USC was in a free fall. Then it turned to Rick Caruso

On the lowest level in its historical past, the College of Southern California turned to Rick Caruso.

It was 2018 and USC was reeling from revelations a couple of campus gynecologist. A whole lot of scholars and alumnae had been lining up sexual abuse fits that may finally price the college greater than $1 billion. The once-docile college was demanding the president’s resignation, and the LAPD and the U.S. Division of Schooling had been mounting investigations.

Embattled President C.L. Max Nikias summoned Caruso, an actual property developer, alumnus and college trustee, to a Could assembly and laid out extra dangerous information: The person in line to move the board, a low-profile Silicon Valley enterprise capitalist, was not suited to steer by means of the disaster.

“He wanted some stability,” recalled Caruso, who had navigated scandal as an L.A. police commissioner. “It was getting uncontrolled.”

Caruso stepped into the volunteer put up and rapidly reworked it right into a full-time place that made him at instances during the last 4 years the de facto chief government of USC, a multibillion-dollar healthcare and schooling enterprise that’s the metropolis’s largest non-public employer.

Now operating for mayor, Caruso is inviting voters to look intently at that almost all current entry on his resume. His marketing campaign has introduced him as prepared to repair L.A.’s crime, homelessness and corruption the way in which he “cleaned up the messes at USC.”

There’s broad settlement on campus that the college is in a greater place than when Caruso took over. In interviews with directors, college, college students, trustees and alumni, many credited him with the ouster of the polarizing Nikias and the compensation of former sufferers of Dr. George Tyndall, the most important intercourse abuse settlement in larger schooling historical past. Additionally they lauded Caruso for his position in putting in USC’s first feminine president, Carol Folt, and its new star soccer coach and reforming a governing board of fellow billionaires and energy gamers within the face of non-public assaults.

“He was prepared to take the bullets and the darts to do the best factor,” stated trustee Suzanne Nora Johnson, a retired Goldman Sachs government. “I do know only a few individuals in private and non-private life who’re as really brave.”

Others stated they had been upset by a scarcity of transparency on the college, together with preserving non-public the interior studies about misconduct. Some professors additionally bemoaned a “top-down” strategy that they stated discounted the views of lecturers and college students and relied on administration consultants.

“I can perceive why coming from his background as an completed mall developer man, he would see operating issues properly as the answer however a college isn’t a shopping center,” stated cinematic arts professor Howard Rodman, president of the USC chapter of the American Assn. of College Professors. “Good administration isn’t a purpose in itself.”

After he took over, Caruso turned the primary board chair in current historical past to arrange an workplace close to the president’s suite in Bovard Corridor, and he labored there with a chief of employees employed from Caltech.

Elizabeth Daley, the longest-serving USC dean who leads the College of Cinematic Arts, stated she was relieved to see Caruso taking a hands-on strategy given the “figurehead” position that trustees typically performed.

“You felt like the best individual was in cost,” Daley stated. Of his “24/7 availability” in these days, she recalled pondering, “The person doesn’t want this — he might simply stay a lifetime of luxurious.”

By that time, USC had turn out to be synonymous with corruption. There was the medical college dean who used methamphetamine and partied with addicts in his campus workplace, and his alternative who needed to step down after a sexual harassment accusation emerged. The athletic division produced extra scandals than nationwide championships: college students on the take, a soccer coach intoxicated at a pep rally, one other one fired on an airport tarmac, an athletic director amassing cash from a kids’s nonprofit.

The Day by day Trojan employees hung a “days-since-scandal” counter on the newsroom wall — and by no means received previous eight, stated alumnus Tomás Mier, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. “It turned coaching floor as a journalist, nevertheless it was actually tough to be a pupil,” Mier stated.

The college was ruled on paper by the trustees, however the board of about 60 influential enterprise leaders and donors exercised little actual oversight. No matter disturbing headlines got here, Nikias emphasised USC’s phenomenal strides in lecturers and fundraising, trustees and college officers stated.

Caruso had been a kind of who accepted Nikias’ rose-tinted view. A 1980 graduate and donor, he was elected to the board in 2007 and served for a interval on its government committee, ostensibly essentially the most highly effective group of trustees.

“It was a really passive board,” Caruso acknowledged in an interview. “Disgrace on all of us for not being extra vital.”

In March 2018, he and different members of the chief committee had been privately briefed on allegations towards Tyndall, who had been quietly pressured out of the coed well being clinic two years earlier following a long time of complaints from ladies. Caruso stated that he was shaken and advisable an impartial investigation, one thing he stated college attorneys urged towards.

