Kudos to the Board of Trustees for moving quickly to put a permanent President in charge.
Dr Carol Fult was Interim President at Dartmouth and Chancellor UNC and in my opinion is a great choice to move USC forward.
https://news.usc.edu/155328/carol-l-folt-to-become-uscs-12th-president/
This is great news indeed. From what I have read, she is just perfect for the role. Very exciting!
Here’s the letter from USC:
Dear Fellow Members of the USC Community:
On behalf of the Board of Trustees, I am very pleased to announce that the Board has voted unanimously to appoint Dr. Carol Lynn Folt as the 12th President of the University of Southern California.
Dr. Folt will join us this summer from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she served as Chancellor from June 2013 to January 2019. She was previously Dean of the Faculty, Provost and interim President at Dartmouth College and an Endowed Professor of Biological Sciences. Dr. Folt’s impressive career began here in California where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Aquatic Biology and Master’s Degree in Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara followed by a Doctorate in Ecology from the University of California, Davis.
For the past seven months, the Presidential Search Advisory Committee has been engaged in a comprehensive, global search to identify the most qualified and talented person to lead USC into its next era. The 23-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee, together with our two search firms, conducted a comprehensive discovery for leaders whose professional and personal qualifications aligned with the vision and priorities set forth by the USC community. Over 3,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members participated in eleven in-person listening sessions and via the search website.
Your input became our mandate – to find an individual with impeccable moral character and integrity, an intense dedication to transparent and transformative leadership, strong academic credentials, experience managing a large, complex organization including health sciences, commitment to the student experience and shared governance, appreciation for the arts and humanities, recognition of USC’s role as a civic and community steward, and a track record of leading strong, successful athletics programs.
The search advisory committee spent months interviewing more than one hundred of the very best candidates from higher education, business, government, and the non-profit sectors. The committee conducted multiple day-long interviews with the semi-finalists in addition to comprehensive vetting. Through this process, it became evident that Dr. Folt is the leader who most embodies the qualities we seek and is the right person to be our president, both now and for the long term. The committee voted unanimously to recommend her appointment to the Board of Trustees.
I have no doubt that under the enterprising and accomplished leadership of Dr. Folt, USC is set to embark on an exciting, upward, and unprecedented journey along with cultural renewal and positive change. That includes ushering in a new era of excellence, innovation, scholarship, and principled leadership that our community so justly deserves.
I want to put Dr. Folt’s selection as our 12th president into one final context. Since its founding in 1880, USC has always looked ahead. USC admitted women in its first class, and the very first valedictorian in 1884 was a woman. This torch of strong, principled women driving USC forward has been graciously carried by interim President Wanda Austin and soon will be proudly passed to Dr. Folt.
Thank you to the members of the Presidential Search Advisory Committee for their diligence and dedication to this monumental process. This is an exceptional group of trustees and faculty leaders who always placed the best interests of our Trojan community first through every step of this process. I also want to express my gratitude to all my fellow trustees for their guidance, wisdom and steadfast commitment to this critically important decision. It is the Board’s most important and solemn duty.
The Board and I are also deeply and especially grateful to Dr. Austin for serving as interim President. These last nine months have been the most turbulent in the University’s 140-year history. And yet, she has exhibited leadership, courage, selflessness and grace. Dr. Austin embodies the very best of our Trojan spirit. She will continue in her role until June 30th to ensure a seamless transition and will then return to the Board as a fellow Trustee.
Finally, I want to express my sincerest appreciation to our entire USC community for your loyalty and patience through this search process and during the significant challenges we have endured over the past few years. The responsibility of everyone at USC, especially our leadership, is to act with sound judgment, fortitude, and a commitment to always doing what is right. The Board and I are eager to support Dr. Folt as we live up to this responsibility and bring constructive cultural change and a positive, new direction to our great University. We are as prepared, as strong, as courageous, as clear-eyed, as principled as the Trojan warrior and ready to move forward. Dr. Folt will be communicating with you very soon. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her into the Trojan family. And, together, let’s Fight On!
Sincerely,
Chair
Board of Trustees
The first letter from the new USC President
https://presidentelect.usc.edu/message-from-the-president-elect/
Such an exciting and positive time for USC! For those that don’t like links, here is the text:
Message from the President-Elect
March 20, 2019
Greetings Trojan Family,
I am honored to be joining you as the twelfth president of the University of Southern California, and am deeply grateful to the USC community and its leaders for giving me the privilege of working with you to set a bold and transformational path for our university.
