STEFANO FENDRICH: Thank you so much for joining us today, President Folt. We understand you have some very brief remarks to start us off.

CAROL FOLT: Okay, great. Thank you. It’s great to see you. [It’s a] busy part of the spring semester, and I know a number of you are graduating seniors, so that’s even more exciting for you. 

FOLT: And so, I just have a few things to say. For me, the spring is always exciting, but I feel particularly excited this year because I’m actually graduating along with you. It feels like that. I’ve been running university, been a leader in university for 24 years, and so I feel as though I have that same “what happens next” kind of feeling, but I’m really excited about it, because what happens next is going to be exciting for all of you, I know it. And I think it’s going to be exciting for me. And I’ve also always loved the students, so I had the press at Dartmouth, The Daily Tar Heel, which was the press [at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill] and of course, talking with both, I love getting to see both [Annenberg Media] and the Daily Trojan. That’s, that’s really fun.

And so, my main thing I thought I’d just say, it’s been a privilege to be at USC. I think it’s a real leader, and it has some very special features that you’ll probably want to talk about. But the students are wonderful. They come from the most amazing backgrounds, every culture. This year we had something like 45 different languages in the entering class. They have experiences. They’ve got drive. There’s a joyfulness on this campus that I’ve really enjoyed. And I know the weather helps, but that’s been important. But there’s a very strong seriousness. Ambition really is in everybody’s book. I think I really like that. 

I think the change that we’re seeing in higher education isn’t really new. I mean, education is always about change. Higher education is about change. My first speech I had to give at Dartmouth was at 9/11. So we have big events, extra events, COVID, you get natural events and changes that really cause universities to react quickly, and we’re actually pretty good at it, but I’ve yet to see the change that causes us to deviate from our mission. I believe that as now, as much as I’ve ever believed it, but I think it’s something that we’ve always stayed very intentional, very purposeful about how do we make sure our mission is really at the core? So, we’ll probably have time [where] we can talk about things like that.

In this institution, we’ve made major changes. Just in the last six years, the “moonshots” have been quite nationally relevant. When I took the job, I said, I’m going to be here five years. What would happen that would make me, five years from now, really regret we didn’t take an action. That’s what a moonshot should be. I think that was right. It was about healthcare going through a massive change. It was about the emergence of AI and all the things in technology and engineering. It was about, for this institution, its athletics programs, and for me, it was about sustainability and the urban future. So I think we picked things to be moonshots that were clearly of their moment, and there’ll be new ones that come in the next moment. 

I’m happy to answer any questions, I’m excited about the next few months. I’m also really mindful that your future and the students’ future feels often like it might be on the line when it really isn’t. So one of our most important jobs is to remind people about the constancy of the higher education that we provide and also its importance to the country, and that’s something that’s really a big focus for me right now.

FENDRICH: So to start off, President Folt, you obviously just concluded what is likely one of your last major speeches as present to your administration, your faculty, your students. Reflecting on your years at USC, how was that moment for you as you gave your last State of the University Address? 

FOLT: I felt actually really excited about it. I think I’m in the place I want to be, and not everyone gets to say that. I’ve been doing it for 20 some years, and it’s not old. I think if you ever leave a place feeling like, “Oh, I cannot wait. I don’t have anything else I want to do,” you waited too long. So I’m stepping down from being the president at a moment when I have so many things I’m excited about, but I still see so many great things. So it’s the right moment to feel like you’re making a transition, and I’m really excited about the things I’m going to do. It felt meaningful, but I felt like I was talking to the people that actually made these changes over six years, and maybe by bringing them to people’s attention, people could see the parts that they didn’t know about. So that was a goal, [trying] to have people have a better, fuller understanding, because with 80,000 people in 23-plus schools, you don’t always know what everyone’s experiencing.

