USC’s Zumberge: Solid as a Rock

For a working geologist, as James H. Zumberge once was, time divided itself more often into history and prehistory than into months and years. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that when he chose to announce his retirement, he would dismiss his decade as president of the University of Southern California by saying simply, that “there is a time to come and a time to go.” He is too modest.

USC has reason to remember well the times of its ninth president and regret his time of going. He will be, or should be, remembered not least for knowing how to read a budget where he saw, shortly after he arrived, fault lines in USC’s financial foundation that nobody else knew were there. Most campus presidents are forced to spend too much of their time raising funds, and from that day forward this was even more true for Zumberge. But he will leave USC’s endowment three times larger than he found it, still small for a school its size, but large enough for it to prosper.

Zumberge will stay on campus until a new president is chosen, a task that could take a year. This will give him a bit more time to further ensure USC’s longevity, to keep building for the future and to extend links between the school and the city around it and adjacent to it. He left some challenges for his successor. Black enrollment is down and, despite an energetic program of rebuilding faculty and recruiting honor students, you hear complaints from other academics that the school appears to lack “intellectual vitality.” Zumberge started meeting the challenges; importantly, he also made it possible to follow through on so very many of them.