Newsletter #17

Author

My15 atUSC
June 13, 2025

Hi Everyone,

Well if 2025 wasn’t already in the running for “The Worst Year Ever”, it certainly took some big strides in the past week! In addition to the sudden militarization of our city, followed by protests, this past Saturday my father-in-law passed away! He was in his 80s, but it was unexpected. He meant everything to my wife, our kids, and the family.

My wife and I already had tickets to Sunday night's "The Roots Picnic” at the Hollywood Bowl- coincidentally with my brother-in-law and his wife- so we decided to go, to celebrate him. We had a family tradition of going to the Bowl for the Playboy Jazz Festival, so we were glad we went.

Needless to say, it’s been a pretty rough week. I’m grateful that my boss, my team, my colleagues and work friends are all supportive. It’s allowed me to spend the week mostly disconnected, being with my family, and spending time with my wife. I say all of this just as a reminder that life is fleeting. Family, close friends, and our little communities are all we can really count on these days, and even those can be rocked in an instant. 

But these are the times we live in, and so we Fight On. For our families, for our friends, and for our little communities. In whatever ways we can.

This is one of those “little communities”. We are 332 strong.

Table of Contents

Newcomers

Before I drop in to the normal stuff, this past week has seen a nice little jump in subscribers. It’s almost exclusively due to a LinkedIn post that pointed out that USC has $23.5M in outstanding housing loans. As I’ve said previously, “because of course they do”.

Since our newcomers are the among the first group that didn’t sign my 7-page legal disclaimer- aka, the “Contact Consent Form”- just to get my newsletter, it’s appropriate to give our newcomers some quick background. 

  1. We are a single-issue group. This community was initially formed because of the cuts to the Tuition Assistance Benefit (TAB), and the goal is a full restoration of those benefits based on the terms we were hired under.

  2. I have absolutely no personal grudge towards anyone at the university. I just want back what was promised to all of us, and what we worked for.

  3.  A large majority (72.3%) of our first 270+ members are “grandfathered” (15+ year) employees. We’re mostly current (72.9%) and former (12.1%) staff.  

  4. My goal is to help share our (your) TAB stories, thoughts, and feelings. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to keep the discussion respectful, but direct. Most of our content will come from your survey responses.

  5. I am currently employed at USC. I enjoy what I do, and hope to keep it that way. Everything I do and say as part of the My15atUSC effort is done so as an individual, not as an official employee of USC.

So thanks for listening, and for being here! As a show of appreciation have some data, courtesy of those who came before.

Open Surveys (3), and Docs (1)

The absolute best and most helpful way to contribute is through our surveys and open docs. I know it’s a lot, but you don’t have to do it all at once. You can come back a few different times, and give just me 5 minutes here and there.

Here’s what’s currently open:

Culture Values - Alignment Survey (Last Last Call) - I’m leaving this open for another week or so, mostly for our newest members. It’s a quick 5-minute survey with questions mirroring the recent culture survey. I want you to let me know how leadership is doing. I’ll compare our community’s answers to the report published in 2024, before the fences went up. Spoiler alert, people feel worse. But don’t let me tell you, you tell me instead.

Leads Survey (Staying Open) - This survey really took off. From zero to one! Thank you to the brave soul who signed up to be one of our new leads! 😉 This person was already a gem in my mind, but this just solidified it. They're going to be a “Thought Partner”, and I absolutely love that idea. And the jokes on you, because I’m gonna buy them coffee…

Seriously though, I’m looking for anyone willing to help, in any capacity. We’re going to relaunch our Instagram efforts, so design is one area. Website content/ideation/building is another. If you’re interested in doing anything, complete the survey and tell me what. You’ll see why I need your help in an Easter Egg later on…

Storytelling Survey (Re-Opened) - Hopefully some of our new members can help here. We have 13 responses. Sign up if you have an interesting TAB story. You don’t need to write it out on this survey, just looking for folks to express some interest.

Feelings v2.0 (Open Doc) - Our feelings doc stays open indefinitely. Feel free to add your free-form comments there.

Community Data (Public)

For those that are interested, there is a public-facing My15atUSC Google Drive folder that has some past survey responses, among other things. I’ll keep adding content there, both from the past efforts, and as we close out new surveys.

Separately, and worth a huge shout-out, one of our community members, Craig Stubing, has put together an extensive data compilation based on the 990’s. His graphs are what generated the engagement on LinkedIn. The larger data-sets are now posted here:

I'm trying to find ways to use this data to make connections between the poor financial choices USC is making, and pointing out that TAB is just a fraction of each one of them. This was the reason for my most recent LinkedIn post. I think it’s easily understood that if USC can afford to hand out “Housing Loans”, our kid’s TAB should be honored.

While I know I can do the same with salaries, I think the argument becomes less effective. USC’s will cite justifications like “we were contractually obligated”, or “we needed to recruit the best”. Also, if they were to cut salaries, that would mean more layoffs and re-orgs. We will be the ones (again) shouldering the burden, and it won't come with TAB being given back.

Regardless of viewpoints, I’m very appreciative of this type of deep data work. I hope you’ll take the time to click around and share back what you find.

Inspired Efforts

I was really bummed when I realized I incorrectly linked this during the last Newsletter. Howard A. Rodman remarks on accepting the Walter Wolf Award was something that was both inspiring and motivating for me. Here’s just one of a handful of powerful quotes: “We have internalized the notion that small concessions at the very margins are the best that we can hope for. We have internalized the notion that by playing nice, they might ‘listen’ to us.”

I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

Discord

We’ve just started the discussion in the My15atUSC Discord server. As a reminder, I’ll need to verify who folks are upon joining in order to give them access to different channels. This is just so the community has a sense of “who can see what”.

I realize this Newsletter is another “link overload” situation. So one more won’t hurt. As you can see (if you clicked on it), I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m learning while playing inside the sandbox, and having a little fun making a mess. Eventually, I’ll figure it out, and we can move out of the sandbox and into our nice shiny URL.

Please continue to keep in touch, through the surveys, via email, on social media, or in person. Thanks for reading through it all.

Take care, talk soon.

Phil