C.L. “Max” Nikias
President, University of Southern California
The State of Education
By Jason Dean
The Reagan years occupy a special place in Dr. Chrysostomos L. “Max” Nikias’ heart for personal as well as professional reasons. Not only were each of his daughters born during Reagan’s tenure as the nation’s 40th president, he and his wife -- both Cyprus nationals -- became U.S. citizens in 1988, The Great Communicator’s final year in office. Appointed last August as just the 11th president in the University of Southern California’s 130-year history, Nikias was openly enthusiastic that the institution would be holding campus events to commemorate the Reagan Centennial at the beginning of February.
“I think a big part of Ronald Reagan’s contribution was [his] emphasis of the core values of what defines us as Americans, which applies nicely to any American college system,” explained Nikias. “He was a strong believer that education was the greatest equalizer of society. And dearest to my heart was the value he placed [on] technological innovation. The advancement of the 1980s was unprecedented, and many of those innovations translated into technologies in the 1990s when we had the Internet boom.”
It’s Friday afternoon, a week before the Reagan Centennial is scheduled to take place, when Nikias welcomes me to his spacious office as if I were an esteemed dignitary. As we share hot tea and pistachio biscotti at one end of an immaculately arranged table, the former dean of the USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering discusses the parallels between ancient Greek and American histories and offers an inspiring assessment of the current condition of higher education.
Pointing out that the culture used to measure generational gaps by decades, I ask Nikias how he feels rapid advances of technology have affected this somewhat arbitrary timeline. “It’s a three-year window now,” he readily responds. In other words, the typical freshman will be adapting to a whole new wave of technological advances by the time he is a senior. This leads to a spirited discussion about the value of lifelong learning.
“What is the importance of the education that you receive between the ages 18 to 22?” he posits. “You have to get the foundation. Throughout your lifespan, you’re going to have to go back to school again and again. Because you’re going to live that long. And you may want a master’s degree in one area, or you may choose to get an MBA.”
“Throughout your lifespan, you’re going to have to go back to school again and again. Because you’re going to live that long.”
In that respect, remote learning is a valuable tool, because many people work while pursuing a degree that will help them become more competitive in their career. But, Nikias says, the physical experience of attending an institution of higher learning is a sine qua non for an undergraduate or doctoral degree. “A Ph.D. education is the relationship of the student with his or her advisors,” he points out. “[And] undergraduate education isn’t just knowledge transferred in the classroom…. That’s at your fingertips already. You can access it.” Nikias, who joined the faculty 19 years ago, knows of what he speaks; he graduated 30 Ph.D. students, many of whom came to his inauguration last August. He was the founding director of the integrated media systems, a center that brought together engineering, journalism, cinematic arts, and music to study the future of digital media. Most recently, he served as executive vice president and provost for five years before moving into the president’s house in San Marino.
Nikias earned his doctorate in 1982, just as his area of expertise -- digital signal processing -- was entering its “golden age” due primarily to the Reagan administration’s emphasis on the build-up of defense systems using digital technology, the engineering world transitioning from analog to digital, and the development of more sophisticated systems for sonar and radar communication. A pioneering researcher in his own right, Nikias holds several patents for sonar and radar applications used by the Department of Defense. “The emphasis Reagan brought into updating all the defense systems in the 1980s, that’s what stimulated the growth of the economy,” he recalls. “My discipline was very popular and still is to this day.”
Nikias describes the foreseeable future for education thusly: Immersive environments with high-resolution and total interactivity features will give the sensation that you’re sitting in the classroom listening to the professor--even asking a question—without having to be there. “These kinds of tests, we did. We showed the feasibility of that.” Perpetual advances in computing speed and database capabilities make the horizon for innovation seem limitless. “Aeschylus the Greek tragedian…has a beautiful expression that I have used many times-- ‘Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth even for the old.’ That’s what I mean by lifelong learning.”
Adaptability to change indelibly defines us as we age. Nikias suggests as much when he discusses his outlook on the incoming class with his peers every September. “You have to remember one thing,” he says, biting into a cookie. “Every year all of us are getting one year older, but our freshman class…” he pauses, his voice softening to a purposeful hush, “is always 18 years old.”
Nikias mentions the current innovation trend, cloud computing, which involves shared servers providing resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand, similar to an electricity grid.
One change Nikias has resisted is the call for USC to follow the lead of other institutions and open “satellite” campuses in other areas of the globe. “American research university education cannot be easily exported,” he explains, adding that one of his roles as president is to protect the University’s core values--which he lists as freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the entrepreneurial spirit, and gender equality. “Who will guarantee to me if I set up a campus on foreign shores, that all the core values that apply here will be protected there?”
The first year of his presidency will culminate, fittingly, with milestones in Nikias’ own family: Daughters Georgiana, 27, and Maria, 22, will earn degrees from USC in law and broadcast journalism, respectively.
The idea of USC embarking on a lasting partnership with the Reagan Library is a natural pairing as far as Nikias is concerned. Informing me that President Reagan made his very first post-presidential speech on the USC campus, he adds, “It makes a lot of sense for our institution and the Reagan Library to work together. There are a lot of joint conferences and workshops and events that we can organize in the long run.”
