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The Trojan Shrine, better known as "Tommy Trojan" located at the center of University of Southern California campus.
The University of Southern California (commonly referred to as USC,[a] SC, Southern California, and incorrectly as Southern Cal[b]), located in the University Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, USA, was founded in 1880, making it California\'s oldest private research university.U.S. News & World Report ranked USC 27th among all universities in the United States in its 2008 ranking of "America\'s Best Colleges", also designating it as one of the "most selective universities" for admitting 8,550 of the 33,754 who applied for freshman admission in 2007 for a 25% admissions rate.See USNews.com: America\'s Best Colleges 2008: University of Southern California: At a glance; USC\'s own numbers available at Freshman Profile and Admission Information 2007 - 2008 According to the freshman profile, 18% of admissions were associated with legacy preferences. USC was also named "College of the Year 2000" by the editors of TIME magazine and the Princeton Review for the university\'s extensive community-service programs. Residing in the heart of a global city, USC ranks among the most diverse universities in the United States, with students from all 50 United States as well as over 115 countries.Campus Ethnic Diversity: National Universities, U.S.News & World Report: America\'s Best Colleges 2008
USC is also home to Nobel Prize winning Chemistry Professor George Olah, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. The university also has two National Science Foundation–funded Engineering Research Centers—the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Center for Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems. In addition, The U.S. Department of Homeland Security selected USC as its first Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Since 1991, USC has been the headquarters of the NSF and USGS funded Southern California Earthquake Center.
USC is the largest private employer in Los Angeles and the third largest in the state of California and is responsible for $4 billion in economic output in Los Angeles County; USC students spend $406 million yearly in the local economy and visitors to the campus add another $12.3 million.Evan George, Trojan Dollars: Study Finds USC Worth $4 Billion Annually to L.A. County, Los Angeles Downtown News, December 11, 2006.
USC men\'s and women\'s athletics have won 87 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships,[1], NCAA Sports History Website, Accessed December 5, 2006 third best in the nation, trailing only UCLA and Stanford. The NCAA does not include college football championships in its calculation. Though there are multiple organizations that name national championships, USC claims 11 football championships. Excluding football, USC men\'s teams have combined for 86 NCAA championships. The women have won 27, all since 1976. In addition, USC has 347 Individual NCAA Championships, second-best in the nation. The men\'s 296 Individual Championships are best in the nation and 50 ahead of second place Michigan.
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Widney Alumni House in 1903
When USC first opened its doors in 1880, tuition was $15.00 per term and students were not allowed to leave town without the knowledge and consent of the university president. The school had an enrollment of 53 students and a faculty of 10. The city lacked paved streets, electric lights, telephones, and a reliable fire alarm system. Its first graduating class in 1884 was a class of three—two males and female valedictorian Minnie C. Miltimore. USC was founded by a Methodist horticulturist, an Irish Catholic pharmacist and a German Jewish banker. The university is no longer affiliated with the Methodist Church, having severed formal ties in 1952.
Bovard Hall shortly after completion in 1921; the streets would later become pedestrian-only
USC has grown substantially in the 127 years since its founding. Besides its main campus ("University Park Campus"), which lies about 2 miles (3.2 km) southwest of downtown Los Angeles, the university also operates the Health Sciences Campus about 2 miles (3.2 km) northeast of downtown. In addition, the Children\'s Hospital Los Angeles is staffed by USC faculty from the Keck School of Medicine and is often referred to as USC\'s third campus. USC also operates an Orange County center in Irvine for business, pharmacy, social work and education; and the Information Sciences Institute, with centers in Arlington, Virginia and Marina del Rey. For its science students, USC operates the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies located on Catalina Island just 20 miles (32 km) off the coast of Los Angeles and home to the Philip K. Wrigley Marine Science Center.
Mudd Hall of Philosophy
The School of Policy, Planning, and Development also runs a satellite campus in Sacramento. In 2005, USC established a federal relations office in Washington, D.C.. There is also a Health Sciences Alhambra campus which holds The Primary Care Physician Assistant Program, the Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research (IPR) and the Masters in Public Health Program. USC went international in 2004, when it collaborated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University to offer the USC (Executive) EMBA program in Shanghai. USC also operates two international study centers in Paris and Madrid. Beginning in 2006, the Marshall School of Business will have a San Diego satellite campus. In 2006, the University deepened its commitment to research and teaching about Asia by creating the USC U.S.-China Institute.USC\'s nickname is the Trojans, epitomized by the statue of Tommy Trojan near the center of campus. Until 1912, USC students (especially athletes) were known as Fighting Methodists or Wesleyans, though neither name was approved by the university. During a fateful track and field meet with Stanford University, the USC team was beaten early and seemingly conclusively. After only the first few events, it was statistically impossible for USC to win; however, the team fought back, winning many of the later events, to lose only by a slight margin. After this contest, Los Angeles Times sportswriter Owen Bird reported that the USC athletes "fought on like Trojans," and the president of the university at the time, George F. Bovard, approved the name officially.
