C. L. Max Nikias

In May 2018, 200 tenured USC professors (out of 4,604 university faculty) demanded Nikias's resignation for how his administration dealt with nearly 300 incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct allegations over 27 years against a longtime student health center gynecologist, George Tyndall. He and the board of trustees agreed to an orderly transition to a new president on May 25, 2018, and he stepped down on August 7, 2018. Following this, Nikias was named president emeritus and a life trustee of the university. The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Right's independent investigation concluded with a report published in February 2020 and did not implicate Nikias in any wrongdoing. The report stated that Nikias had no knowledge of "the possibility of physical misconduct" by the student health center gynecologist. As soon as Nikias was made aware of the gynecologist situation, the report stated that "he had identified the matter to be of such significance that he directed the general council to brief the University's Board of Trustees" in March of 2018; and on May 15, 2018, he informed all USC students and alumni worldwide about the matter in advance of the Los Angeles Times article.

In May 2018, Nikias and the USC board of trustees agreed to an orderly transition to a new president, following a sex abuse scandal regarding USC's student health center's gynecologist and questions about how the university handled it.

After Nikias stepped down in August 2018, Rick Caruso, chair of the USC board of trustees, said: "As he has always done, Max is taking this action in what he believes to be in the best interest of the university following controversies that have arisen from the unfortunate and unacceptable acts of others. From our investigations, which are not yet completed, we have found absolutely no wrong doing on Max's part."

In February 2020, following its independent investigation, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights published its report. It did not implicate Nikias in any wrongdoing. The report stated that Nikias had no knowledge of "the possibility of physical misconduct" by the student health center gynecologist. As soon as Nikias was made aware of the gynecologist situation, the report stated that he had identified the matter "to be of such significance that he directed the general counsel to brief the university's Board of Trustees" in March of 2018; and on May 15, 2018, he informed all USC students and alumni worldwide about the matter in advance of the Los Angeles Times article.

Nikias brought the nation's largest literary festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, to USC. In addition, under his leadership, the university embarked on a major capital construction initiative that already includes Wallis Annenberg Hall for journalism, the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, Dauterive Hall for social sciences, Fertitta Hall for business, the Kaufman International Dance Center, the McKay Center for athletics, Uytengsu Aquatics Center, the Engemann Student Health Center, a new Cinematic Arts building, and the University Club at Stoops, as well as the Soto Building, Currie Residential Hall, and Norris Consultation Center on the Health Sciences Campus, and beautification projects for both of USC's campuses. The most prominent project, though, is the USC Village, a 1.3 million square-foot center of student residential colleges, that opened in 2017, entirely reimagining the university's landscape.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Nikias played "a central role in university's meteoric rise in academic stature." In 2016, The Wall Street Journal/ Times Higher Education's rankings placed USC at No. 17 among 1,061 colleges and universities. Only three universities west of Chicago ranked in the top 20: USC, Stanford, and Caltech.

As president, Nikias wrote frequently about a range of nationally significant topics, including the value of—and access to—higher education; the future of online education; the continued importance of the arts and humanities; the art of leadership through the classics; and the role of elite research universities, particularly as economic drivers.

In 2011, Nikias announced a $6 billion fundraising campaign, which—at the time of its launch—was the largest in the history of higher education. In six and a half years, USC's campaign surpassed the $6 billion mark—18 months ahead of schedule—bringing to the university, on the average, $900 million per year. The fundraising campaign raised a total of $7 billion in eight years. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called Nikias a "prodigious fundraiser." During Nikias' tenure, USC consistently ranked among the top five universities, along with Stanford and Harvard, in cash charitable donations.

From June 2005 to August 2010, Nikias served as USC's provost and chief academic officer. He was instrumental in bringing USC trustee Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation Institute and its vast video archive of 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors to USC. Nikias also established the university's Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging, Stevens Center for Innovation, U.S.-China Institute, and Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. He launched Visions and Voices, USC's campus-wide arts and humanities initiative, as well as a grant program to advance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Nikias spearheaded the integration of the Keck School of Medicine of USC's faculty practice plans, oversaw the transfer of University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital from Tenet Healthcare Corporation to the university, and recruited a new leadership team for USC's medical enterprise.

From 2001 to 2005, Nikias served as dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, solidifying its position as a top-tier engineering school. He directed the expansion of the school's biomedical engineering enterprise and developed its distance-learning program into one of the largest in the country at that time. He oversaw the development of the school's Tutor Hall of Engineering. He also established key partnerships with corporations, among them Pratt & Whitney, Airbus, Boeing, Chevron, and Northrop Grumman, and led a fundraising campaign that brought in more than $250 million, capped by a $52 million school-naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi. Nikias was instrumental in supporting the Information Sciences Institute in the USC Viterbi School, and in working with faculty across the university to establish two National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC), as well as the Department of Homeland Security's first Research Center of Excellence at USC.

Nikias served as founding director of the school's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) from 1996 to 2001. He led the engineering school's effort to secure the center in an intense national competition conducted by the National Science Foundation that included 116 other proposals. Nikias also served as associate dean of the engineering school from 1992 to 2001. While his research work ranged from signal processing and biomedical engineering to digital communications and military radar and sonar, he is best known for his understanding of multimedia's defining place in the future of the internet and the IMSC.

Nikias is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, an associate member of the Academy of Athens, a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1991 when he was 38. Fewer than 2 percent of IEEE's 350,000 members have been named Fellow, and only 5 percent of those achieved that honor by age 38.

Nikias was born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. There, he graduated with honors from the Famagusta Gymnasium, a school that emphasizes sciences, history, and Greco-Roman classics. He married his wife, Niki, in 1977, and the couple have two daughters, Georgiana and Maria. He received a degree in electrical and mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1977, and has an academic interest in Athenian drama and democracy. Nikias earned a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D in 1982 in electrical engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His predecessor as USC president, Steven Sample, was likewise an electrical engineer, and served as president of SUNY-Buffalo from 1982 to 1991.

Chrysostomos Loizos "Max" Nikias (Greek: Χρυσόστομος Λοΐζος Νικίας ; born September 30, 1952) is a Cypriot-American academic, and served as the 11th University of Southern California president, a position he held from August 3, 2010, to August 7, 2018. He holds the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities and is president emeritus of the university. He had been at USC since 1991, as a professor, director of national research centers, dean, provost, and president. He also served as chair of the College Football Playoff (CFP) Board of Managers (2015-2018) as chair of the board of the Keck Medical Center at USC (2009-2018), as member of the board of directors of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering (2001-2018), and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Chadwick School, an independent school in Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif. (2001-2010). He is currently a tenured professor in electrical engineering with a secondary appointment in classics, and the director of the USC Institute for Technology Enabled Higher Education.