It was after Tyndall’s troubled historical past turned public in The Occasions two months later that Nikias requested Caruso to turn out to be chair. The president had publicly agreed to step down, however behind closed doorways he and plenty of trustees anticipated that he would climate the storm and stay in workplace. Nikias declined to remark.

Caruso stated Nikias initially counted him as one in every of these “loyalist” trustees, however that rapidly modified as particulars about Tyndall emerged.

“We wanted to look ahead,” Caruso stated.

His personal daughter, Gianna, was amongst 1000’s of first-year college students set to reach in August and he felt it could be “a nightmare” for Nikias to welcome them and their mother and father amid protests a couple of rogue gynecologist.

Caruso met one-on-one with different trustees to attempt to persuade them that the Nikias period needed to finish and that it was value USC opening its coffers to hasten his exit. William Tierney, a professor emeritus of schooling, recalled Caruso confiding in him, “‘If Max steps down, it’s going to price us.’ And I knew what he meant.”

The profitable severance package deal Nikias negotiated has by no means been absolutely disclosed. Public tax filings reveal it has included thousands and thousands of {dollars} in compensation and a mortgage for a $4.1-million home in Manhattan Seaside.

It was not Caruso’s final conflict with trustees loyal to the outdated guard. When interim President Wanda Austin pressured out the favored enterprise college dean later that yr over the dealing with of harassment and discrimination claims, different billionaire trustees, together with entrepreneur Ming Hsieh and Lakers’ co-owner and developer Ed Roski, needed Caruso to intervene. He refused.

The dispute at one trustees assembly grew so heated that safety was referred to as and Hsieh ejected — a transfer that Roski later advised was motivated by racism on Caruso’s half. Opponents reportedly scuttled the developer’s utility to affix L.A. Nation Membership.

The discontent waned after Caruso helped lure a formidable new chief for USC’s enterprise program: the dean of the vaunted Wharton College of Enterprise.

Financier Lloyd Greif, a donor who led the try to preserve Jim Ellis as enterprise college dean, stated he didn’t discuss to Caruso for years afterward and nonetheless strongly disagreed with him on that difficulty. He credited Caruso, although, for his resolute management.

“Rightly or wrongly — and you understand my view on it — it was a troublesome determination,” he stated.

Below Caruso’s tenure, the sprawling, quarrelsome board was whittled down from greater than 57 members to 40, and by the top of this yr, 35. Its bylaws had been rewritten to set time period limits and its workings had been made extra public. The membership of the chief committee, stored secret throughout Nikias’ administration, is now listed on the college web site.

“We reworked our board to make sure these issues of the previous aren’t repeated,” stated trustee David Bohnett, a tech investor who helped lead the overhaul of the board to offer extra energetic oversight.

The school campaigned for the board adjustments, however some felt used when the reforms didn’t embrace voting seats for them or the coed physique. “As soon as the coup had been profitable, the diploma of communication dropped precipitously, which could lead on one to suppose we had served our function and now it was again to enterprise as typical,” stated communications professor Larry Gross.

Some professors had been upset that the college didn’t dip into the endowment to keep up funds to school retirement accounts throughout the pandemic. Caruso’s use of the controversial consulting agency McKinsey & Co., which has suggested Enron, an opioid producer and different problematic shoppers, additionally drew objections

To get enter on the number of new president, Caruso launched a method that had proved profitable in mollifying neighbors about his mall tasks: listening periods. Teams of trustees sat for hours as college students, college, alumni and employees aired grievances and hopes for what the following president would embody.

The board selected Carol Folt, the chancellor of College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pleasing those that needed a visual change from USC’s “outdated boys membership” previous. Folt declined an interview citing a coverage of not taking sides in elections. In a February letter to alumni and college students, she wrote that Caruso’s “imaginative and prescient and religion put USC on the trail to restoring belief in and integrity throughout the establishment.”

Shortly earlier than Folt was named president, federal prosecutors introduced the indictment of dozens of rich mother and father in a nationwide scheme to purchase admission to USC and different universities.

Although the conduct alleged within the “Varsity Blues” case predated Caruso’s time as chair, he was drawn into the scandal when the daughter of one couple charged, actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, J. Mossimo Giannulli, was with the developer’s daughter on his yacht within the Bahamas on the time of her mother and father’ arrest.

Requested concerning the scenario, Caruso stated he didn’t need to violate his daughter’s privateness, however stated, “I did nothing fallacious. My daughter did nothing fallacious.”

