<p>Way to go 'SC! Keep hiring more Nobel Winners!</p>
<p>Nobel</a> Prize Winner Appointed Presidential Professor at USC - USC News</p>
<p>wow thats solid.</p>
<p>If USC really wants to move up in the rankings/become on par with Stanford in terms of academics, it will need to start producing Nobel prize/other prize winners in their respective fields. And to do that, USC will need to develop a leading faculty, not to say that the USC faculty isn’t great already, but, as with anything, it can improve.</p>
<p>May I suggest you visit the Faculty Portal on the USC website? There is a long list of honors, awards, achievements and prizes earned by the USC faculty. These include National Medals, Turing Prize winners, Pritzer Prize winners and large numbers of academy members in various disciplines. </p>
<p>Faculty members have also won Pulitzer Prizes, Peabody Awards, Fulbright Scholarships, Guggenheim Fellowships, Sloan Scholarships, Grammys, Academy Awards, Emmys, Tonys and many other honors. An interesting note is last year a professor in Viterbi won an Academy Award and a professor in Thornton won a Pulitzer Prize.</p>
<p>Murray Gell-Mann is an icon when it comes to physics, but like most icons he is in a point of his career where he will do almost nothing for the academic reputation of USC. My guess is that he is hired for public relations reasons, in order to strengthen the fundraising ability of the science departments. </p>
<p>On an unrelated note, you may have heard that in the last few years USC has stood for University of Stolen Colleagues, on account of its very aggressive policy of recruiting visible researchers.</p>