Kim gets candid
Tomo Chien
November 20, 2025
Good morning. It’s Thursday, and these are the five USC, Los Angeles, and California stories you need to know for today.
1.
Interim President Beong-Soo Kim spoke candidly at a luncheon Monday, describing USC as a “huge house on fire” when he accepted the school’s top role. “My job is to make as many hard, painful decisions as need to be made to set this university up for long-term success,” Kim told a private crowd of faculty and staff.
2.
The U.S. State Department is planning to boot USC and 37 other universities from a federal research program because they engage in DEI hiring practices. The program, called the Diplomacy Lab, connects university researchers with State Department staffers to tackle foreign policy challenges.
3.
Police evacuated the Student Union yesterday after a caller phoned in a bomb threat to the LGBTQ+ Student Center. The Department of Public Safety said it isn’t investigating the hoax as a hate crime because no group was mentioned by name.
4.
A USC professor known as an anti-woke firebrand said she’s severing ties with the journal Nature because it has “sacrificed the epistemic standards of scientific publishing in unrelenting pursuit of a social justice agenda.” Nature, wrote chemistry professor Anna Krylov, “has lost its credibility as a truth-seeking enterprise.”
5.
Are you smarter than an eighth grader from 1899? At the link below, New York Magazine assembled a 14-question quiz using standardized test questions across decades of American history. If you score higher than my 12/14 — I’m not proud of it — email me a screenshot and we’ll get you a Morning, Trojan sticker.