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USC pledges $100 million to lure top-notch professors

LOS ANGELES (AP) The University of Southern California has pledged $100 million to boost its faculty ranks with the some of the nation's top-notch professors.

The three-year recruitment campaign will expand the university's full-time faculty by nearly 25 percent, campus officials said Friday. All the professors will be hired to work in the university's College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.

``In many ways, the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences is the core of a university, and if we wanted to achieve the position we wanted in the hierarchy of universities in the world, we needed to improve the college,'' USC's Provost Lloyd Armstrong Jr. told the Los Angeles Times.

A successful fund-raising campaign launched in 1993 has collected more than $2.5 billion in gifts and pledges, which will be used to fund much of the hiring initiative, Armstrong said.

The campaign could also heat up bidding wars among the nation's major universities, who compete for academics with the best credentials, particularly in research fields.

``USC has clearly made a very important commitment to quality and to being a major player in the area of private higher education,'' said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, which represents about 1,800 colleges and universities.

USC officials said they will focus on hiring high-profile professors in three broad areas: biology and other life sciences; urban studies and globalization; and language and culture. The university has yet to begin identifying particular candidates.

After the $100 million is spent on salaries, equipment, research efforts and other costs over about three years, USC will budget about $30 million a year to continue the support, Armstrong said. In some cases, compensation packages for the new professors will exceed $200,000 a year, mainly in the competitive research fields, he said.

Among other incentives is a new $60-million life sciences building with cutting-edge equipment. Construction is scheduled to begin in January, with a completion date of 2004. In addition, USC recently announced a $100-million effort to strengthen and step up recruiting for its graduate programs, mainly through financial aid.

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