Norman Topping, Pivotal Ex-President of USC, Dies

Dr. Norman Topping, former president of USC who was credited with making the university a world-class educational and research institution and creating its Norris cancer center, has died. He was 89.

Topping, who served as USC president from 1958 to 1970, died Tuesday of pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles, USC officials announced Thursday.

A community leader, the educator promoted commuter rail lines for Los Angeles as president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District and worked for redevelopment of the economically depressed areas around his campus.

“I think of Norman Topping as the father of the modern USC,” said the university’s current president, Steven Sample.

It was Topping, Sample said, who saw that USC must “transform itself” into a research university in the late 1950s as UCLA and other public universities assumed USC’s early role of training professionals to develop Southern California.

“Norman was brave enough and effective enough to make the USC constituency--alumni, faculty, donors--adopt the new mission to become the international research university it is today,” Sample said. “He started us on this new course, and this has been our course for 40 years.”

Significantly, near the end of Topping’s tenure, USC was first elected to the prestigious Assn. of American Universities, recognizing the struggle he spearheaded to attain academic excellence. The association is made up of (currently 62) elite research universities in the U.S. and Canada.

In 1958, Topping returned to a campus that, he told The Times, “hadn’t changed a great deal” since he studied medicine there in the 1930s. The physical plant was inadequate, fund-raising efforts were largely unsuccessful and relatively little research was occurring.

By 1961 the new president announced a master plan for improvement. When he retired nine years later, he left a legacy of $60 million worth of new buildings, graduate students representing 55% of the total enrollment of 20,000, about $28 million in federal support for research instead of the $2 million being received annually when he arrived, and improved salaries and standards that upgraded the quality of faculty and students.

He also quadrupled the university’s endowment, including landing large grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation to fuel major growth in science and engineering. He kept finances in the black despite increasing the annual operating budget from $18.5 million to $80 million.

“This used to be a joke school,” a professor told The Times in 1970. “. . . People came here to play football or because it was a good way for a ballplayer to get to the major leagues. The only time the university got any publicity was when somebody died from fraternity hazing. Topping just decided that this was going to be a first-rate university. He got the money, and he got good people.”

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As chancellor from 1971 until 1980 and then chancellor emeritus, Topping continued raising money and respect for USC, particularly in the medical field.

As a physician, he had specialized in infectious diseases, but he also became a staunch supporter of cancer research. In 1976, he campaigned strenuously for passage of a county ballot measure to finance construction of Los Angeles County-USC Cancer Hospital and Research Institute.

The initiative lost. But Kenneth Norris Jr. stepped forward as a major USC benefactor eager to help the medical school, and Topping created what is now the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, which opened in 1983. Topping continued soliciting funding for the addition of what was named the Dr. Norman Topping Tower.

Without Topping, said Dr. Brian Henderson, his friend and the former director of both the Norris facility and the Salk Institute, there would have been no Norris center.

“Norris was the first private medical facility for the university, and it was a huge gamble,” Henderson said. “Norman was always there when I needed help, advice, encouragement, never being in the way. He was the best of all kinds of mentors as well as quite a remarkable leader.”

To celebrate Topping’s 75th birthday in 1983, friends organized a benefit starring singer Andy Williams to fund the Norman Topping Endowment for Cancer Research at Norris.

The now-annual Topping Dinner is USC’s largest fund-raising event, bringing in $1.7 million last year.

Also in 1983, USC honored Topping with an endowed chair, funded by National Medical Enterprises Inc., for study of the relationship between law and medicine. He received the USC Presidential Medallion, the university’s highest honor, in 1987.

Beyond the campus, Topping became a major force in the Greater Los Angeles community.

He assumed the president’s post in the era of urban renewal. In his inaugural address, he called for redevelopment of the run-down neighborhoods surrounding USC, and within weeks he was in the office of Mayor Norris Poulson working on the problem. He sent students into the community in an “urban semester” program.

“We are a large university in the heart of a vast urban area,” he told The Times when he was president. “We are completely aware that urban problems are major problems that must be solved and that a university can’t be an ostrich and stick its head in the sand.”

After leaving the USC presidency, Topping became even more active in civic and political causes.

He served as president of the RTD and was one of the first to advocate making Union Station a unified transportation center for rail, bus and other modes of travel.

Topping staunchly supported a commuter rail system for Los Angeles decades before the Red Line became a reality.

“It is not a matter of centralization vs. dispersal, as some would argue,” he wrote in an opinion piece for The Times in 1973 when he was in his third term as RTD president. “Rather, it is that we in this basin deserve to reach a new level in personal mobility that does not include all-out reliance on the car and the facilities required to store and operate it. . . . It is critical that we get started as soon as possible.”

In 1976, Topping also served on Mayor Tom Bradley’s citizens committee to consider redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles.

Born in Flat River, Mo., Norman Hawkins Topping grew up in Los Angeles and earned both his bachelor’s and medical degrees at USC.

He began his career as a researcher in viral diseases at the U.S. Public Health Service in Bethesda, Md., where he developed the typhus vaccine given to American, Canadian and British soldiers during World War II and still used today. He also developed the first effective treatment for Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

During the war, Topping spent three months as a medical officer on a Coast Guard cutter, but was recalled to Washington as associate director of the National Institutes of Health. He was also named assistant U.S. surgeon general.

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Topping served as vice president for medical affairs at the University of Pennsylvania from 1952 to 1958.

Among his myriad honors, he received the Hollzer Award in 1974 from the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council for his contribution to promotion of racial and religious harmony in Southern California.

He earned the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Public Relations Society of America in 1972, and in 1971 was named Headliner of the Year by the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and Man of the Year by the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Topping is survived by a son, Brian B. Topping, of Baltimore; a daughter, Linda Topping Badgley, of Isla de Culebra, Puerto Rico; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife, the former Helen Rummens, died in 1989.