University of Southern California

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The University of Southern California opened its doors in 1880 with 53 students, 10 faculty members, and a graduating class four years later of exactly three people. One of those three was valedictorian. She was the only woman in the class. That founding moment captures something essential about USC: a small, scrappy institution in a city that barely existed, asking questions about who deserves a seat at the table. The school's charter declared that no student would be denied admission because of race, an extraordinary commitment for 1880. The man who made it happen, Judge Robert Maclay Widney, pulled together an unlikely trio of donors, each from a different faith tradition, to piece together the land and the money. From that improbable start, USC has grown into a university of more than 47,000 students, a film school that has shaped Hollywood, athletic programs that have sent more athletes to the Olympic medal podium than any other American university, and a campus so visually distinctive that filmmakers use it to stand in for virtually every fictional college in America. The story of how a Methodist-affiliated school on the edge of a frontier city became one of the most complicated, celebrated, and contested institutions in the country is worth understanding in detail.

• 2. Three Donors, One Dream

  ›

  Ozro Childs was a Protestant nurseryman. John Gately Downey was an Irish Catholic who had served as governor of California. Isaias Wolf Hellman was a German Jewish banker. These three men had almost nothing in common except an interest in building something lasting in Los Angeles, and together they donated 308 acres and the seed money that allowed USC to open. Their collaboration was not accidental. Judge Robert Maclay Widney, the university's founder, deliberately sought donors across religious lines, and the resulting institution opened with the explicit promise that faith would not determine who could attend. USC operated under the umbrella of the Methodist Church for decades, but formal ties were severed in 1952, and no religious affiliation has governed the university since. The first campus building, the one envisioned as the permanent centerpiece, was completed in 1887 and named Old College. It housed the college of Liberal Arts, the forerunner of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences that exists today. By the mid-20th century, Old College's age and seismic vulnerabilities had overtaken its symbolism, and the building was demolished in 1948, leaving behind a founding vision that the new structures would have to carry forward.

• 3. Building the Campus

  ›

  In 1919, architect John Parkinson arrived at USC with a master plan that would define the university's visual identity for a century. His focus was Romanesque buildings rendered in red brick, a style so consistent that the campus reads today as a unified architectural statement. Bovard Administration Building went up along Trousdale Parkway in 1921 and remains one of the oldest and most recognizable structures on the grounds. The Gwynn Wilson Student Union, the Doheny Memorial Library, and the Allan Hancock Foundation followed in 1927, 1932, and 1940, clustering around what is now Hahn Plaza. Much of this building surge happened under President Rufus B. von KleinSmid, who oversaw the construction of 19 buildings across 25 years. World War II interrupted that momentum sharply. Total enrollment fell 15 percent, and by the war's end, 75 percent of male students were serving in some branch of the military. USC was among 131 institutions nationally that participated in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a pathway to a Navy commission. When the war ended, veterans flooded back under the G.I. Bill, pushing enrollment to 24,000 by 1947 and straining every facility the university owned. The postwar pressure on space drove the next major expansion. Under President Norman Topping, who took office in 1958, and with the assistance of architect William Pereira, USC built 99 buildings between 1961 and 1979. The oldest surviving structure on the entire campus is Widney Alumni House, built in 1880, which predates everything Parkinson and Pereira would later construct. In 2015, the historic portion of the University Park campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

• 4. The Trojans Are Born

  ›

  Before 1912, USC athletes were called Fighting Methodists or Wesleyans, names no one at the university had officially approved. The change came from a single athletic contest against Stanford University, a track and field meet that USC was losing decisively after the first few events. The team fought back, winning enough of the remaining events to lose only by a small margin. A Los Angeles Times sportswriter named Owen Bird described the USC athletes as having fought on like the Trojans of antiquity. The university's president at the time, George F. Bovard, heard the phrase and made it official. The bronze statue now known as Tommy Trojan, formally called the Trojan Shrine, stands near the center of campus and has become so popular a landmark that its sword is stolen with enough frequency that the university long ago stopped replacing it with brass. Tommy's current sword is wooden. The live mascot is a white Andalusian horse named Traveler. The first Traveler appeared at a football game in 1961 ridden by Richard Saukko; the current horse is Traveler IX. An earlier unofficial mascot, a car-chasing dog named George Tirebiter, earned its own statue in 2006, decades after the original animal died. The dog became famous partly by biting the mascot of rival UCLA, which gives some sense of how the cross-town rivalry has always operated. The Trojans' official fight song, 'Fight On', was composed in 1922 by Milo Sweet, a USC dental student, with lyrics by Sweet and Glen Grant.

