USC President Beong-Soo Kim shares ‘What Matters to Me and Why’

When USC President Beong-Soo Kim played a Catalan folk song on his cello, the audience of students, faculty and staff gathered in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center on the USC University Park Campus on April 15 received more than a moving musical performance. They also gained insight into the ideas and ideals that Kim holds dear.

The performance came at the end of Kim’s remarks at “What Matters to Me and Why,” a monthly talk and discussion series featuring USC faculty and administrators. Started in 2001, the series has encouraged those who shape the university to reflect on their values, beliefs and motivations.

At the event, Kim highlighted three people who had a significant impact on his life and his ways of thinking about the world. One of them was Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, born in Spain in 1876 and widely considered the greatest cellist of his time. Kim spoke about admiring Casals for his artistry, discipline and moral compass. At the peak of Casals’ career, he refused to perform in countries that supported authoritarian regimes, including those of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco Franco in Spain.

“The idea that someone, an artist, would make such a decision that was so detrimental to his own career in the service of these broader moral principles is something that I find incredibly inspiring,” Kim said.

When Casals visited the United Nations in 1971 to accept the U.N. Peace Medal, he told the U.N. audience, “Birds sing when they are in the sky; they sing, ‘Peace, Peace, Peace,’” before performing the traditional Catalan folk song “The Song of the Birds.” Kim’s choice to play the same haunting melody at last week’s event underscored the deep personal resonance of Casals’ stance for peace, justice and freedom.

An ‘open-minded, open-hearted’ leader

The “What Matters to Me and Why” series is presented by the USC Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, the USC Amy King Dundon-Berchtold University Club at King Stoops Hall, and the Levan Institute for the Humanities at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Now in its 25th year, the program has hosted nearly 200 Trojans as speakers, including USC presidents, staff members, faculty and alumni. In addition to being a forum for Trojans to pass on worldly wisdom, the series also seeks to bring together all members of the USC community, from students, faculty and staff to neighborhood residents.

In opening remarks before Kim’s talk, USC Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni shared some personal observations from working closely with Kim. Soni noted Kim’s dedication to attending campus events, including those hosted by an array of religious and spiritual groups.

During periods of challenge for the university, Soni has seen Kim’s character shine. “I realized I was the chaplain who thought like a lawyer,” Soni said. “He was the lawyer who thought like a chaplain … an open-minded, open-hearted leader who sees and hears people, who walks alongside them.”

Kim was unanimously elected the 13th president of USC in February, following seven months serving as interim president. Kim previously held senior roles at Kaiser Permanente, was a partner at an international law firm and served as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice. He joined USC in 2020 as senior vice president and general counsel.

Fostering a vibrant exchange of viewpoints

Soni discussed some of the ways that Kim has supported the protection of free speech on campus since he began leading the university. “[Kim] has spearheaded Open Dialogue initiatives, hosted numerous town halls, pushed for financial transparency and championed academic freedom,” Soni said.

Kim brought up Russian-British historian and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin as another influential figure in his life. The example offered a window into what motivates Kim to foster a culture of free expression at the university.

“I was very idealistic as a child and as a student and was always looking for the right answer,” said Kim, who grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif. “Sir Isaiah Berlin’s writings made me realize that maybe there is no one answer to these questions around how we should organize our politics, how should we live our lives. Instead, there are many different approaches.”

Berlin acted on his conviction that there is no single truth by engaging people of wide-ranging beliefs in thoughtful conversation. “He was considered to be one of the greatest conversationalists of his time, someone who never spoke down to people and always wanted to understand where they were coming from,” Kim said. “He would literally sit in a chair with a pipe and speak to people for hours and hours at a time.”

In his writings, Berlin distinguished between negative liberty — a form of freedom that comes from a lack of interference — and positive liberty. “That’s a form of liberty that comes from people engaged in politics, engaged in conversation,” Kim said. “It’s a form of collective liberty, if you will,” he added.

“Positive liberty truly reflects the kind of intellectual community that I think all of us aspire to at USC and other great universities, where people aren’t just being asked to be let alone, but rather people want to engage with other people, with other ideas, to learn from them,” Kim said. “The conversation never finishes because there’s always more to learn — there’s always a greater truth to achieve.”

Kim credited Berlin for shaping his thinking about the importance of robust conversations to the mission of the university. The Open Dialogue Project, a series of universitywide forums and programs Kim launched to promote a vibrant exchange of viewpoints, is a striking example of that influence. And Kim himself is following in Berlin’s footsteps as a conversationalist on his Trojan Talks podcast, which features him speaking with leading USC researchers and thought leaders.

A passion for learning and an ethic of service

The third role model Kim discussed was his late mother. Born in what is now North Korea, she fled south with her family during the Korean War, ultimately settling in Hong Kong. After high school, she came to the United States and worked various jobs, including on an assembly line at Mattel. But her love of learning propelled her to pursue higher education.

She earned a master’s degree at USC and became a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Later in life, she learned to play piano and speak new languages, including Spanish and Japanese.

“She had a personalized license plate, ‘LV2LRN,’” Kim recalled — “either ‘live’ or ‘love’ to learn.”

Her passion for learning rubbed off on Kim. “Being at USC is like being a kid in a candy shop in terms of learning,” he said.

Another quality he admired in his mother was her ethic of service. As a teacher, Kim said, she always went the extra mile for her students, and she touched the lives of so many people with her almost boundless generosity.

Kim recounted a time near the end of her life when he was driving her home from the hospital to begin her hospice care. Halfway home, she told him to turn the car around: “We need to drop off chocolates for the nurses who cared for me.”

As USC president, Kim is guided by his mother’s example of selflessness and service. When his tenure leading USC comes to an end, he said, “I want the delta between what I’ve given to the university and what I’ve received to be as large as possible.”

Making values-based decisions for USC

Following Kim’s remarks and his cello performance, Soni invited the audience to ask Kim questions. Om Tandon, a sophomore at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, was one of the students who did so.

“As president, you’re faced with making tough decisions every single day,” Tandon said. “I wanted to know how your approach to making these decisions has changed when looking towards the three inspirations you’ve talked about today or anyone else in your life over the past year.”

Kim’s answer reflected in part what he learned from Casals’ example of acting from moral principles. In making decisions as USC president, Kim said, “What I try to think about is not what is expedient … but what is going to look right years from now. I’m always trying to take that longer-term perspective and stay true to those longer-term values.”

Kim was forthright about the pressures of having to sometimes make very quick decisions and the inevitability of making some mistakes as a result.

“I believe so much in excellence, and I appreciate how hard it is to achieve that,” Kim said in his remarks before the Q&A, noting the kind of “maniacal focus” it takes to achieve excellence at the levels of Casals’ artistry. “Especially in this job, but in prior jobs as well, I always feel like I’m falling short.”

But in the spirit of Berlin, Kim noted in response to Tandon that any missteps he’s made have served as opportunities for further dialogue.

“What I’ve experienced in the USC community is that if you just stand up in front of people and explain how you made the decision, whether or not people agree with the decision, I think they’re willing to really give you a lot of grace,” he said, “if you just give them the opportunity to express themselves — and have a conversation.”