USC Spends Big to Boost a Weak Academic Link

That was all the encouragement needed for USC, eager to snare new star faculty members, to swing into action. The school quickly flew Soames in from New Jersey for a couple of visits, told him about USC's rising aspirations and offered a pay raise.

Finally, the Southern California climate clinched the deal. "I kind of fell in love with Los Angeles while I was out there," said Soames, an expert in the philosophy of language. "It was December and January, and it's easy to fall in love with then."

At a time when many other universities are hamstrung by budget cutbacks and worried about raiding of their faculty, USC is in the midst of an ambitious hiring campaign. The Los Angeles campus is flush with money from a record-setting $2.85-billion fundraising campaign concluded a year ago, and it is using $100 million of that to snag high-profile scholars like Soames.

The hiring is for the campus' largest division, the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. USC leaders and others in higher education have considered it a weak link, compared with the campus' professional schools such as engineering and law, and they hope the recruits will lift the college's stature.

"It's very rare that an institution can make a major move like they're making," said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of Cornell University's Higher Education Research Institute. He noted that Northeastern University in Boston recently announced a $75-million recruiting effort, one of the few examples of another school that is planning to substantially expand its faculty, but he added that "they're not in a position to move to the top rung, like Southern Cal is."

Overall, USC is rated the 30th-best research university in the nation in the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings, up from No. 42 a decade ago. That still leaves it behind several other California institutions: Stanford and Caltech were in a four-way tie for 5th place, UC Berkeley came in at 21st and archrival UCLA was 26th.

Some of USC's professional graduate schools fared well in the magazine's rankings -- film was tied for No. 1 in the nation, engineering was 8th, law was 18th and business was 20th. The magazine did not rate the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences separately. But academic experts say many of USC's social sciences and humanities programs and its general intellectual atmosphere have lagged.