Transparency was one in every of Caruso’s guarantees when he started his time period. Lower than a month into his tenure, that dedication was examined when a whistleblower at USC’s social work college questioned the routing of a donation by the dean, Marilyn Flynn, to a nonprofit run by the son of then-Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

USC reported the switch to the U.S. lawyer’s workplace, and Caruso publicly introduced the transfer in a letter to the neighborhood. Final yr, a grand jury indicted Flynn and Ridley-Thomas; each have pleaded not responsible to fees of conspiracy and bribery.

The longer Caruso stayed in energy, although, the much less he appeared to be in airing the college’s soiled laundry. Early in his tenure, he stated he deliberate to launch inner studies about former medical college dean, Dr. Carmen Puliafito, and Tyndall, the gynecologist.

The Puliafito report stays confidential. Questioned not too long ago, Caruso stated it was Nikias who determined to maintain the report secret. He didn’t clarify why that call couldn’t be reversed.

As to the Tyndall report, Caruso contended that there was nothing written to launch as a result of the regulation agency employed to research had briefed trustees orally. “It was a posh, horrible case. We did the best factor. And now to launch info with explicit particulars of what occurred would simply be dangerous,” he stated. USC in the end agreed to pay greater than $1.1 billion to Tyndall’s former sufferers.

Undergraduate Sydney Brown, president of the Trojan Democrats, criticized what she stated was a sample by Caruso and different college leaders of asserting investigations however not disclosing the findings.

“All of it ties into this notion that USC is incapable of being clear and holding wrongdoers accountable,” Brown stated. The group she leads has endorsed Caruso rival Rep. Karen Bass, a USC alum.

An enormous protecting order within the gynecologist case stays in place, shielding from the general public the testimony of Caruso, college directors, clinic nurses, former sufferers who alleged abuse and Tyndall himself.

Caruso stated he had no objection to creating his deposition transcript public: “I’ve nothing to cover.”

Within the wake of the Tyndall scandal, USC employed a raft of latest directors to supervise ethics and improve the providers for sexual assault victims.

Nonetheless, when the college obtained at the very least 5 studies about alleged drugging and assault final fall at a fraternity, it took three weeks to alert the coed physique. In that point, one other pupil reported she was sexually assaulted by a member of the identical fraternity.

Although the president acknowledged a “troubling delay in appearing on this info,” Caruso maintained that “swift motion was taken,” including, “All fraternities had been shut down when it comes to social occasions.”

One rival within the mayoral race has invoked USC’s sexual assault file to say Caruso is unfit, citing a 2019 survey — taken about 9 months after Caruso took over as chair — during which one-third of USC ladies had reported being sexually assaulted throughout their faculty years.

“If he couldn’t preserve the ladies of USC protected, how is he going to maintain the ladies within the metropolis of Los Angeles protected?” mayoral candidate and Metropolis Atty. Mike Feuer stated at a current debate. Caruso referred to as Feuer’s assault “grotesque.”

Alexis Areias, president of the Undergraduate Pupil Authorities, stated the preliminary response to fraternity assault studies deserved criticism. However she stated she had studied the numbers Feuer cited, and she or he didn’t suppose it was truthful to put all of the blame on Caruso.

“I do suppose he inherited a whole lot of these statistics and people atrocities that occurred,” Areias stated. “I don’t suppose a tradition shift can happen in a single day.”

For sure alumni, Caruso’s most essential contribution to USC was lending his non-public aircraft to whisk the brand new soccer coach Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma to L.A. Caruso was one in every of 4 individuals on campus final fall who knew the Trojans had been circling the Sooners coach to steer the storied however underperforming program.

He described serving to the athletic director and Folt secretly pursue Riley as “in all probability a number of the greatest 30 days of my life.”

Athletic director Mike Bohn stated in an interview that Caruso’s “enterprise acumen” helped within the recruitment. USC has not revealed Riley’s wage, however he and his spouse not too long ago purchased a $17-million compound in Palos Verdes Estates.

Caruso is predicted to step down formally close to the top of the varsity yr. He has swatted down the concept he assumed the position to burnish his credentials for public workplace.

“Hear, if I used to be actually severe, and solely considered operating for mayor, I might have by no means turn out to be the chair of USC,” he stated. “I might be a typical politician the place I’d need to fear about doing every little thing that’s politically appropriate, slightly than what’s proper, and would have averted the powerful job of turning SC round.”