News - Carnegie Mellon University: Following the announcement of a historic $3 billion investment in Carnegie Mellon University from Citadel founder and CEO and founder of Griffin Catalyst Ken Griffin — the largest individual gift in the history of higher education, and which includes a new CMU campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood — members of the Carnegie Mellon community were invited to join CMU President Farnam Jahanian and Griffin for a fireside chat.
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Yea I knew this was going to be one of the posts on David's blog, and I'm surprised not many people have shared their thoughts on this milestone. Three billion dollars is SO much money, and I am excited that Carnegie Mellon is improving their already world-class computer science program. Having a campus in Miami is obviously a benefit to Ken Griffin, who resides in Miami and wants to make the city a tech hub similar to Pittsburgh. But three billion dollars is SO much money.
I wonder how the Pittsburgh campus will use their 1 billion dollar portion of the gift (which is also SO much money). I know many students have expressed their frustration that the money isn't be used to benefit what they think is important. Maybe one day we'll have a 5 billion dollar donation to the School of Drama and the rest of the university can be mad at the donor for not sharing it with them.
Three billion dollars is one of those sums of money that I really can’t even fathom. It is hard to wrap my head around just how much money that is, and it is crazy that one guy is basically single-handedly planning to pay the cost of building a new college campus. I am very curious about the future of this Miami campus and what the relationship between the Miami and Pittsburgh campuses will be. Will it be similar to the Silicon Valley campus, which is a very specialized research and graduate studies-focused campus, or will it be a fully operational “traditional” campus with undergrad and graduate programs focused on a variety of studies? I am also very interested in how the choice of how to use the $500 million for the general Pittsburgh campus will be used. Obviously, there’s been “surveys” sent out asking for the communities input, but I am curious about what transulency there will be in the process in order to make it clear how the decisions of how to spend that money are being made.
I am very very conflicted about how I feel about this donation to the school. I think that it is a positive thing that people are getting more access to educational and that CMU is spreading it’s influence out to other places like Miami. However, I am super interested in the discussions that are going on above my head. I think there are a lot of different thing going on with this donation and the reasoning behind it. While I do think that there is sincerity in their quotes from the talk, that they want to further education and CMU’s rank as a university and research institution. I also think there are a lot of politics and ulterior motives that are going on behind closed doors. I would like to spend a day with the president or ken griffin to figure out what really is going on. I think that this would provide a lot of useful information and that I would be able to have a clearer picture of why this happened and what the intentions are for the new campus. I think that there is a lot of different things they could have done with that money to further what we already have, so opening a new campus must also have incentives that go along with it for both Ken Griffin and CMU as a whole.
I saw this article on last week’s News Page Mailer. I wanted to read it this week because I felt like I still did not fully understand the details of what Ken Griffin’s donation actually means to CMU. After reading this article, I honestly wish that Ken Griffin also visited the other colleges around campus and not just the Computer Science building. He made this donation to CMU because he was so impressed by the student work presented in the Gates-Hillman center. While our computer science school absolutely deserves this recognition, the other colleges of CMU also are producing work that are redefining their respective industries. CMU is so world-renown because of all our disciplines creating work that challenges standards and innovates their entire fields. While I am glad that he still considered the rest of the Pittsburgh campus when making his donation, I believe maybe he would have considered to specifically recognize the other award-winning disciplines CMU has to offer as well as the Computer Science school.
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