Carnegie Mellon University will build a new campus in Miami centered on solving society’s greatest challenges, funded by a historic $3 billion gift from entrepreneur Ken Griffin.
The donation, believed to be the largest ever from an individual to a university, comes at a time when higher education has been under attack on many fronts. But private donors have made some prominent gifts recently, including $1 billion from Phil and Penny Knight to the University of Oregon last week.
This gift is a big swing from one of the country’s most influential business leaders and philanthropists.
“This is one of the largest investments that will be made in the history of American higher education,” said Griffin, the founder and chief executive officer of the hedge fund Citadel and the founder of Citadel Securities and Griffin Catalyst, who will join the university’s board of trustees. He said his support is focused on a belief in excellence that should be a beacon for other schools. “This is a moment in American history when all of American universities need to step their game up.”
Griffin said the gift is being made to Carnegie Mellon because of the school’s leadership in computer science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics and other areas, and its leaders’ willingness to take risks to advance the interests of the school and the nation.
“In a world where people are debating the value of higher education, this is a school where the students have an incredible return on investment on their education,” Griffin said.
The new campus, Carnegie Mellon University Miami, will be organized around societal challenges rather than traditional academic majors, with the hope of spurring breakthroughs by interdisciplinary teams that could include industry and government leaders as well as students and researchers. Plans call for it to be built on more than 35 acres in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood and open in 2028 with 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students.
Scholars there could explore areas such as human health and biological discovery, national security and strategic capabilities, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation, according to university officials.
As technology catapults forward, the hope is that the university will be preparing future leaders for a fast-changing world and accelerating research.
“Throughout CMU’s history, we’ve made bold bets at moments of profound change,” Farnam Jahanian, the university’s president, said. “And we believe that this is an extraordinary opportunity to build on that history and CMU’s existing strengths.”
Rapid advances in AI and other technologies are transforming every sector of our economy, he said, changing the way people work, learn and communicate, and accelerating the pace of discovery in almost every field. Global competition is intensifying in many of the industries and markets that will define economic prosperity and national security for decades to come, he said.
Jahanian said the urgency at the moment could not be higher.
In medicine, AI is enabling far earlier diagnosis, and collaboration from computer scientists, biologists, engineers and others will advance treatment plans and advances, he said.
“Higher education is at an inflection point because we have a responsibility to prepare the next generation of students for this changing world,” Jahanian said, “and give them the tools to ask bold questions, exercise sound judgment, work across disciplines, and understand human consequence of the technologies that they invent and they use.”
In 2022, Griffin’s hedge fund, Citadel, announced it was moving its global headquarters to Miami.
Griffin, when asked about the location, said Miami is the nexus of this hemisphere and a great American city of hardworking immigrants who value education and hard work. He said he hoped that Miami would be impacted by Carnegie Mellon as Pittsburgh has been, drawing leading software, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence companies.
For Carnegie Mellon, the Miami expansion is more than a new campus, Lip-Bu Tan, chief executive officer of Intel and a member of the Carnegie Mellon board of trustees, said in a written statement. “It is the opportunity to bring students, faculty, researchers and industry leaders together around real problems.”
Of the $3 billion gift, $2 billion will go to the new campus. The other $1 billion will go to the existing campus in Pittsburgh for a $500 million fund for the school’s highest priorities, and $500 million for a signature school that will be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. The priorities will include recruiting top talent and supporting financial aid for students.
Griffin has been a generous donor to schools including Harvard University, where he is an alumnus, and the University of Chicago, as well as political funds supporting Republican candidates.
Carnegie Mellon is known for its work in advanced computing, engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence, but also for its focus on humanities, particularly drama, and interdisciplinary research.
Before this donation, the largest known gift to a college came in 2018 when former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg gave $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to support student financial aid.
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