Message to USC Faculty
From: Michael W. Quick, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
September 17, 2018
Our 2018 Strategic Plan: Answering the Call charts our path forward as a leading global research university by asking us to re-commit to our core academic and societal values, to invest in people who embody entrepreneurial, convergent, and inclusive spirits, to invent the future and support our communities, and to reinvent higher education for the 21st Century. The plan is ambitious and our success depends not just on adequate resources, but on leadership and engagement by our world-class faculty, staff, and students.
We have already made multiple investments in support of the Strategic Plan. We have increased funding for research infrastructure, created inter-school research centers such as the USC Race and Equity Center, the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, the Center for Human-Applied Reasoning and the Internet of Things (CHARIOT), and launched programs aimed at confronting the complex issues of homelessness, security & sustainability, lifespan health, and immigration & global migration. We have new initiatives related to arts for social change and in teaching excellence. We have taken major steps to advance diversity, access, and opportunity across the university in ways that are coming to fruition. We are just getting started, and in the weeks ahead I will update you on additional initiatives in these areas.
Over the next five years my office will be allocating a minimum of $10 million per year to further advance the goals of the 2018 Strategic Plan.
As part of this effort, I have asked the Academic Senate to establish faculty committees for each of the four pillars of the Strategic Plan. These committees will be in charge of soliciting proposals from our community and allocating the necessary resources.
While it will be up to the faculty committees to design the types of proposals to be considered, the kinds of efforts we want to sponsor will strengthen our culture and refocus us on our core academic values. They will be in keeping with the Strategic Plan’s main tenets: leading through impact, people, values, and transforming our university. I urge you to think beyond your area of expertise, across schools. I encourage you to reach bigger and broader to strengthen our intellectual community.
I will update you once the committees are established and when they have designed their requests for proposals. In the meantime, we have a new strategic plan website, https://strategic.usc.edu/ that I invite you to visit. We will add new information to the site as we have it.
As our plan states: our mission is urgent, our energy boundless, and our vision sweeping. Let’s take on this challenge together.
Cc: Wanda Austin
Academic Senate
Academic Deans
President’s Cabinet
Provost’s Cabinet