Navigating the Trump administration

MOHAMMED ZAIN SHAFI KHAN: Thank you. We’ll now dive into the current climate on campus. Campus has felt a shift in the political climate since President [Donald] Trump’s inauguration on January 20. There’s the possibility of losing federal funding through research and DEI programming, and last week, both Annenberg Media and Daily Trojan reported on changes within department names, such as the DEI website being taken down and merged with the Culture Team, and heightened presence of Immigration and Customs distortions as well. Some community members claim that USC is “complying in advance in a way that’s sacrificing DEI programs” that you spearheaded for so long. How do you respond to those disappointed saying that they would rather see you resist the Trump administration and stand up for these values of DEI that USC holds so close to itself, and maybe even say that, “We’ll see you in court.”

FOLT: There’s a lot in that, and maybe we’ll unpack it in a couple questions. First of all, I don’t think I’ve deviated for a second, and I don’t think the University will, from its commitment to being a place of opportunity, trying to be a social mobility to the incredible student body that we have. I think that’s been true, and I think we will continue it, and I see it in every way. I think we’re also, like everyone else, still looking at instructions that are coming to us that are not necessarily law. So the last thing we’re actually doing is trying to do things in advance, but we’re certainly trying to do things in the way that we believe they need to be done. So we haven’t really made those big changes. I’m not even sure which ones you’re really talking about, but when [former chief diversity and inclusion officer Christopher Manning] stepped down more than a year ago, he actually said we need to rethink the whole thing. So this has been a process of where we’re thinking we can be best at supporting everyone’s needs, their belonging, their culture, but even beyond that, and going into the professional offices where the art allows it to be at the heart of the Culture Commission. So this isn’t a new thing. This is a progression.

KHAN: You said that we have not deviated. We did receive a community-wide email from you saying that we would start complying with executive orders that have been sent out by the President. On that note, we’ve also had community members say that the associate chiefs of diversity, equity and inclusion have been renamed and moved to the culture office. 

FOLT: But there’s only three people. You should know the truth. I’ll explain it to you. So the reality is, it’s not against anything in our history to comply with the law. So I think you need to understand that. Universities follow the law. You vote and change the laws as citizens, and that is something that people do. We certainly advocate. I was in Washington all last week for things that we think are really important. We’ve advocated for immigration and visas, we’ve advocated for research, we’ve advocated for all the things that you’re talking about. Also, much of what people are reacting to is not established law yet. So I think we’re doing it exactly as we have been and should do. So where we’re seeing the three people that moved, it’s really because we’re trying to get them in a much better place. It’s something that’s been under works for a long time.

KHAN: So even without these executive orders, you would have still gone ahead and rebranded the DEI to a culture team. 

FOLT: Yes, yes. We’ve been talking about it for almost six months, and you can talk to Stacy about it, we’ve had meetings with the Culture Commission. So I think that universities are always working. You just don’t necessarily see the things that are going on until one day, when it becomes a visible piece. But that was something that people have been working on for a long time.

FENDRICH: I see. The DOJ recently announced on Friday that a federal task force is going to visit USC to investigate antisemitism on campus. What do you think this task force is going to find?

FOLT: I think they’ll find all the things that we’ve done. I think we have a really good record there. We’ve posted everything online. We’ve got all the FAQs and things that we’ve done. We’ve embraced them, we welcome them to come. We’ll certainly answer all their questions. I think they’re going to find that we’ve been doing everything we can to be supportive of students. 

Impacts of fraternity disaffiliations

KHAN: Going back a little in your tenure, one major event that also happened is the disaffiliation of fraternities on campus. Now that you’re leaving office, how do you reflect on the disaffiliation of these Greek fraternities during your tenure, and what do you think this says about the future of Greek life on campus?