The opportunities ahead for USC are extraordinary. Walking across both campuses, I feel the spirit of this place, the strength of the work being done here, and it is teeming with possibility and promise. I feel the powerful legacy that comes from its frontier history, rising with the growth of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, embracing diversity and global reach well before others, and innovating with spirit and a drive for excellence and service at the center of it all.
Already, in every conversation, our community has been telling me that they desire to push this great university even further. I see you have the energy for that, and I am eager to get started working with you. Of course, I also see that our community is deeply troubled by a number of immediate challenges. I assure you that we will meet these challenges together directly, decisively, and with honesty and candor. I have learned already how much our people—our students, faculty, staff, and alumni—love and are committed to our university, and how much discovery and innovation takes place here every day. With so much to celebrate, so many strengths, and so much public good, we must look to ourselves to strengthen our culture and our bonds of trust, and take actions that drive positive change. At the same time, we also must stay focused on our educational mission—our daily work of teaching, research, taking care of patients, service—and on the future. This is a moment of responsibility and opportunity, and we will seize them both.
It is also a great pleasure to be moving back to California. So much of my formative time was here. I came here as a community college student, then as an undergrad and grad student at UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis. I learned the excitement and the disciplinary rigor of science, made lifelong friends, and studied many of California’s diverse ecosystems and wild places. And while I still have much to learn about the Los Angeles region, the creative energy here is instantly obvious and infectious. USC’s diversity and inextricable link to our local communities distinguishes us among other preeminent universities with a national and global reach. I love that USC’s first valedictorian was a woman, Minnie Miltimore, who graduated in 1884, and that USC has always looked outward—to the local community, to the Pacific Rim, and beyond—for inspiration and mission.
My sincere thanks to Interim President Wanda Austin, Board Chair Rick Caruso, the search committee, the Board of Trustees, and the USC staff who have graciously welcomed me and are working to make sure I have a smooth transition. Shared governance is a distinguishing feature of higher education and is essential to our success. I look forward to listening to and working closely with our outstanding students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community to ensure your perspectives are reflected as we move forward.
One of my greatest joys of being your president will be getting to know you, spending time with you, listening as you share your concerns and your dreams, and celebrating your accomplishments and victories. I’ll see you at performances, lectures, games, in classrooms and labs, and in places across our campuses. I hope you’ll reach out and introduce yourselves at every opportunity.
Thank you again. And let me say, proudly, for the first time: Fight On, together.
Sincerely,
Carol L. Folt
President-elect
I am beyond excited about our new president. I’ll have more input on this later, and I’d love to hear from Trimple W and other Trojans re President Folt.
It’s a great day to be a Trojan!
I concur with @USCWolverine.
From all that I have read about both 1) the selection committee’s process in terms of searching for a new USC president and 2) the specific back-story and biography of Carol Folt herself, she seems very well-suited to serve in this capacity. It took them seven long months to conclude the search, but ultimately the USC Board of Trustees chose her after their 23-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee voted for Folt’s appointment unanimously. That is a very strong sign indeed. And to be clear… I think they were looking for a new mold of president this go around… and for many important reasons.
Folt is the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the first woman to ever lead UNC) and had to in fact lead UNC out of a very dark period, following significant NCAA scandals. After a global search that led USC to speak with 100+ candidates for the job, here’s hoping that they made the right selection. But let’s face it… the reality is that only time will tell if they chose wisely or not. I certainly hope so.
The key issues that have plagued past USC presidents seem to arise based on how they reacted to certain situations… or failed to react appropriately. That may very well be her most significant test(s) over time as well. But Folt at least seems well-poised for the role. She seems like a true academic with the proper balance of executive experience. In the past, I believe that USC mistakenly assumed that the USC president could chiefly be a strong ambassador for the school and its most significant fundraiser… as if the other critical job prerequisites - like setting the proper agenda and overseeing a complex myriad of department heads - may be inconsequential. Clearly they were not so. Too many scandals arose that could have and should have been squashed at their inception.
I am thus at least enthusiastic about this appointment and USC’s new path at the start 
.
I’m optimistic although I think we should wait at least 5 years before making any judgments. But the fact that she’s spent significant time in California and then also worked in high positions at Dartmouth and UNC seems good. She just has a lot of work ahead of her and I think this is where we should just hope and pray for her success. USC is bigger than any one person and the state and country need it to succeed, period. These last few scandals have just really hurt because they speak to the character of the institution and the gap between expectations and reality.