California and the West : Three Cheers for a Deep Commitment to the Community

I can’t begin to imagine how UCLA’s alumni feel about this, but USC has just been named “college of the year”--the year being 2000--by Time magazine, in conjunction with the Princeton Review.

Congratulations are definitely in order at USC, where students and professors have already begun celebrating a noteworthy achievement. This wouldn’t be the best week for a keg of beer and a food fight, I might add.

What a wonderful honor, to be called the best college or university in the entire country. Last year’s winner was Vassar, a rival that USC should immediately adopt in football and drop what’s-its-name, Notre Dame.

The choice of USC was made by a panel of authorities on higher education. The decision has nothing to do with a school’s beauty, affordability or commitment to letting Kurt Vonnegut deliver a commencement speech. It has a great deal to do with a school’s commitment to its community.

“USC’s effort goes far beyond mailing brochures to inner-city high school counselors and hoping that qualified applicants will materialize,” the magazine’s story on its honoree makes clear.

Good of somebody to notice.

Since taking over as its president a few years ago, Steven B. Sample has taken pains to make the University of Southern California a vital, almost revolutionary force in Los Angeles, where it is the city’s largest private employer.

Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Chicago . . . these might be more widely known for scholarly pursuits, but it takes more than that to make a college.

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Around the nation, or perhaps even around the region, many are unaware of proud old (don’t-you-dare-call-us) “Southern Cal” as anything more than an upper-crust urban university, prosperous and prominent.

It is not as renowned as it should be for social and civic contributions, or as acknowledged as it would be if USC, like so many other major universities, were the hub of an entire town. Whenever something of note happens at a Princeton, at a Duke, at a Purdue, you can bet that practically everybody in the vicinity knows about it.

Lost in Los Angeles this way, things are going on at USC that sometimes fall through the cracks of common knowledge.

For example:

* Time points out that more than half of SC’s 15,000 undergraduates do volunteer work in the community. Architecture students build a park in an abandoned lot. Spanish majors serve as interpreters. Premeds help at the morgue. That kind of thing.

* During the past decade, the average SAT scores of students applying to USC have risen more than 200 points.

* The school’s endowment has nearly tripled, to $1.5 billion.

* A 5-year-old project to provide tutoring programs in math and reading for five neighborhood schools is so successful that both the magazine and USC’s president call it a model for the rest of the nation.

* Kid Watch, created in 1996, recruited local residents to observe children on their way to and from school. More than 8,000 kids (and their parents) can now feel at least a little safer on the street.

* Campus police have greatly increased in number and in the area they patrol.

* A program initiated by USC gets rid of ugly graffiti, usually within 24 hours.

* USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative helps hundreds of C-average students to improve skills before entering college, rather than after. An outreach program such as this counsels kids and offers scholarship rewards to some who would otherwise have little or no chance at one.

“Our research showed that the University of Southern California has been doing more for its surrounding community than most, and has been doing so longer,” Time’s editors noted.

And, they add, they are not the first to notice, pointing out that Gen. Colin Powell’s pet project, America’s Promise, gave its “university of the year” honor to USC in 1998.

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Everyone on campus enjoys it when a university’s representative is triumphant . . . a professor capturing a prize, a student excelling in a particular field, a team carrying a coach on its shoulders.

This latest recognition, though, is of the university itself, and of everything that it represents.

In an age of complaint over rising collegiate costs, isn’t it satisfying to know that a school such as USC can make one see and feel the value of money well spent?

Forget football. This could be USC’s greatest victory of the ‘90s.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com