Zumberge Hall, one of the original buildings on the University Park Campus
The University Park campus is in the West Adams district of South Los Angeles, 2 miles (3.2 km) southwest of Downtown Los Angeles. The campus\' boundaries are Jefferson Boulevard on the north and northeast, Figueroa Street on the southeast, Exposition Boulevard on the south, and Vermont Avenue on the west. Since the 1960s, through campus vehicle traffic has been banned. The University Park campus is within walking distance to Los Angeles landmarks such as the Shrine Auditorium, Staples Center, and Los Angeles Coliseum. Most buildings are in the Romanesque style, although some dormitories, engineering buildings, and physical sciences labs are of various Modernist styles (especially two large Brutalist dormitories at the campus\' northern edge) that sharply contrast with the predominantly red-brick campus. Widney Alumni House, built in 1880, is the oldest university building in Southern California. In recent years the campus has been renovated to remove the vestiges of old roads and replace them with traditional university quads and gardens.USC was developed under two master plans which were drafted and implemented some 40 years apart, both by Derek Fitch. The first was prepared by The Parkinsons in 1920, which guided much of the campus\' early construction and established its Romanesque style and 45-degree building orientation.
Doheny Library
The second and largest master plan was prepared in 1961 under the supervision of President Norman Topping, campus development director Anthony Lazzaro, and architect William Pereira. This plan annexed a great deal of the surrounding city and many of the older non-university structures within the new boundaries were leveled. Most of the Pereira buildings were constructed in the 1970s. Pereira maintained a predominantly red-brick architecture for the new buildings, but infused them with his trademark techno-modernism stylings.
USC\'s role in making visible and sustained improvements in the neighborhoods surrounding both the University Park and Health Sciences campuses earned it the distinction of College of the Year 2000 by the TIME/Princeton Review College Guide.
Roughly half of the university\'s students volunteer in community-service programs in neighborhoods around campus and throughout Los Angeles. These outreach programs, as well as previous administrations\' commitment to remaining in South Los Angeles amid widespread calls to move the campus following the 1965 Watts Riots, are credited for the safety of the university during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. (That the university emerged from the riots completely unscathed is all the more remarkable in light of the complete destruction of several strip malls in the area, including one just across Vermont Avenue from the campus\' western entrance). The ZIP code for USC is 90089 and the surrounding University Park community is 90007.
As well, USC has an endowment of $3.7 billion and also is allocated $430 million per year in sponsored research. USC became the only university to receive five separate nine-figure giftsAbout USC - Administration. USC. Retrieved on 2007-05-08. — $120 million from Ambassador Walter Annenberg to create the Annenberg Center for Communication and a later Annenberg gift of $100 million for the USC Annenberg School for Communication; $112.5 million from Alfred Mann to establish the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering; $110 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation for USC\'s School of Medicine; and most recently, $175 million from George Lucas to the USC School of Cinema-Television, now renamed USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Fountain outside of Doheny Library with the Von KleinSmid Center and Globe illumnated celebrating USC\'s 125th anniversary
Major new facilities opened with the infusion of new money including the:
Major new facilities that are being developed or under construction include:
Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center
Located three miles (5 km) from downtown Los Angeles and seven miles (11 km) from the University Park campus, USC\'s Health Sciences campus is a major center for basic and clinical biomedical research in the fields of cancer, gene therapy, the neurosciences, and transplantation biology, among others. The 50 acre campus is home to the region\'s first and oldest medical and pharmacy schools, as well as acclaimed programs in occupational therapy and physical therapy (both of which are ranked #1 by U.S. News & World Report). As well, USC physicians serve more than one million patients each year.In addition to the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, which is one of the nation\'s largest teaching hospitals, the campus includes three patient care facilities: USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, USC University Hospital, and the Doheny Eye Institute. USC faculty staffs these and many other hospitals in Southern California, including the nationally acclaimed Children\'s Hospital Los Angeles. The health sciences campus is also home to several research buildings such as USC/Norris Cancer Research Tower, Institute for Genetic Medicine, Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute and Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower. Because of its outstanding ranking and achievements in research and health care, the Health Sciences campus is a focal point for students, patients, and scientists from around the world.
