I have now completed my first two months as the Chair of USC Economics. It is my impression that the University of Southern California fascinates outsiders. People know that Los Angeles is a wonderful sunny city. People know that USC is a private university raising a large amount of money. People know that there are very few strong private universities west of the Mississippi. USC is catching up with its main rival (UCLA) and seeks to be "Stanford South". The Football team is ranked #14 and the Economics Department is ranked #20 on Repec.
Given these points, what do I do? I read and respond to a lot of email and I attend many meetings. USC Economics is the largest major on campus. I am working hard to improve our major. Some of our majors love economics while others like economics. I want to have a flexible (and challenging) major that pushes our most ambitious students while still delivering for the median student. We are developing our network with our alumni to help place our students in great internships and jobs. We are fleshing out offerings in computer science, economics writing, public speaking and applied econometrics to help push our students where they want to go while providing them with the rigorous tools that economics can deliver.
Our MA program is large and we are investing to upgrade it. A leading econometrician from Netflix will be teaching a class for us in the Spring. We are inviting in leading experts to present public lectures.
Our PHD program has traditionally been strong in econometrics, development and experimental economics. We seek to build on this strength by broadening into environmental economics, macro/finance and political economy. A serious PHD program both trains students well and helps them to land high quality jobs. We will attract better students if we can deliver on this front. We are restructuring our PHD program to improve the mentoring and the students' transition to doing independent research.
The Chairman not only works to improve the educational mission but also engages in fundraising and faculty recruiting. As Los Angeles and USC both become increasingly desirable areas to live and work, more prominent economists are hinting to me that they want to join us in the sun. While I would love to grow our faculty from the current size of 28 to 82, the Deans place some limits on our growth. I spend a fair bit of time talking to our Deans about our growth plan and how we will finance this growth. We will be hiring 3 new professors this year. Our department is growing and this improves morale.
One worry of mine is our physical location. To maximize the intellectual synergies between the various economics units on campus, we seek to co-locate with the Marshall School in the middle of campus. For historical reasons, the Economics Department has been banished to the periphery of campus (close to a Taco Bell). For us to maximize our potential and to build up Economics at USC to the level it has achieved at Stanford and UChicago, we need to move to the middle of campus.
I spend my time building up the internal quality of our department and engaging in outreach with successful friends of my department and by connecting with other units on campus. There are many meetings because we have so much potential.
I now see that the challenge a department chair faces is "toggling" back and forth between administrative functions and returning to my "real job" of writing academic papers and creating new ideas.
I moved to USC from a nearby school because I saw its great potential. During my two years as Chair, I want to create a momentum such that the next Chair will have the resources and the power to make the Big Push such that the department cracks into the "top 15".