FOLT: It’s interesting, of course, I’ve been with Greek life on campus since Dartmouth, and I’ve actually always felt that there’s a real advantage for students that find homes, places that they really feel that they are a part of something. It gives them that feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood and all the things that that does. I think there was a lot of great stuff [going] on with our fraternities too. We have a really active group. I think we hired people to make sure that they had a lot of opportunity to work with the school. I felt like when they made that decision, and they did, still, most of the people that are in affiliated groups are not. That’s just a certain group of the Greek units. There’s many other affiliated cultural groups on campus, and they all stayed as part of that office, is the first thing. And then, we always said, I said, they are still our students. So all the support we would give any of our students, we still give the fraternities, we still help them with all the things they need to do, but there are other things, that now they have to respond to the LAPD, that that’s a choice they made. I think the point for me was, if they make the choice, then we have to continue to support them. That is the most important, is that they can continue to feel like they’re students and they’re connected. I think it’s important that if they were to start doing things that are illegal, that they have to face the same music as anyone else. You’re not allowed to dox people or things like that during rush, but that’s true for the band. It’s true for anybody. So trying to make sure that those things are still in effect and that they’re also feeling fully supported. That’s how I feel about it.

I don’t know that I could talk about the future. Yogi Bear said, “It’s really great to make predictions, unless they’re about the future.” So I’m with him on that one. That one’s harder to say, but the need for community isn’t going away. And if that is where people find some positive community, I think it will stay a part of the University.

KHAN: What about concerns of the lack of oversight? Of course, with the disaffiliation of certain fraternities, there’s a lack of oversight, and with concerns of sexual misconduct, how might USC navigate that relationship, that they’re still part of the community, but they’re yet disaffiliated?

FOLT: You all have to do trainings. They do too. So we have a number of things in place that they are students just like you are, and we have to trust our students. They do those trainings. We have really strong rules, and we have to encourage people to lodge complaints if they feel like they are undergoing violations. I think you have to have your other processes in place. The state put in a law that we have to report things about fraternities and things like that, so we gather the data that we can but you know, in the same way that we can’t go into an apartment and monitor what you’re doing in your apartment, we can’t go into a fraternity or a sorority and monitor what they’re doing there. So we have lots of ways to have people help us understand. We offer people to go forward. We get complaints, we show up. Get complaints, the LAPD will show up. Those are the rules that are in place.

Campus security

FENDRICH: Speaking to the surrounding communities, obviously, USC has long emphasized its commitment to South LA using phrases like “inexplicably linked” and “an open invitation for everyone to benefit from the University” as well as “being good neighbors.” At what point will USC’s neighbors again have free access to campus, if at all?

FOLT: Well, our neighbors all have access to campus, they just have to show an ID. It’s never been taken away. We aren’t getting complaints from our neighbors because they are allowed to come in and they feel very good about that. We haven’t reduced any support for the hundreds of opportunities that we have — [USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative], most of those things have just grown in the last few months or years. So I think that is a construct that you might be putting on it, but it may not be speaking for what the neighbors feel. I think it’s important but, trust me, we’ve been out talking to all the leaders all the time about what that means, and they feel they still have access. 

Now, we have had a significant reduction in crime, both in the campus and around the campus, and our neighbors love it when there’s less crime around the campus as well. That’s down about 20%. These are things that are complicated, and there’s not a single viewpoint, but you try to find a solution that maximizes your attempt to be a good neighbor while also improving safety.

KHAN: Continuing on this topic of gates, the Undergraduate Student Government did do student polling, which claimed that many students feel like [the Department of Public Safety] is overly policing or racially profiling students. This presents a concern given that, like you said, a lot of our students come from various different backgrounds and cultures. So how do you respond to students who aren’t happy about these gates?

FOLT: I haven’t had many students come up and say they’re specifically not happy about the gates.

KHAN: Maybe not to you, but those concerns have been made. 

FOLT: You told me about something you heard that I’m just telling you how I respond. We do talk to people about it as well. There’s a lot of opportunity, if people have complaints about those things, where they could lodge those complaints and there would be immediate action-taking. We’re not getting that. That doesn’t mean someone didn’t tell us, but we certainly aren’t hearing it. We also talked to a lot of parents, and there are many people that are very pleased when they found out we could put these gates up. You can just walk right by. You show your ID and you walk in. There isn’t a building in a city right now that you can’t go in by doing that. So I think being able to make it easier — we want it to be friendly, as friendly as possible. We’ve actually had visitors, because at the gates, we also have someone set up right there that if you’re a visitor, they have someone there, an ambassador, to attend to them and help them get in. So trying to do everything to design it, to make it easy, almost unnoticeable, I know it is noticeable but I think that was really the goal, is to try to have it not impede people’s ability to come in, go out and feel that they’re not standing out in any way.

