USC’s presidential finalist lays out his plans for the university. Here are 5 takeaways

University of South Carolina presidential finalist Michael Amiridis laid out his vision for the state’s largest university during virtual meetings on Friday with students and employees.

That vision includes investing in online courses, boosting diversity, recruiting and keeping quality employees, improving infrastructure and how to improve the schools’ rankings.

Amiridis, 59, is the former USC provost whom in 2014 was named chancellor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A native of Greece, Amiridis came to USC in 1994 as a chemical engineering professor. He remained there until 2014.

“I”m excited to be back on campus of the University of South Carolina,” Amiridis said during his first meeting. “I spent 21 years on this campus. This is home.”

USC announced Amiridis was a finalist Friday morning just 1.5 hours before the public forums began. The three forums addressed academics, research, the university system as a whole and diversity, The State reported previously. The Friday meetings included panel questions from students and faculty.

The university has been looking for a permanent president since Bob Caslen, who was named president in 2019, resigned in May 2021 after admitting he plagiarized part of a commencement address.

Online courses

Amiridis is a strong believer in online schooling. When he was at USC, he helped establish the university’s online degree program, Palmetto College. If he advances to USC’s top post, he wants to take that even further.

With online schooling, “there is a misunderstanding there in many cases… that it is of lesser quality. As you know that doesn’t have to be the case,” Amiridis said, speaking to students and faculty. “When these courses are of high value, they provide the same value as face-to-face courses.”

One of the advantages of online courses is they allow non-traditional students, such as people with full-time jobs, veterans, and more, an opportunity to get a degree, Amiridis said.

Diversity

A common reasoning for the lack of diversity in higher education faculty is the lack of diverse, qualified employees for a particular job. But according to Amiridis, it is a university’s responsibility to train people who are qualified for those positions.

While at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Amiritis oversaw the implementation of two programs he says caused measurable increases in diverse faculty.

One of the policies addressed when a department identified a highly qualified, diverse candidate but did not have a position available. The university would hire the candidate anyway and find a role for them, he said.

“Bring us a strong candidate of color and whether we have a position for them or not, we will find the funding and bring them in,” Amiridis said.

Another policy allowed diverse faculty to more quickly enter into a tenure-track position, Amiridis said. Out of a cohort of 10 faculty members in fall 2020, one is already in a tenure-track position, and the other nine have offers to be tenure-track employees, he said.

“Our faculty have to reflect the demographics of our students and our faculty have to reflect the demographics of the state,” Amiridis said. “It’s especially important for students of color so they have role models to look up to.”

Recruiting/keeping faculty

One way USC can both increase long-term faculty diversity and boost research is to prepare USC’s graduate students to step into faculty roles after graduation, Amiridis said.

The focus is on producing a “cohort of future faculty members, and prepare them, give them the skills they need, the opportunities they need to get there,” Amiridis said.

This strategy would allow USC to widen the pipeline of diverse doctoral students, he said. One reason colleges and universities don’t have adequately diverse faculty is a small pool of diverse doctorate students.

Once faculty are hired, it’s important to keep them by fostering tight-knit communities and making sure employees are fairly compensated.

“Having competitive salaries for the university is extremely important,” Amiridis said.

Improving infrastructure

For years, USC has been behind on maintaining its buildings. Interim President Harris Pastides even went before the state legislature earlier this week to ask for more money to maintain buildings.

While state funds to education ebbs and flows based on the economy and other agencies jockeying for state dollars, Amiridis has a different plan to pay for infrastructure improvements, especially when it comes to renovating classrooms and lab spaces.

While at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the university assisted in trials for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, which netted the university $50 million in royalties, Amiridis said.

“The quality of the facilities is important to attract the best faculty and students in the industry, but also to deliver results,” Amiridis said.

National rankings

Throughout the current presidential search and the 2019 presidential search, faculty often asked candidates if they had any plans to admit USC to the American Association of Universities (AAU), a prestigious group of 66 universities in the U.S. and Canada.

While the AAU demands high, measurable standards for admittance, the group makes an explicit emphasis on remaining small and is very selective about which universities it lets in, even if metrics are met, Amiridis said.

“This is an organization that has its own metrics. We have to decide we can’t have a strategic goal to be part of an organization we have no control over. Our goal has to be based on our own metrics,” Amiridis said.

Amiridis voiced support for a similar approach to other college rankings. While he admits he cares about the rankings, Amiridis thinks by hitting the university’s internal goals of academic progress, diversity, research, etc., the university will naturally move up in rankings, he said.