A billionaire hedge fund manager gifted Carnegie Mellon a higher-ed record $3 billion to fund its Pittsburgh campus and build a new campus in Miami.
Some $2 billion of the historic donation by Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, will seed Carnegie Mellon University Miami, which will be “organized around consequential challenges that demand expertise across disciplines,” the university said.
Education and research at the Miami campus will center on “four grand challenge areas”: human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.
“I believe that every institution of higher education has to take a step back and say, ‘What do we need to do to reignite both the belief and the realization of the possibility of the American dream?’” Griffin said in a statement posted by Carnegie Mellon.
Beginning in 2028, the university plans to enroll more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students at the Miami campus.
The remaining $1 billion of Griffin’s gift will be split evenly between the Carnegie Mellon’s highest priorities and its top-ranked School of Computer Science, now renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science, the university said.
Griffin’s donation tops the $1 billion Nike co-founder Phil Knight, and his wife, Penny, gave to create a school of engineering at the University of Oregon. The gift, announced earlier in September, was then hailed as “the largest gift ever given to a comprehensive public university.”