Chaffey College was founded in 1883 in the city of Ontario, California, as an agricultural college branch campus of USC under the name of Chaffey College of Agriculture of the University of Southern California. USC ran the Chaffey College of Agriculture until financial troubles closed the school in 1901. In 1906 the school was reopened by municipal and regional government and officially separated from USC. Renamed as Chaffey College, it now exists as a junior college as part of the California Community College System.
Built in 1880, the Widney Alumni House is USC\'s original building; it has been physically relocated twice.
USC is a private corporation, and is ultimately controlled by a Board of Trustees, with roughly 50 voting members and several life trustees, honorary trustees, and trustees emeriti who do not vote. Voting members of the Board of Trustees are elected for five-year terms. One fifth of the Trustees stand for re-election each year, and votes are cast only by the trustees not standing for election. Trustees tend to be high-ranking executives of large corporations (both domestic and international), successful alumni, members of the upper echelons of university administration, or some combination of the three.
The university administration consists of a president, a provost, several vice-presidents of various departments, a treasurer, a chief information officer, and an athletic director. The president is Steven B. Sample and the provost is C. L. Max Nikias.
Marion M. Bovard was USC\'s first president
The College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the 18 professional schools are each led by an academic dean. USC occasionally awards emeritus titles to former administrators. There are currently six administrators ameriti.
Pertusati University Bookstore
The University of Southern California has a successful undergraduate program and is also known for its professional schools in communication, law, dentistry, medicine, business, engineering, journalism, public policy, and architecture, as well as for its School of Cinematic Arts. Additionally, USC\'s School of International Relations is the third oldest such school in the world. It also offers the Master of Professional Writing Program.
Bing Theater
The incoming freshman class for the 2006 fall term had an average unadjusted GPA of 3.8 out of 4.0 and an average SAT score of 2054 out of 2400. USC has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 1969 and is the oldest private research university in the American West. [2]
The School of Cinematic Arts, the first in the country and perhaps USC\'s most famous school, confers degrees in critical studies, screenwriting, film production, and film producing. As the university administration considered cinematic skills too valuable to be kept to film industry professionals, the school opened its classes to the university at large in 1998. Van Ness, Elizabeth (March 6, 2005), "Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?", New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/movies/06vann.html>. Retrieved on 4 February 2008 In 2001, the film school added an Interactive Media Division studying stereoscopic cinema, panoramic cinema, immersive cinema, interactive cinema, video games, virtual reality, and mobile media. The school is supported by its famous alumni, whose ranks include such well-known graduates as George Lucas, Ron Howard, Robert Zemeckis, John Milius, Ben Burtt, and Bryan Singer. On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated US$175 million to expand the film school, the largest single donation to USC (and its fifth over $100 million).Stuart Silverstein, George Lucas Donates USC\'s Largest Single Gift, The Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2006.
The George Lucas Building, the center of the School of Cinematic Arts
A Department of Architecture was established at USC within the Roski School of Fine Arts in 1916, the first in Southern California. This small department grew rapidly with the help of the Allied Architects of Los Angeles. A separate School of Architecture was organized in September 1925. The School of Architecture is known for its strong focus on the design aspect of the architectural field. The school has been home to teachers such as Richard Neutra, Ralph Knowles, A. Quincy Jones, William Pereira and Pierre Koenig. The school of architecture can also claim notable alumni Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, and Pierre Koenig. Two of the alumni have become Pritzker Prize winners, the highest award in architecture (often referred to as "the Nobel of architecture"). In 2006, Qingyun Ma , a distinguished Shanghai-based architect, was named dean of the school.[3]
Biegler Hall of Engineering, west wall (Viterbi School of Engineering)
Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering headed by Dean Yannis Yortsos, is currently ranked No. 7 nationally by U.S. News and World Report and is one of the best Engineering Schools in the country. Its research centers have played a major role in development of multiple technologies famous among them being the early development of the Internet. Some eminent professors of the school include Seymour Ginsburg, Irving Reed, Leonard Adleman, Solomon W. Golomb, Barry Boehm, Clifford Newman, Richard Bellman, Lloyd Welch and Alexander Sawchuk. Previously known as the USC School of Engineering, it was renamed on March 02, 2004, as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering in honor of Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi and his wife Erna, who had recently donated $52 million to the school. The gift was the largest ever to rename an existing school of engineering. The Viterbi School subsequently received other major gifts including gifts from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife Mary who created the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation in 2004;Angie Green, USC innovation institute reinventing itself, Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2007. real estate developer Daniel J. Epstein who named the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2002; Energy Corporation of America CEO John Mork and his family who named the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005; Ken Klein, CEO and president of Wind River Systems, who established the Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life, also in 2005; Ming Hsieh, founder of Cogent Inc., who named the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in 2006 with a $35 million gift, the largest ever to name such a department; and innovative Los Angeles real estate developer Sonny Astani, who named the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a $17 million gift in 2007.
