University of Southern California (USC) Interim President Beong Soo Kim has been handed a great gift in the form of the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Currently, the nine universities that have been asked to review the draft Compact have not been asked to sign it; instead, they have been asked to comment on it. USC is uniquely well-positioned to benefit from the terms of the draft Compact, and so is Kim.
President Kim is not a career academic. He joined USC in 2020 as the General Counsel. He succeeded the former leftist President of USC, Carol Folt, whose abrupt retirement made her term of service mercifully brief. Kim reports that he has no designs on a permanent appointment to the post, although he says he is open to staying in the role as long as the Board of Trustees requests. This is precisely what anyone who wants the job would say.
For now, take Interim President Kim at his word. Suppose he is not competing for a permanent appointment as President. In this case, he is essentially bulletproof and has little to lose by accepting the US Department of Education’s offer when the terms of the Compact are finalized. USC has much to gain if he does. President Kim faces a windfall—a uniquely effective opportunity to follow his conscience, deliver transformative leadership, and save one of the nation’s great universities from its long-standing intellectual decline.
Kim may have the disposition to do so, and if he does, then hopefully, the USC Board of Trustees has the wisdom to let him. He was a very unusual General Counsel. Most General Counsels stay deliberately behind the scenes. President Kim did not. He has been very visible, speaking on campus and in other venues about academic freedom and freedom of speech, and is a strong proponent of both. The son of two former USC graduate students from Korea, and one of the relatively few Asians Harvard allowed to attend, Kim has seen up close the downside of discrimination risk embedded in affirmative action.
For the most part, USC’s mostly leftist faculty view the possibility of the university agreeing to the Compact as the approach of Armageddon. They are making a unified effort to persuade USC’s leadership to decline. An October 6th Zoom call with 499 faculty members, in addition to Kim, revealed that no one was prepared to support the Compact publicly. This is unfortunate because the terms of the Compact would improve the culture at USC, and President Kim is likely aware of this.
The Compact declares that preferential treatment of certain groups “perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority, destroys confidence, and does nothing to identify or solve the most pressing challenges of aspiring young people.” The document prohibits considering “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations, or proxies for any of those factors” in admission or financial support decisions. It invokes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to call for applying similar standards in “appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level.” In short, the Compact calls for an exclusive focus on merit in decisions relating to the allocation of resources or opportunities. This is a welcome, long-overdue correction.
Beyond this centrally important return to a fundamental, color-blind, gender-blind standard of fairness, the Compact includes a laundry list of other improvements. It calls for “an intellectually open campus environment,” including an end to the “heckler’s veto,” forbidding disruptions to instruction, and, most importantly, actively fostering ideological diversity. The Compact calls for strict institutional neutrality at all levels with respect to social and political events, while encouraging members of the university community to express their views in their individual capacities.
It calls for an end to grade inflation. Documenting this effort would add to the University’s administrative burden, but it would give the administrators something constructive to do for a change. It calls for uniform standards of discipline respecting due process for students, faculty, and staff. Although not explicitly stated in the Compact, these standards and procedures may differ across groups, as faculty, staff, and students have distinct rights, roles, and responsibilities; however, they should be entirely consistent within each group. The Compact calls for removing biological men from women’s sports and locker rooms, but does not prohibit universities from providing all-gender facilities for those who want to use them. It calls for supporting education opportunities for service members and veterans, a historical strength for USC, including articulating credit transfer opportunities for work documented in these students’ Joint Services Transcripts.
The Compact includes provisions with financial implications that would have a strong but manageable effect on USC. Tuition for domestic students would be frozen for five years. For many years, tuition at USC and elsewhere has grown at a rate that is a small integer multiple of inflation, with impunity. In 2025, US News and World Report ranked the total cost of attending USC as the highest in the nation. Tuition increased by more than $3,000 for the 2025-26 academic year. In 2023, USC’s total costs ranked third among national universities. This trend is a long-term artifact of aggressively profligate US student loan programs and university leaders nationwide who were willing to take advantage of the situation to grow their institutions’ administrative ranks. Freezing tuition for five years would force financial trade-offs, but this is the point. Cost reductions are feasible. US universities have bloated administrations, and USC is no exception, though not quite in Stanford territory.
The Compact’s 15 percent cap on international undergraduate students, with no more than five percent from any one country, would not strongly affect USC, because just about 14 percent of the University’s undergraduate cohort is international. There has been rapid growth in this population over the last decade. Fifteen years ago, this share was in the neighborhood of two to three percent. In any event, international undergraduates do not have a significant effect on the nation’s ability to retain technical talent, as only about 17 percent of international bachelor’s degree recipients remain in the United States.
The graduate picture is different. Historically, USC has been internationally intensive at the graduate level, in part because USC is the national leader in the number of master’s degrees awarded in engineering. USC became the nation’s most international institution in terms of enrollment after the 9/11 attacks, overtaking NYU, but currently ranks fifth. The Compact imposes no new restrictions on global graduate students. These exist outside the agreement in the form of the administration’s new H-1B visa costs, which are a mistake.
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The Trump administration overlooks the fact that graduate education for international students is a key ingredient in expanding the pool of technically skilled Americans. Half of master’s degree recipients graduating from US institutions between 2012 and 2020, and three-fourths of doctoral recipients, were still in the country in 2021. These advanced degree-holders are professionally oriented and have acculturated to American society. The administration’s policy goal should be to keep these graduates here on a path to citizenship, not making it more difficult for companies to hire them.
Desperate not to be left out of the race for bad ideas, California Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened to somehow cut off state funding to California universities that agree to the Compact. USC receives relatively little research funding from the State of California. Most such resources are dedicated, as a matter of law, to the University of California system, but Newsom’s threat is not entirely empty. USC still receives more than $28 million in Cal Grant revenue to enable attendance by California students.
Exactly how the Governor would manage to interrupt this revenue flow is unclear. He cannot retroactively impound for policy reasons funds that have already been appropriated. Newsom could request a bill from the legislature to amend appropriations for the California Student Aid Commission or include provisions in the next Budget Act that exclude institutions that agree to the Compact. He could ask the legislature to amend the Education Code to redefine the set of qualifying institutions students must enroll in to receive grant funds. Still, there is nothing the Governor can do unilaterally or immediately. Further, California’s Democratic super-majority legislature might not support his requests. Newsom will term out of office in 2026, and California legislators have constituents of their own, constituents whose children’s interests are supported by these funds. Even if a lame-duck Governor somehow prevails in the legislature, affected universities will see him in court.
Eventually saying “yes” to the Trump administration’s offer might result in a no-confidence vote for Interim President Kim by USC’s Academic Senate, but this is uncertain, and even if it came to pass, what of it? Conscience and progress are not free, and he is interim. Kim agreeing to the terms of the draft Compact would greenlight USC’s pursuit of federal funding for faculty research. Scientific research, ranging from medical research for the National Institutes of Health to classified research for the Department of Defense, is what USC is mainly about. Being consigned to the back of the research funding queue would impose a significantly greater cost than any of the conditions outlined by the Compact. Still, research funds are just icing on the cake. The real win would be an institutional return to merit, due process, and equal opportunity.
Image: “University of Southern California” by FASTILY on Wikimedia Commons
