A historic first for USC — downplayed

Beong-Soo Kim, USC’s new president, has achieved a significant milestone that has largely been left unsaid: He is the first Asian American — in fact, the first person of color — to assume the school’s permanent presidency.

You couldn’t be blamed for missing that fact.

Since Kim’s appointment last week, the bevy of news releases, social media videos, and press interviews pushed by USC have made no mention of the achievement. Accordingly, few national or local media outlets have so much as hinted at it.

It is a stark contrast to the fanfare when Wanda Austin, a Black woman, was installed as interim president in 2018, and when Carol Folt became the first woman to serve as permanent USC president a year later.

Kim has ascended to the presidency at a remarkably different time than Folt and Austin. An erratic second Trump administration has declared all-out war on what it has described as dangerously progressive universities, waging legal battles against schools that retain diversity, equity, and inclusion-coded language.

In an interview Tuesday, Kim acknowledged that downplaying the historic nature of his presidency was a deliberate decision. But he denied that Trump-era anti-DEI attitudes played any role.

“It was a personal decision that felt right for me,” Kim said. “It should be obvious to absolutely anyone, just from my name alone, that I am Asian American.”

Eight decades ago, Kim’s ascension to the presidency would’ve been unthinkable.

In World War II, when Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and locked in the barbed confines of California’s Owens Valley, scores of USC students were among them.

When these students, known as Nisei, returned from their years-long internment, USC refused to release their academic records, forcing many to restart their education elsewhere.

Kim, of course, is Korean. His parents did not immigrate to the United States until the 1960s. It is hardly a surprise that a man of his background could ascend to a university presidency when Asian Americans have long played an outsized role in higher education.

But it is undeniably significant that USC, which once assented to one of the great injustices of American history, is now led by an Asian man.

In past interviews, Kim, 53, has described his ethnic background as an “incredibly important part of my identity,” but has not appeared interested in discussing it at length — or espousing platitudes about diversity.

Kim, the son of immigrants, who spent his childhood summers visiting Korea, was raised in Woodland Hills, whose population recorded in the 1990 census was less than 5% Asian.

His attitude toward his ethnic identity appears not dissimilar from that of so many other second-generation Asian Americans, who are popularly perceived as assimilating quickly into the American mainstream.

“I do recognize that this really matters to many members of the community,” Kim said. But, he added, “I would rather be judged ultimately based on what I end up doing” — and “not just that one part of my identity.”

Tomo Chien can be reached at [email protected].