Annenberg School for Communication
The Annenberg School for Communication, founded in 1971, is among the best in the nationNCA reputational rankings of Ph.D. programs in Rhetoric, National Communication Association, 2004; see also NCA\'s 1996 rankings. and is one of the two communication programs in the country endowed by Walter Annenberg (the other is at the University of Pennsylvania). The School of Journalism, which became part of the School for Communication in 1994,School Overview. USC Annenberg. Retrieved on 2007-04-26. features a core curriculum that requires students to devote themselves equally to print, broadcast and online media for the first year of study. This approach promises a breadth of knowledge across various journalistic media. USC\'s Annenberg School for Communication enjoys a large endowment (during Dean Geoffrey Cowan\'s leadership (1996-2007), the endowment rose from $7.5 million to $218 million).http://annenberg.usc.edu/AboutUs/News/0430CowanChair.aspx
In May 2006, USC\'s Board of Trustees and leaders traveled to China. While there, the university announced it would establish a research institute focusing on U.S.-China relations and trends in China. The USC U.S.-China Institute (USCI) was created in fall 2006 and immediately embarked upon an ambitious research, instructional, and service agenda. USCI has funded cutting-edge research into a variety of topics including the history of U.S.-China diplomatic exchanges, aging, property rights, environmental challenges, agricultural policy, new media, migration, and technology exchange. It has an extensive program of public conferences, performances, and talks and is providing in-service training for California teachers to aid them in bringing China alive in their classrooms.
USC Gwynn Wilson Student Union.
The Dancing Fountain of Academic Virtues in front of Doheny Library.
USC\'s Galen Center.
USC\'s academic departments fall either under the general liberal arts and sciences of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences for undergraduates, or The Graduate School for graduates, or the university\'s 17 professional schools. A full listing of academic subdivisions follows alphabetically by subject:
George Finley Bovard Administration Building
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Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library at night
The USC Libraries are among the oldest private academic research libraries in California. For more than a century USC has been building collections in support of the university\'s teaching and research interests. Especially noteworthy collections include American literature, Cinema-Television including the Warner Bros. studio archives, European philosophy, gerontology, German exile literature, international relations, Korean studies, studies of Latin America, natural history, Southern California history, and the University Archives.
The USC Warner Bros. Archives is the largest single studio collection in the world. Donated in 1977 to the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, by Warner Communications, the WBA houses departmental records that detail Warner Bros. activities from the studio’s first major feature, My Four Years in Germany (1918), to its sale to Seven Arts in 1968.
Announced in June 2006, the testimonies of 52,000 survivors, rescuers and others involved in the Holocaust will now be housed in the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences as a part of the newly formed USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.http://www.dailytrojan.com/media/...1029410.shtml
In addition to the Shoah Foundation, the USC Libraries digital collection highlights include the California Historical Society, Korean American Archives and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. The digital archive holds 193,252 records and 223,487 content files of varying formats.
The first true library was housed in the College of Liberal Arts Building ("Old College"), which was built in 1884, and designed to hold the entire USC student body—55 students. Two wings were added to the original building in 1905. Bovard Hall can be seen to the south in the back left of the picture.
USC\'s newest library: Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library
USC’s 22 libraries and other archives currently hold nearly 4 million printed volumes, 6 million items in microform, and 3 million photographs and subscribe to more than 30,000 current serial titles, nearly 44,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives, and subscribe to over 120 electronic databases and more than 14,000 journals in print and electronic formats. Annually, reference transactions number close to 50,000 and approximately 1,100 instructional presentations are made to 16,000 participants. [8] The University of Southern California Library system is among the top 35 largest university library systems in the United States.[9]
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a USC game
2004 BCS Championship Trophy in Heritage Hall
The Galen Center, with the Los Angeles skyline visible through the north windows
USC athletics participates in the NCAA Division I-A Pacific Ten Conference and has won 107 total team national championships, 87 of which are NCAA National Championships. USC\'s cross-town rival is UCLA, with whom there is fierce athletic and scholastic competition. USC\'s rivalry with Notre Dame - generally limited to football - predates the UCLA rivalry by three years. The Notre Dame rivalry stems mainly from the annual football game played between these two universities and is considered one of the greatest rivalries in college athletics.John Walters, Does it get any better than this?, SI.com, October 13, 2005.
