USC to Mark 125th Anniversary of Its Founding With Festival

Since opening more than a century ago, the University of Southern California has woven itself into the cultural fabric of Los Angeles and the world.

Its medical school, the first in Southern California, has recently produced research on the relationship between asthma and air pollution.

Home of the nation’s first film school, USC has seen at least one of its graduates nominated every year for an Oscar since the inception of the Academy Awards in 1929.

Since 1912, USC has been the only university in the world to have a gold-winning athlete in every Summer Olympiad.

And it lays claim to having the highest population of international students -- more than 5,000 from 134 nations -- of any university in the United States granting doctoral degrees.

“It started out as a small liberal arts college,” said Dennis Cornell, associate vice president for external affairs. “In the early 1900s, USC provided the city with its doctors, its lawyers, its pharmacists and so forth. It evolved as a vital part of Los Angeles, but with a global reach.”

That legacy is being celebrated as USC marks its 125th anniversary this week with a four-day festival, starting Thursday.

Through the decades, USC graduates have surfaced often in important places and events. Their ranks include astronaut Neil Armstrong, former First Lady Pat Nixon, architect Frank Gehry, baseball slugger Mark McGwire, actor John Wayne, columnist Art Buchwald, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.

The university, with 32,000 undergraduate and graduate students today, sprang from a humble start in 1880, when Los Angeles was a pioneer town of 10,000. That year USC had 53 students and 10 teachers. The campus awarded nearly 8,500 undergraduate and graduate degrees last year.

Its law, medical, dental, business, architecture, communications and other schools provide an entree to the professional world that rivals any university in the world, said Cornell.

The university is in the forefront of computer gaming technology that taps into advanced digital manipulation of video imagery, he said. And the School of Cinema-Television “without a doubt is considered No. 1 in the country.”

“Our alumni populate every corner of the field,” said the film school dean, Elizabeth Daley. “They’re in and out of our classes all the time.” Grads include Robert Greenblatt, producer of “Six Feet Under,” and John Wells, who produced “West Wing.”

The school began in 1929, when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was a fencing partner with Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid, USC’s president. It was only two years after the first talking picture, “The Jazz Singer,” premiered.

“They decided there should be a place where film would be accorded the same stature as law and medicine,” Daley said. Fairbanks founded and taught at the school’s forerunner, the department of cinema, the first in the nation. Other early instructors were D.W. Griffith and Darryl Zanuck.

More recently, cinematic classes have been taught by filmmakers George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis, who are alumni, and director Steven Spielberg.

As part of the celebration, a keynote speech Thursday morning by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- a UCLA graduate -- will mark his first 100 days in office and outline his vision for the city.

New York Gov. George Pataki will also speak, and violinist Itzhak Perlman will preform.

The celebration will begin at the campus center, next to the Tommy Trojan statue, with a gathering at 10:30 a.m. A ceremonial cake 7 feet tall, 9 feet wide and 9 feet long will be cut at noon, and the Trojan marching band will play.

One of the scheduled highlights of the celebration, called USC Festival 125, is a concert at 7 p.m. Thursday featuring the USC Thornton Symphony and faculty artist Norman Krieger in the world premiere of “Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra,” composed by USC faculty member Donald Crockett.

The second half of the concert is to include the appearance by Perlman, who will play Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor. The concert is for invited guests, although some people may be admitted on a stand-by basis.

Pataki will speak at 2:30 p.m. Friday as part of the law school’s annual Roth Lecture on issues facing the courts.

More information on the celebration is available on the Internet at www.usc.edu/programs/125/

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Trojan timeline

1879: Judge Robert Maclay Widney forms a Board of Trustees and secures a property donation from three community leaders -- Ozro W. Childs, a Protestant horticulturist; former California Gov. John G. Downey, an Irish-Catholic businessman; and Isaias W. Hellman, a German-Jewish banker and philanthropist.

1880: The university opens, with 53 students and 10 teachers.

1885: USC’s College of Medicine, the first in Southern California, is established.

1896: USC’s law school begins when a group of apprentices form a voluntary association to study under a prominent attorney.

1897: The College of Dentistry of USC is established.

1905: USC’s School of Pharmacy, the first in Southern California, is established.

1906: The department of physics begins offering engineering courses, as the forerunner to USC’s College of Engineering.

1909: USC’s Department of Education opens.

1912: The university’s athletic team is dubbed the “Trojans” by Los Angeles Times sportswriter Owen R. Bird.

1915: Ten-year-old Teresa Van Grove enrolls, making her the youngest Trojan.

1918: Amy Winship, who as a child knew Abraham Lincoln, attends at age 87 and is nicknamed “the oldest coed in the world.”

1919: USC’s Department of Architecture opens, becoming the first school of its kind in Southern California.

1920: The USC School of Business Administration, the first business school in Southern California, is established.

1922: The music for USC’s fight song, “Fight On,” is composed by USC dental student Milo Sweet.

1924: USC establishes the nation’s first school of international relations.

1929: USC’s Department of Cinema, the nation’s first program in cinematography, is founded by Douglas Fairbanks Sr..

1930: A bronze statue of a Trojan soldier, known now as Tommy Trojan, is unveiled. The sculptor is Roger Nobel Burnham.

1942: USC’s Department of Occupational Therapy opens as one of the first programs of its kind in the country.

1954: Trumpet player and Trojan Marching Band member Herb Alpert works his way through two years of USC by playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

1971: The Annenberg School for Communication is established.

1975: The Leonard David School of Gerontology, the first in the country, is founded.

1981: The Doheny Memorial Library celebrates acquisition of its 2-millionth volume, a collection of plays by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (the first edition to include the complete Agamemnon), printed in 1557.

1984: The Summer Olympics comes to Los Angeles, and University Park Campus is the site of the largest Olympic Village, hosting the swimming, diving and synchronized swimming competitions.

1993: $120 million from Ambassador Walter Annenberg funds the creation of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.

1994: USC Professor George Olah wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

1998: A $112.5-million donation to the university establishes the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering.

1999: USC’s medical school receives a $110-million donation and is renamed the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

1999: For its outstanding community service, USC is named College of the Year 2000 by Time magazine and the Princeton Review.

2001: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts opens, the nation’s first and only fully digital training facility for student filmmakers.

Source: USC at www.usc.edu/about/history/