FENDRICH: So will they be permanent? And also even the gate around Alumni Park, which students have not had access to?

FOLT: I’m here till the end of spring. I’m not predicting out beyond that about which aspects of the gates will be permanent. I really don’t know. I think right now it has still been our decision that it actually is serving a purpose.

KHAN: Even those on campus surrounding Alumni Park, not just the ones that are blocking access to campus?

FOLT: Yeah, they do, they serve a purpose, but I think also those start changing. We have a lot of things that start happening in all of those places in the next couple of weeks. We have all the student affairs, and you probably have noticed all those parks have been used for all sorts of student events. When anyone ever asked to use them, they’re allowed to use them, so they haven’t been stopped from having access to those parks.

KHAN: So what is the purpose of those gates? Also, it’s expensive to put those gates up.

FOLT: Well they haven’t been moved, it hasn’t really changed in its expense since it’s been up there, and it has felt that it has given us a different level of security.

KHAN: Even the ones within campus are for security?

FOLT: Mm-hm.

FENDRICH: I guess to touch on the fiscal part, more on the upkeep of the gates, you have 80 to 100 staffers around the gates every day. Ballpark, how much is the cost of the gates, costing University every day, every week?

FOLT: It costs us money, but it costs us money to do all sorts of things. So let me go back to the safety. If, in fact, the gates are really reducing crime on campus, we have ways of redistributing our resources. So, we have a safety unit that we do in every possible way, and it’s part of that budget. What’s used for one thing, then doesn’t become used for something else. As we see a changing safety landscape, we have different ways of attributing that budget. 

KHAN: I understand your point about safety, about how, sure, people have to scan their IDs to get in, but still, it doesn’t explain the access to Alumni Park, which is a campus resource for many students and something they pay for in their tuition. So what is the logic behind having the parks being blocked? 

FOLT: Well, we have had the parks open. No one is blocked from using it. So, I just have to say that that isn’t true. We are letting people use it. Every day we make an assessment about that, and I think we’re sticking with what we have for this term. I think that when we get closer and closer and closer to graduation, when we’re using these all the time, they will be open because you want to have, certainly, that straight access.

Managing the University’s budget

KHAN: Now, let’s just turn to the budget for a few moments, which you also devoted some time earlier in your address today as well. USC has finalized a $34 million purchase of the Hebrew Union building. We know that you inherited fiscal challenges, including lawsuits that you had nothing to do with in your tenure, in addition to also navigating a global pandemic. We also know that tuition has increased every year since. Meanwhile, there have been mandated budget cuts across various departments within the University. With these concerns and increased calls for financial transparency about overspending on external consultants and administrative expansion, how have your financial priorities aligned with USC’s academic mission?

FOLT: Well, there’s a lot in that too, and I can’t give you a simple answer for it, but I think I showed everybody today that we’ve been doing a detailed financials budget assessment with the board for two years. So, we’re working on all aspects of it. The cost of higher education has really changed, and quite simply, the cost is higher than tuition. So you might have tuition rises, and there’s going to be a capping to tuition. Probably no one’s been more concerned about trying to get financial aid for students than I have been, and I’m still deeply, deeply involved with that. So, you have costs that have gone up. I gave you some. We’re all self-insured. Insurance is so high, you go through these lists, you can’t cover all those costs: the cost of IT, cybersecurity. I could go through a list, and that’s why I think it’s 70–80% of the universities in America, for the last two to three years, have carried operating deficits. It’s a change in the financial costs of doing our business and the revenues. We’re a university whose revenues, while very great for us from different things that we do, we aren’t like a lot of others. We are mostly tuition-dependent. We have great sports, we’ve got a great hospital, but we don’t have a big endowment per capita that actually subsidizes it. So we need to be good every year. When we had big costs in legal and COVID, and that depletes your reserves, then you’re going to spend two or three years to build those reserves back up. My entire time here, I’ve had that. That’s been, sadly, my goal is that I never had all that extra spending money. So, you need to try to push the moonshots and the things that you’re doing. We’ve been very good at pushing salaries, but then we’ve said maybe some other things need to wait until you have that money replenished. So that’s really what’s been going on. 

