues from climate change, which is over-exposure to heat, by creating more shade through not just trees, but also through structures, awnings, so that people feel healthier.

It turns out it's actually an incredibly complex challenge, because it's not just about the science. It is about how you engage Los Angeles County. How do you engage local businesses? How do you engage with our partner’s UCLA?

That's what you need, though. You need people who come together. We're so excited to be doing more things like that, to bring together our researchers at USC and UCLA, with the county, with businesses, to really do something that's going to be impactful as we head into LA28.

Stephen Cheung: Regardless of politics, it is very clear that universities currently are the center of national conversation and debate. There has been a lot of criticism about how higher education is taught and how it's operating as well. This is not just in California. However, there has been a spotlight on California recently. How is that landscape changing or shaping the way that you're prioritizing your focus?

Beong-Soo Kim: There is a lot of volatility in higher education. At USC, we are really trying to view these challenges as opportunities. We've had our research funding impacted like a lot of universities. Fortunately, not nearly as much as many of our peers. 

What I have been talking to the faculty about is that this is actually an opportunity to think about where we want to have the most impact as a research institution. What are our core strengths? I'm talking about things like Alzheimer's research, blindness, cancer, and longevity. Those are some core areas, and we are making sure that we have broad alignment around the areas where we're not only excellent now, but where we need to maintain that excellence. We are looking for corporate support of research and building on the research partnerships that we already have with Amazon, Amgen, and Salesforce to figure out how we can be less reliant on one source of funding in the future. 

One of the criticisms that universities have experienced is around anti-semitism. Making sure that everyone at USC understands the rules with respect to open dialogue and mutual respect. We're so proud that we maintain the Shoa Foundation Institute, which is the world's largest repository of Holocaust testimonials. Through the Shoa Foundation, we're going into middle schools and going across the country to teach children to identify not just anti-semitism, but other forms of group hatred. 

We're looking at the headlines and trying to find the opportunities for us to sharpen our impact and our mission. I'm very pleased to say that we're not on any kind of radar or any kind of list, and we're going to just keep focusing on values and impact.

Stephen Cheung: We talked about USC's role as an anchor institution here for not only Los Angeles, but Southern California and California as a whole. How do you define the university's role in economic growth for the people and the communities across this entire region?

Beong-Soo Kim: I could give you numbers like we're the largest private employer in the city of Los Angeles. You know, we employ this number of people, we have almost 50,000 students, but those numbers don't actually really capture the full economic impact. Our health system, for example, generates about $5 billion in revenue. We actually spend over a billion dollars in research, and that's going to be the same this year as it was last year, before all of the news out of Washington DC. 

We are really focused on trying to create an innovation ecosystem in Los Angeles by engaging our corporate partners, and also through a program called Techstars. The Techstars program basically gives consulting and other services to individuals and companies that have a really exciting idea. You have to apply, and it's an extremely competitive process, but we made a decision with Techstar. We're not just going to open it up to students, but we're going to open it up to anyone with a USC connection and others. What we're trying to do is actually create an innovation ecosystem in Los Angeles.

People always talk about how all of the large companies are moving out of Los Angeles. I have to tell you, there's still so much happening in LA. We've seen huge opportunities in space, in transportation, in sustainability, and of course, entertainment. 

We recently announced a new center, the Blavatnik Center, as part of our School of Cinematic Arts, which is going to be focused on AI and digital filmmaking. We don't want to hide or bury our heads in the sand. AI is transforming that industry. We want to be at the forefront of the changes.

Stephen Cheung: There's been a lot of messaging saying that the companies are leaving Los Angeles, but they're not focusing on the companies that are growing here or entering here. In fact, Amgen just announced that they're going to be investing $600 million into the local region. One of the selling points that all these international and major corporations look at is that we're not the cheapest place to do business. We can say cheaper is cheaper. Cheaper is not better. So what we have is basically our talent pool and our education and innovation system. So this entire synergy with universities like yourselves is going to be vital.

Beong-Soo Kim: I mentioned space, but athletics too. USC, UCLA, maybe not Cal Tech, but we can be really important anchors in that athletics ecosystem. We have a whole program, Next Level Sports, that is really aimed at making Los Angeles the sports capital of the world.

Stephen Cheung: I want to go back to one of the things that you mentioned about research. We know that research is so critical to our society, leading to groundbreaking technological advancements and helping support development. How do you see research, especially from USC, as a catalyst for regional economic growth?

Beong-Soo Kim: One of the things that we've been doing is trying to inventory our research and be much more intentional about the areas where we want to be the best in the world. We're making incredible strides in the area of Alzheimer's in particular, and our top researchers believe that we are going to have a preventative therapeutic for Alzheimer's within the next decade. I like to stay on time for my children. That's tremendously exciting, and that's just one example.

We are also doing a lot of work in the medical sciences. In the area space, we have facilities and research institutes on the Westside and Silicon Beach that are part of USC, ISI, and ISICT, and they're doing tremendous work there. We also talked about Shade LA, and there are so many other examples. 

There is one thing that I think people are missing a little bit in the conversation that started over the last seven months around research. People are often fixated on just one particular area of research, but research is so creative and additive to a region. When you are spending money on research, you're not only advancing these cures and these technological breakthroughs, you’re also employing people, you're generating startup companies that spin off from the university, and you're attracting venture capital. It's an amazing kind of flywheel. We do that, but if we could all be more intentional about the vision and the goal for Los Angeles, there are limitless opportunities….
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Editor’s Note: We’ve included this item here because of its significance to federal-university research dynamics and ongoing funding stability. For further reference, see the full AP coverage: [link to article].