Editor’s Note: This article was updated Feb. 6 at 9:30 p.m. to add quotes from a Daily Trojan interview with Beong-Soo Kim. 

Beong-Soo Kim will serve as interim president following President Carol Folt’s retirement, the Board of Trustees announced in a community-wide message Wednesday afternoon. Kim has served as the senior vice president and general counsel for the University since July 2020. 

In an interview with the Daily Trojan, Kim said he is “feeling great” and is excited to take over in July. 

“The reason I feel so good is because I’ve gotten to know my colleagues on the senior leadership team, the deans and faculty across both of our campuses so well over the last four plus years,” Kim said. “I am really looking forward,come July,to really try to unleash all of this excitement and build on all the momentum I feel like the University already has.”

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Kim will continue his role as general counsel until taking over for Folt, but he will leave the position once he takes over as interim president after June 30. 

During his time as general counsel, Kim has advised the University on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic and “legacy litigation” — including the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and the class-action sexual assault lawsuit involving former USC gynecologist George Tyndall. Kim has also worked on issues involved in athletic conference realignment and the emergence of name, image and likeness deals for college athletes.

Kim has taught classes at the Gould School of Law as well as Harvard University and South Carolina University. While Johnson said continuing to teach will be up to him, she said his role as interim president will be his “top priority.” 

Kim is also known for his cello porch concerts for his Pasadena neighbors during the coronavirus pandemic, which the Los Angeles Times wrote about in 2020.  

In an interview with campus media, Suzanne Nora Johnson, chair of the Board of Trustees, said the search for an interim president began when Folt announced her retirement. She said Folt’s announcement coming months before the retirement helped create a “seamless” transition, giving the Board time to choose an interim president and leaving room for a shadowing period, where Kim could learn the duties of the president from Folt.

Johnson said Kim has an “impeccable character,” “greater integrity” than anyone she has met in higher education and “judgment [that is] second to none.”

“[Kim] believes in excellence. He wants to kind of take us to the next level. He never does anything halfway. He always does things 150%,” Johnson said. “We think this job requires all those things.”

Kim was also chosen as the interim president due to having expertise in University affairs as well as with the medical and athletics side of USC, Johnson said. Because Kim did not want to become a permanent president and an interim president is disqualified from the permanent selection process, Johnson said he made sense for the position. 

Johnson said the Board doesn’t feel “pressured” to make the decision fast because they want to find the “very best” person for the job and have confidence in Kim in the meantime.

“This job is one of the most difficult jobs in America,” Johnson said. “We’re going to be looking for very specific attributes that our community helps define, but we also have to offer something that the best people will be interested in because this is a very hard job.”

Johnson said the process to decide the next president will likely take until at least June 2026, with some “flexibility.”

The Board also announced the creation of a Presidential Search Committee — made up of two Board of Trustee members and “a wide range of faculty, staff, student and alumni perspectives from across the Trojan Family.”

Johnson said previous search committees did not include staff or students but that the Board felt “very strongly” about including those perspectives. Grace Kim, a graduate student studying French horn at the Thornton School of Music, is the sole student representative on the committee.

The committee will begin the search for the next president by defining what the University is looking for in a candidate and suggesting a “small number of highly qualified candidates” to the Board for interviews and selection, the community-wide message read.

The committee was designed to include a variety of perspectives while being small enough to make efficient decisions, according to Johnson. She said the 20 members are encouraged to consider other perspectives so voices not represented in the committee can be heard.

Johnson said a series of “listening sessions” will allow different stakeholder groups — including staff, students, and both tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty — to be heard more specifically. She said the goal of these sessions will be to identify trends across groups to implement into the search process. Johnson said trustees, who will lead the sessions, have been selected.

The process of establishing criteria will begin later in February or in March and take “at least” six months, according to Johnson.

Afterward, around the summer or fall, Johnson said the University will begin identifying candidates internally and externally that fit the defined criteria and interview them. Once a candidate is selected, Johnson said it will take a few months to negotiate a contract and vet the candidate to ensure they align with University values.

In the meantime, Kim said he is excited to serve as the president of an “incredibly special institution.”

“I don’t think there’s any other university that has all of the assets and energy and just strengths across so many disciplines that we have,” Kim said. “It’s just a tremendous privilege to be in this position where I can, hopefully, nudge the University towards even greater heights.”

Henry Kofman contributed to this report.