‘USC is not afraid to change.’ New provost vows to rebuild lost trust in higher education

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USC has named David Madigan, a statistician and former Northeastern University provost, as its chief academic officer, and he vows to make the university a leader in restoring American trust in higher education and adapting to rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

Madigan, 63, will become provost and executive vice president for academic affairs on Oct. 13, the university announced Wednesday, in the most significant academic appointment of President Beong-Soo Kim’s first year at the helm.

Madigan arrives as USC emerges from a financial crisis, fights a faculty union drive and faces political and funding pressures from the Trump administration — all while artificial intelligence reshapes learning, teaching and research.

“I really believe in the power of the great American research universities,” Madigan said in an interview. “Somehow or other, we’ve lost our way a little bit.”

Incoming USC provost David Madigan. (Northeastern University) The problem predates recent federal cuts challenging higher education, he said, emphasizing a decline in public trust in universities and affirming that USC is well placed to address it.

“USC is not afraid to change,” he said. “We have to be ready to adapt and change, and kind of restore our position, restore the trust of the American people.”

In a statement, Kim said Madigan brings “the experience and leadership we need to build on USC’s extraordinary strengths, advance our academic mission, and help USC shape the future.”

Madigan will oversee 18 schools and academic units along with student life, libraries and enrollment services. USC’s budget staff reports to Gregg Goldman, hired in June as its first executive vice president for finance and operations.

Madigan said he will approach his role with “transparency and authenticity.”

“These are not for-profit corporations. We’re not Goldman Sachs. We’re not Procter and Gamble,” Madigan said. He said USC should tell its community members about “good news, bad news, financial news, just clarity about exactly where we stand.”

He takes over after a lean stretch. To close a deficit of more than $200 million that it announced last year, USC froze hiring, laid off roughly 1,000 workers, eliminated merit raises, sold unused buildings and cut discretionary spending. Some reductions have continued, including layoffs at the Viterbi School of Engineering this month.

In June, about 70% of voting non-tenure-track faculty approved unionizing under United Faculty-UAW, which seeks to represent roughly 2,700 USC lecturers, researchers, clinicians, librarians and pharmacists.

USC has refused to recognize the result and asked the National Labor Relations Board to throw it out, arguing that those faculty hold management rights through shared governance and that the bargaining unit is too broad.

Like UCLA and other research universities, USC faces a Trump administration that has cut research funding and pressured campuses to eliminate diversity programs, strictly enforce protest rules and restrict international enrollment, a major issue at USC, where more than a quarter of students are international.

Last year, USC declined to sign a White House “academic compact” requiring it to cap international undergraduate enrollment and freeze tuition.

USC also is betting heavily on AI. In May, trustee Mark Stevens and his wife, Mary, gave $200 million, one of the largest gifts in the university’s history, to spread the technology across fields from medicine to the arts. This fall, Viterbi launched USC’s first undergraduate AI degree.

“AI is completely transforming the research process,” Madigan said, and in teaching, “the holy grail of learning science has always been the personal tutor, and in many ways, here we are.”

“Risks are real, and the safeguards are not in place,” he added, speaking to AI’s rapid development in society and debates over government-led guardrails.

A native of Ireland, Madigan earned a mathematics degree and a doctorate in statistics from Trinity College Dublin and worked in insurance and technology consulting. His research spans Bayesian statistics and drug safety.

He taught at the University of Washington and became a dean at Rutgers University. At Columbia University, he chaired the statistics department before spending five years as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As Northeastern’s provost from 2020 to 2025, he oversaw 10 schools and colleges and the research enterprise and managed its pandemic reopening and acquisitions of Mills College in Oakland and Marymount Manhattan College in New York. He has since been a professor and presidential adviser at Northeastern.

At USC, he will hold the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Provost’s Chair and join the Marshall School of Business faculty as a professor of data sciences and operations, with joint appointments in population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and in mathematics at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

His Northeastern tenure included clashes over campus protest. In April 2024, he co-signed a statement defending the police removal of a pro-Palestinian encampment that led to about 100 arrests. Faculty pressed him to disavow university guidance saying they needed the provost’s permission to protest. The language was removed, but some faculty said his assurances fell short.

Madigan called academic freedom and free speech a “bedrock principle.”

“We have to be able to express ideas in ways that some people might not like, some people might find offensive,” he said. “This is not negotiable.” But “it’s not OK to harass someone,” he added, and “disrupting the business of the university is problematic.”

Madigan succeeds Andrew Guzman, who is returning to the Gould School of Law faculty.

Guzman, a former law school dean who became provost in 2023, faced similar tests over protests and free speech. In May 2024, the Academic Senate censured him and then-President Carol Folt over their handling of pro-Palestinian protests, including an encampment where 93 people were arrested.

Announcing Guzman’s departure in May, Kim credited his “focused efforts around financial sustainability” during “an extraordinarily challenging time.”

On Wednesday, USC also named Megan Jordan, its interim chief communications officer since January, to the post permanently. Jordan, a USC alumna and adjunct professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, joined the administration in 2024 to oversee communications for the president’s office. She previously worked at Claremont McKenna College, Southern California Edison, Herbalife and Kaiser Permanente.

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Jaweed Kaleem is an education reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where he covers the University of California and higher education. He specializes in reporting on campus activism and culture, including issues on free speech, religion, race and politics. Kaleem previously worked for The Times as a Los Angeles-based national correspondent and a London-based foreign correspondent. Follow him on Bluesky @jaweedkaleem.bsky.social and X @jaweedkaleem.

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