Q&A: Incoming provost hopes to continue USC’s ‘excellence at scale’

President Carol Folt announced Tuesday the appointment of Andrew Guzman as USC’s next provost. Currently dean of the Gould School of Law and interim dean of USC Libraries, Guzman will be the first Latine to serve as USC’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. 

His appointment follows Charles Zukoski’s abrupt resignation from the position last November, after which interim Provost Elizabeth Graddy held the post while the Provost Search Committee looked for a permanent successor. In her announcement of the appointment, reached after months of deliberation, Folt praised Guzman’s legacy of “prioritizing academic excellence” and having “led the recruitment of renowned interdisciplinary legal scholars.”

Guzman sat down for a joint media briefing with the Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media Wednesday to discuss his vision for the provostship, and the importance of diversity and inclusion for both students and faculty. In remarks before student media questions, Guzman said he was “just really excited by the opportunity,” especially at a University whose ability to “engage in excellence at scale” puts it in a unique position in higher education.

“There are lots of terrific universities in this country, and there are lots of large universities in this country. But USC is unusual in its ability to be both at the same time,” Guzman said. “That’s attractive to me … because scale means impact, right? The number of students we produce, [that] graduate every year — that’s not the only measure, but that’s an obvious one — the amount of research we do.”

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Annenberg Media: You are filling the shoes of Charles Zukoski, who was the last provost of three years. What relationship do you have with him? And what, specifically, do you plan to do differently?

Andrew Guzman: I know him pretty well, because I was a dean under him, and the dean and the provost work very closely. I don’t really want to draw a contrast between what I’m going to do and what he’s going to do, but I’m happy to talk about things I would like to do.

One of the ways to describe the role of the provost — or at least part of the role of the provost — is: There’s all these different schools, and the provost’s job is to support each of the deans so that their school can thrive. That’s easier because I already have a relationship with some of them. I know pretty well what the main challenges their schools are; For others, it won’t be hard for me to learn from them. So, that’s one element.

The other thing that I want to focus on, which is more reflective of the way I think about these leadership roles: It’s important to always have a way to make sure I’m thinking of longer-term projects. In my current role as dean — but even more so in the role of provost — you can be consumed by things that have short-term deadlines. And that seems urgent, and you’ve got to get all that stuff done. But you have to lift up your eyes and make sure you’re thinking about what needs to get done in a year, or in five years, because that’s one of the ways progress is made.

Daily Trojan: You are the first Latine to serve in this position; could you speak a little to the significance of this milestone?

AG: It’s important for all the reasons one would expect. If USC is going to thrive on, let’s say, a horizon of 20 or 30 years, we know that the student population is going to be even more [Latine] than it is now. California is a very [Latine] state, the population within the country is growing — the demographics are clear. So these demographic trends have to be part of the University strategy going forward.

I also think there’s some symbolic meaning to it. As we have an increasingly diverse everything — that is to say, student body, staff, faculty, the academic leadership, leadership on the staff side — as those populations become more diverse, the places they go from there become more diverse. So, a more diverse faculty cohort leads to a more diverse dean cohort leads to more of a likelihood of having a provost who’s from minority groups. 

But I want to be clear. I’m Latino by any definition: My father’s Dominican, I speak Spanish. But I also don’t present as Latino to most people, and that has implications for the way I’ve encountered society. And I don’t want to misrepresent the set of experiences I’ve had. Sometimes, people see me, and they think, “He’s Latino?” And they find that odd. I do look unusual; I’m ethnically not typical. But if I was in Chile or Argentina or Panama, I wouldn’t look particularly different from anyone else.

DT: The Daily Trojan has done some independent research on the faculty demographics here at USC, and we found it skews heavily towards white male professors. The diversity of our student bodies seems to not necessarily be reflected in the faculty. To give you some numbers: 6% of students, as of the 2021-22 academic year, are Black, while only 3% of tenured faculty are Black. 16% of students are Hispanic/Latine, while only 5% of tenured faculty are Hispanic/Latine. Did you have any specific plans to hire more diverse faculty in the future?

AG: The University has been focused on this for a while. I think it was last year — that’s not a solid dating — there was a large fund of $50 million made available to support the hiring of faculty that contribute to diversity. That fund has been renewed. So, it was used up, and “used up” means it was spent in the recruiting of faculty that add to diversity. So, that’s been a theme for some time, and it’s important that we keep making progress on that.

There’s an inherent challenge, which I do not present as an excuse or apology, because faculty don’t turn over very quickly. So, one of the challenges that’s been worked on, and that I plan to continue to work on, is how do you accelerate that? You can’t double the size of the faculty, which would be one way to solve that problem. But what other options are there to make that change happen faster and in an effective way? And faculty hiring happens in a decentralized way; It happens in the schools or sometimes at the department level. How do you influence that, so that you can get that demographic change of the faculty accelerated? That’s not an easy problem. But it’s a really important one that we continue to work on.