Kaprielian named to executive VP post
By Kevin McKenna
editor
Zohrab A. Kaprielian, already considered the most influential university administrator under President John R. Hubbard, will formally assume that role with his appointment as executive vice-president.
Kaprielian’s selection for the newly created post, which Hubbard announced Saturday at the annual faculty breakfast, still requires formal approval by the Board of Trustees at its Oct. 1 meeting. Kaprielian would assume the position immediately.
The naming of Kaprielian to the position was the first step in a proposed massive reorganization of university governance.
At the same time, Hubbard announced the formation of a search committee to fill another new office—that of university provost—which will be responsible for academic and student affairs.
The creation of the two positions was recommended last spring in a report by a President’s Advisory Council task force chaired by Jackson M. Cope, Bing professor of English.
The two new positions—and the elimination of several existing vice-presidencies-were the key proposals contained in the Cope task force report, which Hubbard said was aimed at organizing “a much leaner and simplified administration.”
Houston I. Flournoy, now dean of the Center for Public Affairs, served as a special assistant to the president during the summer to aid Hubbard in the formation of the reorganization plan.
Kaprielian’s new duties under the reorganization plan include the responsibility for “long-range academic planning and the overall administration of research and resource management,” Hubbard said.
Specifically, Hubbard listed areas under Kaprielian’s new office as contracts and grants, personnel, affirmative action, university information processes (computers) and international programs.
Daily |gp Trojan
University of Southern California
Volume LXVII, No. 5	Los Angeles, California Tuesday, September 23, 1975
Hubbard stresses university’s importance in a ‘global village’
The university’s role in a “global village”—and its continued responsibility to promote international education—were emphasized by President John R. Hubbard in an address Saturday at the annual faculty breakfast.
At the same time, Hubbard cited another effort—the establishment of a Nixon library at the university—as “the most important development at USC in recent times.”
As at last year’s breakfast, the problems confronting private higher education in general and the university in particular were the focal points of the president’s speech.
“Very few of our sister institutions have adapted as well as we to the new realities of contemporary existence,” Hubbard said. “The lean years came so suddenly on the heels of the long expansionist boom years that preceded them—and very few possess the broad potential and exciting range of possibilities for growth that confront us now.”
Among the realities that the university has had to confront in recent years is “our position within the larger society,” he said.
“As early as the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan and others were prophesying the arrival of the global village,” Hubbard said.
“As a leading university in one of the world’s post-industrial nations, it is becoming clear that our educational responsibilities increasingly extend far beyond our national boundaries.”
But in recruiting foreign students, he said, USC must avoid what he called the “bandwagon-ing” approach of other universities—“recruiting warm bodies who can pay, upon which they will eventually and in inflationary fashion confer a currently much-prized American degree.”
Instead, Hubbard declared, the university must continue its tradition—a tradition he compared to Yale’s—of avoiding this approach.
In order to discharge “our supranational responsibilities as a leading university in a post-industrial nation,” Hubbard said, USC will consider during the coming year the foundation of a multidisciplinary international graduate center.
“Such a center, which would dramatically increase the number of graduate students on campus, is not something which can be established without careful consideration and planning,” he said.
“But it is conceivably a significant part of our future... (as is) a series of projects by which this university might enlarge dramatically its established role as a provider of educational and research services to foreign governments.”
Earlier in his speech, Hubbard listed the university’s acquisition of the personal materials of former President Richard M. Nixon as consistent with “our responsibility to the global community of scholars of which we are a part.
“We are advancing painstakingly on the assumption that all materials pertaining to Mr. Nixon’s long public career will ultimately be available to the university,” he said.
“The availability of these materials—books, tapes, films, photographs, notes, etc.—is vitally important to world scholarship,” he said. “The controversy that surrounds the events of the Nixon presidency makes their eventual study of particular significance to all of us.”
Hubbard admited he and many “USC loyalists” had expressed concern about the university’s role in establishing the Nixon library. But university officials were convinced by USC’s “apolitical essence” to pursue the plans, he said.
“This university aims above all to be a community of scholars,” he said. “As an entity it takes no political stance and thus it must neither endorse or condemn the acts, actions and activities of public figures. In pressing ahead with these plans, therefore, we are fulfilling our traditional role of promoting and facilitating scholarship.”