Now, the big changes that could happen with changes in the federal government are causing all universities to think, you don’t just operate to have a level budget, you operate to build a reserve. We probably think we need to be saving more money in case there are other shocks to the system, if we have changes in students that are able to attend. We’re not seeing a reduction in demography, but a lot of other schools have fewer students. You might see things getting much more expensive, if they really reduce financial aid. We get 1.2 or $1.4 billion from the federal government, and close to 500 plus of that goes directly to student aid. So that’s really important that we keep thinking about that too and trying to anticipate, but our budgets get set for a year and we’ve got four year programs. So, you’re not like a business that you just say, “Oh, we’re going to jettison that. We’re going to do that.” You need to do this thoughtfully with the horizon, you take changes over time. That’s really what we’ve been doing.

FENDRICH: Obviously there have been a lot of calls from faculty and staff, obviously very upset by these budget cuts. Obviously the spending on this new building, $34 million, other things that people see around campus, how would you respond to people who say that, frankly, the University’s finances have been mismanaged?

FOLT: Yeah, I don’t actually think they’ve been mismanaged. I really don’t. I think it’d be pretty short sighted to say that you have colleagues that sell a building that’s adjacent to your campus, because the other ideas that were being used for that would have turned it into something that’d be very difficult, that sits in the middle of what we do. 

So, of course, universities have to keep a long view and a short view, and some of those long views are, where do you invest now? Because, you know you’re going to need that investment in the future. We have 80,000 people that work here at 23 schools, and more than 27,000 of them are graduate and professional, 18 or 20 undergraduate, all with different perspectives. So, you’re trying very hard to keep those different enterprises going forward. One of the things that was really a priority for me was that I said we need to continue to invest in the people who are currently here, and try to find the resources that will really support them, be able to give compensation that can keep us competitive, put a lot of money into financial aid. That was a big deal for me, because — put it there. Now, there’d be many people that didn’t think that was necessarily where we should put the money to, but you have priorities about making a place where people can come. We have priorities about being ready for the future. So, investing in a new building, moving to DC at the same time, building programs that will keep us competitive in the future always are being played against the immediate cost. 

But, we’ve not done much cost cutting that has actually affected students directly. We’ve tried to, actually, [we’ve] been supplementing them and trying to keep people’s salaries up, so, they’re complicated, and it’s like running a city. [There are] that many different opinions about it. We work very closely with the board. We work with all the deans. You know, we’re trying to keep the balance going on building a budget, but it isn’t a simple thing. So, when someone’s mad, it’s usually one thing just happened, they didn’t like it, and I understand that, that thing really mattered to them, but it may not be understood outside the context of the positives that also happened. I think there’s a lot of examples of that in what you hear and what you experience.

FENDRICH: Well, on that note, we are going to take a brief break and continue with some questions from Nathan and Lyla after this. 

Spring 2024 encampment protests

NATHAN ELIAS: We want to address something that I think a lot of people still have questions about, the events of last spring, which included, among other things, canceling the commencement speaker, encampments, protests, multiple arrests and, ultimately, the cancelation of the main commencement ceremony. On April 27, as we know, there [were] dozens and hundreds of people that set up an encampment in the middle of campus. By the end of the day, 93 of them were arrested. Can you walk us through some of the decisions that you made during that time and what was going through your mind as president? 

