USC president Steven B. Sample and Annenberg Foundation vice president Wallis Annenberg (pictured, below right, with Dean Cowan and his wife Aileen Adams) presented Dean Cowan with a personalized chair to symbolize the Annenberg Family Chair, which was made possible by a major gift from the Annenberg Foundation. Sample also announced Cowan's appointment as a University Professor, one of the highest honors for a USC faculty member.
After more than a decade leading the USC Annenberg School, Dean Cowan will retire as dean on June 30. He will take a year-long sabbatical and return to USC Annenberg as the director of the Center on Communication Leadership.
Sample cited many accomplishments the School achieved under Cowan's leadership, including both the enrollment and faculty doubling in 
"During his tenure, Dean Cowan has enhanced every aspect of this school, strengthening its reputation for academic excellence, pioneering new academic programs, and recruiting some of the world's top scholars, distinguished professionals and exceptional students," Sample said.
Wallis Annenberg said she knows Dean Cowan will continue to advance the understanding and practice of communication as a force for public good.
"Geoff Cowan's boundless energy, his inclusiveness, his belief in the power of communication and in the ways this school can harness it, have earned him the gratitude and admiration of the Annenberg family and the entire USC community," she said.
Journalism professor Joe Saltzman said Dean Cowan has brought the Annenberg School together in hundreds of ways.
"Geoff made a difference in many USC Annenberg lives, including mine," Saltzman said. "Through long hours and hard work, through humor and good spirits, with charisma and enthusiasm, working closely with staff, faculty and administrators, the Provost and the President and the Annenberg Family, he has turned USC Annenberg into an international force."
A focus of the event was on students, including remarks delivered by communication major John Collins, Ph.D. candidate Amelia Arsenault and former student and current adjunct professor Sophia Wachholtz.
"I felt like he was somebody that I could turn to if I had a problem, issue, needed a kind ear to listen, or just wanted to have a conversation," said Collins, a freshman from Greenwich, Conn. who took Dean Cowan's Journalism 190 class in fall 2006. "He made a big place feel a whole lot smaller. Instead of a sprawling campus with thousands of students, he made USC feel more like "Cheers: where everybody knows your name."