• 5. Athletic Records

  ›

  As of 2021, athletes who have passed through USC have won 326 medals at the Olympic Games, breaking down to 153 golds, 96 silvers, and 77 bronzes. That total is greater than that of any other American university, and a separate calculation found that if USC were an independent country, it would have ranked 13th in the world in Olympic medals at the 2016 Games. Since 1912, USC is the only university anywhere to have produced a gold medal-winning athlete at every single summer Olympiad. Four Trojans have won the James E. Sullivan Award, given to the top amateur athlete in America: diver Sammy Lee in 1953, shot putter Parry O'Brien in 1959, swimmer John Naber in 1977, and swimmer Janet Evans in 1989. In football, 537 Trojans have been taken in the NFL draft, and the program claims 11 national championships along with eight Heisman Trophy winners. Men's sports at USC have produced 97 team national championships and a record 303 individual NCAA titles across disciplines including track and field, tennis, baseball, swimming and diving, and water polo. Women's teams have added 27 national championships and 64 individual NCAA crowns. Two women athletes have taken the Honda-Broderick Cup as top collegiate woman athlete of the year: Cheryl Miller in 1983-84 and Angela Williams in 2001-02. USC won the National College All-Sports Championship six times after the award was introduced in 1971.

• 6. The School of Cinematic Arts

  ›

  George Lucas donated $175 million to USC's film school in September 2006, at the time the largest single gift the university had received and its fifth donation above $100 million. That money funded new buildings and expanded faculty at an institution that is already considered the oldest and largest film school in the country. The School of Cinematic Arts grants degrees in six programs and has produced more alumni who have gone on to win Academy and Emmy Awards than any other institution in the world. The school's reach inside Hollywood is deep enough that, according to IMDb, the USC campus has appeared in at least 180 film and television titles, with filmmakers using the Romanesque red-brick grounds to stand in for fictional universities in productions ranging from Forrest Gump to The Social Network to Legally Blonde. The school opened its classes to the wider university in 1998, when administrators concluded that cinematic skills were too broadly valuable to reserve for future industry professionals. Three years later, in 2001, the film school added an Interactive Media and Games Division covering stereoscopic cinema, virtual reality, video games, and mobile media. The acceptance rate to the School of Cinematic Arts has held between 4 and 6 percent for several years, placing it among the most selective programs anywhere at the university. The USC Warner Bros. Archives, housed at the university and donated by Warner Communications in 1977, is the largest single studio collection in the world, documenting Warner Bros. activities from its first major feature, My Four Years in Germany, released in 1918, through the studio's 1968 sale to Seven Arts.

• 7. Controversy and Accountability

  ›

  In the mid-2010s, USC faced a sequence of scandals that reached across its medical school, athletics department, and admissions office. The most consequential involved George Tyndall, a gynecologist at the university's health center whose reported misconduct spanned from 1990 to 2016. By June 2018, 401 individuals had contacted a special hotline the university set up to receive complaints. By October of that year, nearly 100 more women had filed lawsuits, bringing the total number of accusers past 500. A series of settlements ultimately totalled more than $1.1 billion, the largest sexual abuse settlement in the history of any university. Tyndall had been fired in 2017 after reaching a separate settlement with USC itself. The university's president at the time, C. L. Max Nikias, resigned in the aftermath, with reports noting that other instances in which the university was perceived to have failed to act on misconduct by powerful officials had also contributed to his departure. Separately, Carmen Puliafito resigned as dean of the Keck School of Medicine in 2016, and the following year a newspaper reported that he had engaged in parties with young recreational drug users and prostitutes, including at the medical school's offices. On the 12th of March 2019, three coaches and one athletic director were charged with accepting bribes in connection with the national college admissions scandal, making USC one of the most heavily implicated institutions in that case. A 2020 investigative report later described preferential treatment given to a Qatari royal, including reports of a Rolex watch delivered alongside a final exam paper, which an adjunct professor returned. In April 2024, the university's decision to bar valedictorian Asna Tabassum from speaking at commencement, citing safety concerns related to her pro-Palestinian viewpoints, drew widespread criticism. Following campus protests, 93 people were arrested. President Carol Folt then cancelled the main stage commencement ceremony entirely.

• 8. The Spirit of Troy

  ›

  The Spirit of Troy, USC's marching band, has performed in at least ten major movies and appeared at both the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In 1979, the band performed on the title track of the Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, which became a multi-platinum record. The band returned for another multi-platinum Fleetwood Mac record, The Dance, in 1997, making the Spirit of Troy the only collegiate band with two platinum records. During halftime at Super Bowl XXI in 1987 and Super Bowl XXII in 1988, the band performed for national audiences. In 2003 and 2004, the Spirit of Troy was one of only two American groups invited to march in the Hong Kong Chinese New Year parade. The band performed at the 2005 World Expo in Nagoya, Japan, and in May 2006 traveled to Italy, where it performed once in Florence and twice in Rome, including in front of the Coliseum. Beyond the band, USC's student media traces back to 1912, when the Daily Trojan began publishing. The newspaper secured the first interview with President Richard Nixon after his resignation and continues to run entirely on advertising revenue without university financial support. The student yearbook, El Rodeo, dates to 1889, when its first edition appeared under the name The Sybil. The name changed to El Rodeo in 1899 as students began marketing it around a cowboy roundup theme. USC's libraries, which hold nearly 4 million printed volumes and more than 2 million archival items from ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the largest LGBT repository in the world, reflect an institution that has consistently built collections at the intersection of entertainment, science, and social history.