FOLT: We put a lot of stuff out, and so I know you can go read about that. What was going through my mind as president is what goes through my mind every day. I really worry about people’s safety. I also want people to have a meaningful experience. I’m not in any way against people expressing their protest, so I think this was constantly looking at what was going on and getting advice from our professionals. We keep a lot of track on what’s going on in social media, and I have my own history of experiences where I’ve been at campuses where things really ended up in problems, and you had fist fights and people getting hurt. So, there was a lot of concern about safety, and that was really my driving principle, in the end, was [trying] to do things that would keep as many people as possible safe. [We] had many people feeling fear. There were so many things going on, and so we were early on in that, and I think we were having to think, “How could we take the campus and find a way to get it through?” And [I] wanted to get people to graduation. I wanted students to be able to go through their finals without feeling fear. While you might not have it, but we had thousands of people writing us about feeling fear about going across campus. So, it was a complicated moment. The last thing any president ever wants to do is to call the police, but at that moment, it felt like we needed to do this to get ourselves in a place where we could keep people safe,

LYLA BHALLA-LADD: Right, absolutely. And you mentioned that you were worried about violence on campus, like we might have seen at UCLA, that became violent, the encampments there. You were saying that you were hearing from a lot of concerned parents at this time. Can we get a sense of who you were talking with at this time? Did you have conversations with the UCLA leaders? Did you talk to Mayor Karen Bass?

FOLT: Yeah, I talked to everybody from the governor, I talked to people in the federal government, because we were trying to say, “What do you know? What are [the] best practices? How do we do that?” I was talking to alumni, parents, talking other presidents. I think I had just stepped down as the president of the [Association of American Universities] at that moment. So, I’m always talking to people, but not just me, everyone that was working with me. I was trying to meet with students. We were trying to get a feel for how we could best handle it. But, just like every campus is in a different location, every campus is different in how this is happening, too. I wasn’t getting pressure. No one was calling me up and saying, “You do this or we’re going to take your money away.” That was absolutely not happening here, and I’m very proud of that. I think that it was getting good feedback from a lot of people. No one that had a single answer, because it wasn’t a single answer.

ELIAS: I know there’s a sense, at the time, that there might have been people from different groups, some people not affiliated with campus, that were coming in and co-opting the encampment. It came out later that about half of the people arrested were students. Did that change your perspective at all on that decision?

FOLT: Well, I would tell you that half weren’t. To me, I was trying not to really look at it that way. I was really trying to look at the safety of my students in my community, and I think that is important. But I’ve been in other situations where a lot of protest does come from outside. I think the most important thing is at the end, there’s only one person who the safety is [sitting]: entirely on my shoulders. So I had people say, “We understand [it] might have been safety, but you should do this.” And I said, “Well, you can say that at night, but I have to wake up keeping the place safe.” That’s still, by itself, a difficult position to be, because the second you keep it safe, you also want people to have the joy of their experience. I think all of that is we want to keep it safe, but we also want to have people be able to do things that they need to do. But, the canceling of the main stage was something that we did fairly early on. By the time graduation came about, we might have been able to have a main stage, but early on, it didn’t look like it. Then you had the UCLA — it looked like it would actually ruin all our students’ graduations, because we could have outright fights. It really looked bad. The last thing I wanted to do was not do that. I love graduation. I love what that means, but it felt better to not do this and make sure that we invested heavily in making all our 40 plus graduations wonderful. They were. Everybody felt safe. We had a larger attendance than we’d had in previous ones, and then we built out the whole Thursday night. So again, we could replace joy with what had been concern. So while [I] sure didn’t like to do it, I still do think, especially when we made the decision, it was the right one, and the experience for the students was really special. You know, we want that for the current seniors, the main stage actually is — only about a third of the graduates come to it anyway. So we wanted everybody’s graduation to be special.

BHALLA-LADD: Right. You mentioned that the promises towards graduation were important to fulfill, even if safety concerns keep a full commencement from happening. On the note of those promises, in reference to any kind of academic punishment for on-campus protesters, you told them during negotiations, “I would never do that,” in reference to any kind of academic punishment. But then the next week, your office sent out letters, about 29, of interim suspension to those same protesting students. So, what changed? 

