University of Southern California

The University of Southern California (USC) was founded as the first private research university in the state (five years before Stanford) largely through the efforts of Judge Robert Widney, one of the most prominent citizens of Los Angeles at that time.

Widney’s vision was of an inclusive institution that would serve all sectors of the already-diverse LA community. Accordingly, the board of trustees he assembled included a wealthy Protestant businessman, a Catholic former-governor, and a Jewish banker. While USC was officially affiliated with the Methodist church during its early years, from the beginning its charter provided that no student would be denied admission on the basis of race.

Today, USC enrolls more than 48,000 students, of whom around a quarter (some 12,000) are international students—one of the highest percentages of any university in the country. Half of all students are undergraduates, while the other half are pursuing graduate or professional training.

Nine Nobel Prize laureates have been connected with USC, including the:

• Physicist, Murray Gell-Mann
• Chemist, Arieh Warshel
• Economists, James Heckman & Angus Deaton

USC faculty member Leonard Adleman, who has a joint appointment in computer science and molecular biology, is a Turing Award–recipient.

Among its many other notable faculty and alumni, we may mention:

• Astronaut, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon
• Architect, Frank Gehry
• Electrical engineer and entrepreneur, Andrew Viterbi
• Actors John Wayne, Tom Selleck, LeVar Burton, Cybil Shepherd, Daryl Hannah, Will Ferrell, & Forest Whitaker
• Television producer and film director, Judd Apatow
• Film directors, Robert Zemeckis, John Singleton, Ron Howard, & George Lucas
• Mohamed Morsi, the former president of Egypt
• Shinzō Abe, the current prime minister of Japan