The other major achievements at the university within the past academic year cited by Hubbard included:
•	The appointments of Edward Bassett, director of the School of Journalism; Houston I. Flournoy, dean of the Center for Public Affairs; Paul Hadley, interim academic vice-president: A. Quincy Jones, dean of architecture; Richard Oliver, dean of dentistry; Jack Steele, dean of
business; Harvey Stedman, interim dean of the College of Con-tinuing Education, and Don Walsh, director ofthe Center for the Study of Marine Science.
•	The beginning of the Century
II	fund-raising effort, with a goal of raising about $250 million by the university’s 100th anniversary in 1981.
•	Revenues from gifts, contracts and grants that totalled $56 million—including more than $19 million from private sources and $30 million in sponsored research monies.
•	Several new campus buildings that have been opened or approach completion, including facilities for library science, pharmacy, the Annenberg School of Communications, continuing education, computer science and the Performing Arts Complex.
“Some of the erstwhile pacesetters among our institutions are being forced to cut back their activities and abdicate their leadership roles,” Hubbard said in closing.
“With the leadership vacuum becoming discernible, this moment in time has brought our golden opportunity to capitalize on our strengths and take up our earned position as one of the world’s greatest universities.”
The executive vice-president will also be responsible for student administrative services—financial aid, registration and admissions.
Most of these areas are now under Kaprielian’s management as vice-president for academic administration and research, a post he has held since October 1970—just two months after Hubbard was chosen to succeed Norman Topping as president.
Kaprielian, 52, has also been dean of the School of Engineering since February 1970,13years after coming to the university as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
In April 1972, he was given authority over the university budget and his designation was changed from vice-president for academic planning and research to his present title.
Since that time, he has emerged as the top-ranking university vice-president, functioning as president in Hubbard’s absence and serving, Hubbard said, as the president’s chief administrative adviser.
“Fortunate indeed...is that president who had the secure advantage of a brilliant and trusted friend and adviser at his side,” Hubbard said of Kaprielian Saturday.
“I have been among the fortunate, for from the early days of my presidency, Zohrab Kaprielian has shared with me the trials, the anxieties and the tribulations of contemporary educational leadership.”
The search committee for the new provost will hold its first meeting Sept. 30, Hubbard said. (A Hubbard aide said later that the search committee is now in the formation process.)
“I am seeking a person of unquestioned intellectual quality and accomplishment and so rec-
ognized throughout the scholarly community,” Hubbard said. “Obviously, a mere visionary will not do and just as obviously, an incumbent deluged in a ritual of paper shuffling will fail miserably.
“I cannot at this time delineate a chart of function and organization. It would be presumptuous of me to do so, for if we find the person we are seek-
ZOHRAB A. KAPRIELIAN
ing, he will most surely demand that his input in this regard be considered.”
Hubbard himself was the last person to serve as a provost of the university. He was named to the post when he came to USC in 1969 and the position was eliminated when he became president a year later.
But the newly constituted provost’s office will have a much broader scope than it did when Hubbard served in that capacity.
The provost may assume duties now performed by a number of vice-presidents. Although Hubbard has not formally announced the elimination of the existing offices, his description of the functions of the provost seems to make such a move a possibility.
The provost will be responsi-
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Electric alternative to gun to be demonstrated today
A new weapon, advertised as the first alternative to the gun, will be demonstrated at noon today in Bovard Auditorium.
The weapon, called the Taser Public Defender, is a nonballis-tic device that utilizes darts charged with 50,000 volts of electricity to immobilize its victims.
The makers of the Taser, Taser Systems, Inc., say the major difference between it and a gun is that the Taser merely immobilizes an individual and does not cause permanent damage.
The Taser resembles a flashlight and draws its power from
two batteries in the unit It must be fired from within 18 feet of the target and the darts can penetrate 1%-inches of clothing.
The electrical charge emitted by the device causes an individual’s muscles to involuntarily contract
The victim becomes helpless within three seconds. The effects of the Taser usually last for several minutes.
Although the results of a Taser charge are said to be less dangerous than a gunshot wound, the makers of the device warn that it should be regarded as a dangerous weapon.
WHAT A COMBINATION—Debbi Jamin, a sophomore in business administration, enjoys one of the nicest combinations that this area has to offer—the first
SoCal of the semester and the warm Southern California sun.