FOLT: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I think you’re quoting things that I — I’m not going to accept that one. I mean, I’m not sure where that came from, but I will tell you that all the student — the things that happen there are FERPA-protected. You know that, you know we don’t talk about those individual things. And so, I really, I’m not going to go there, because I don’t know what you’re even quoting me as, having supposedly said.

BHALLA-LADD: We have a recording of those negotiations in which students say it feels like a veiled threat to receive the topic of academic punishments, or like they wouldn’t be able to graduate.

FOLT: I might have said we aren’t making — I didn’t say that, and we did exactly what our rules say. That was all very much our previous rules. We hadn’t actually changed our time, place and manner rules. So I think that’s important to realize that. We still, we haven’t — we didn’t change them. They were all existing. We have very strong processes for what students do at certain kinds of violations. So, you know, I think that’s a complicated circumstance, but I believe we were following our, our rules. I mean, I think that’s really important. So, you know, I’m sorry, I don’t really, I think there’s probably a lot of context in there that’s not being brought forward in that question.

Valedictorian speech cancellation

ELIAS: One other thing I wanted to follow up with, for that time was we had interviews with [professor of the practice in national and homeland security as well as Associate Senior Vice President of Safety Risk and Assurance Erroll Southers], and there was communications from the University that, you know, the security situation was very complex at the time. You couldn’t give specifics on what specifically might have been the specific threats on the commencement that led to that speech to be canceled, ultimately, the main commencement to be canceled. Now that you know we’re almost a year removed, can you talk in more specifics about what specific security concerns there were? 

FOLT: Well, I think [Southers] said, what I would say now too is that we monitor social media, we monitor all sorts of things that are going on, and we have a very good team. They don’t have a single trigger. Well, there could be a single trigger, but it’s not that. You’re looking at: what is the environment? Who is threatening from outside? Who are the outside forces? What are you seeing? What are you seeing at other campuses? And I think in that, it was at the moment that was going on for us, very early times, it was going to be very hard to feel that we could ensure the safety of the speaker, which we said, and as a result of that, all the various events. So I think you make your best judgment. It isn’t that there’s a single fact, and once it doesn’t happen, you never get to say it would happen. That’s exactly the nature of all of this. So you try instead, to be better prepared, that your rules are very clear, and things like that. I think we were doing a pretty good job there, but it’s never perfect, so it hasn’t changed from what [Southers] said at the time. I think we’re seeing a lot more social postings that would really alarm people. So we keep track of that. We look at it every week, every day, if we think they’re things, because we can’t monitor all the sites, and yet, threats get made. You don’t have the luxury of saying, “I’m not going to listen to it.” Individuals might. I don’t. I run the University. I can’t say later, “Well, I didn’t think that one was serious,” and that one was. You have to look at them all, and you really have to take them seriously.

ELIAS: Did that impact the University’s decision to change the way the valedictorian — well, I mean, the valedictorian speech was canceled. It was changed to a main commencement speaker, and also the venue of the main commencement was changed. Did the events of last spring affect those decisions? 

FOLT: You know, they really didn’t. If you go and do some research on it — and I’m sure you have, you’re all good researchers — you’ll see that most universities don’t have a single valedictorian, and they haven’t. We didn’t have it at my other universities, and in fact, it was something I wondered about when I came here when I saw that more than 200 students were being considered. So, it has lost its meaning. Words that lose their meaning — it’s not the single person with the best record. That’s what it used to be. It became clear that we needed to think about, “How was that made?” So what they’ve done, and they’ve been thinking about it, is increased access, so that more students that would like to give that speech at commencement could be considered. To me, that’s always been what I do, try to increase the tent, make it available to more. So I think that was something that had been talked about in a number of conversations. When [Andrew Guzman] became the provost, he brought that in. He got them to talk about it, and then they changed it. So, I think we’ll have a great speech. Many universities don’t even have that speech at commencement. They do it at their baccalaureate, or they do it at Class Day for students. Again, because they feel like that one metric no longer reflected that there was a single person that had the best academic record. And you know that, that it doesn’t really make sense. So, getting to that, opening it up, is what we were doing here, maybe playing a little catch up to most other places, but we still want them to speak at graduation. We want our students there. So this is a new one, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll try another one, but I think it’s a good move forward.

