USC Tuesday announced that Michael Quick, the university’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, and Carol Mauch Amir, senior vice president for legal affairs and professionalism, are leaving their posts.
Interim President Wanda M. Austin, in a letter to the university community, said Quick and Amir both notified her “of their intent to retire from their positions, effective June 30. She said Quick will return to the faculty, where he is a professor of biological sciences in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
“President-elect (Carol) Folt and I will work together to select their successors,” Austin wrote. “For the provost position, we will name an interim provost in the coming weeks, and identify a chair of the search committee, which will include faculty across an array of schools at USC. Our search for both positions will be national in scope and exhaustive in reach.”
Folk, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was named the university’s 12th president on March 20. She takes the helm July 1, as the university reels from the fallout of a college-admissions cheating scandal and continues dealing with the ramifications of sexual misconduct allegations against former campus physicians that led to the departure of President C.L. Max Nikias.
Austin, former CEO of The Aerospace Corp., has been serving as USC’s interim president since Nikias’ departure last August.
Austin she was “personally grateful to Michael and Carol for working closely with me as we prepare for our new president’s arrival this summer. They have shown tremendous dedication to our university and its community and have led with integrity and compassion. I hope you will join me in wishing them well in their future endeavors.”
Austin said Quick helped raise the university’s profile internationally by “working with deans and other academic leaders to hire and retain extraordinarily accomplished faculty; recruiting the highest achieving and most diverse student body in the history of the university; and supporting faculty in achieving the largest extramural research funding portfolio in USC’s history.”
He also “developed an effective partnership with the Academic Senate, as well as the graduate and undergraduate student governments, and he mobilized our university efforts on such `wicked problems’ as homelessness, sustainability, and immigration, all with a focus on social justice,” Austin said.
Amir, who has been at USC since 1999, in the past year “has overseen the establishment of the Office of Professionalism and Ethics (OPE), which for the first time creates a central location for investigation, monitoring, and tracking of all types of complaints at the university,” Austin wrote. “She helped formalize our initiatives to advance culture change, including structuring the President’s Culture Commission and the Working Group on Culture, and recruited a chief ethics and compliance officer. She has worked with the audit and compliance committee of the board of trustees to increase the scope and substance of the reporting and monitoring undertaken by that committee.”