BHALLA-LADD: On the topic of valedictorians, what about Asna Tabassum, named the valedictorian, but then later stripped of the opportunity to give her speech, which was still active last year. If you could say anything to her, right now, what would you say? 

FOLT: You know, I have talked to her. I would just say that I think she’s got an amazing future, and she’s working hard to make a big difference in the world, and that seems like that’s who she is, and I believe that’s what she’ll do.

The future

BHALLA-LADD: Your presidency will conclude on June 30. What would you say your lasting legacy is at USC?

FOLT: I’m not a person who thinks about my legacy. That’s never been my driver.  I think about the students, the education, the deep research that I have a chance to help promote, and I feel very proud of the last six years. It doesn’t mean every single thing in it was perfect, but we made big, big changes since six years ago. Our admissions are highest ever. Our research is almost 45% more than it’s ever been. I mean, this is not just a little ever, this is ever. Been doing that. We now have a real point of opportunity on the East Coast and the West Coast. It’s turned us from what looks like a regional to a national and international institution. I started a major program in India. We did these launching of these moonshots that are going to change everything. So, I feel like those have all been real high points: better education, more people, better financial circumstances for them, big opportunities for discovery and now we added another moonshot in the arts. So, you do all that, and you try to do the Big Ten. That’s a big move. It’s something that will have a huge impact on sports. For me, a lot of that is about women’s sports and Olympic sports. I feel like I got to work on the biggest issues of the day. We made big progress in them, and the next person will take that ramp and make big progress ahead, and I’ll have fun doing all the things that I’m going to do next. So that’s really how I feel. Mostly, I want America to continue to recognize that its greatest assets [are] its universities, and what makes them sometimes contentious is one of the beautiful things about our country. That’s also important — that we continue to really make our university succeed and bring people from every background to them, because that’s what makes everything so wonderful, or gives it potential. Doesn’t always make it easy, but it certainly makes it have a real impact.

ELIAS: So over your career, I’m sure you’ve learned a lot. What advice would you give to your successor?

FOLT: I think anyone that comes into these jobs needs to have their compass. For me, student-centered was a big, big compass for me. I’ve tried to never deviate from it. I’ve loved teaching and research. I think you need to do things that keep student centeredness and discovery in the public good at the heart of what you do. Safety was another one of mine because I think that if you don’t be mindful of safety, people can’t learn. So I say, have your North Star, and then realize that the hardest part is that you’re not there to necessarily please people, but you’re there to make their experience and the University great, and all of us care deeply about our relationships and our people. You have to find a way to continue to be working towards those big goals. Put those big goals at the front, feel the excitement and the commitment to that, and try to let your personal feelings be less of a driver for you. Now, I use them all the time. I love to go places where I feel — I go out and talk to students whenever I can. I love to go to sports events. I go see our students in every performance they do. I love to hear great speakers and do that. So you have a lot of ways to express what you love while you’re a president, too, by showing up at these amazing events, and it just gives you such an infusion of energy. So, they have to replenish, and if you replenish by the things that you love at the University, it really, it really does help when things are tough.

BHALLA-LADD: And so, what’s next for you after you step down?

FOLT: Well, I’m in Viterbi and [Keck School of Medicine] and Dornsife. I’m gonna have an office in Viterbi, and I’m gonna teach. My first topic will be in sustainability, which, of course, I love very much. It’s been my whole career, but I haven’t gone past that. That’s my biggest thing to think about next, I’m starting to work on that, developing that, but that’ll be really fun for me to go back into the classroom, because I’ve always really enjoyed that.

BHALLA-LADD: Fantastic. Well, we’ll leave it there. And thank you for joining us.