I’m a CMU SCS alum (actually I predate SCS being a full school). Please, someone make me feel better about this. They’re renaming the school after this person.
CEO of Citadel Capital. He's one of the people featured in 'The Quants
How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It', Scott Patterson.
Sure. It's $3B for your school. Who gives a shit what names the buildings have on them. I'll never understand you whiners.
$2B for new Miami campus (could have been in NYC, but well ...)
$1B - split w $500M for CS Dept - for Pittsburg campus
"CMU Miami will invert the traditional higher education model by organizing learning and inquiry around societal challenges rather than academic majors. It will be entirely designed and built — from first blueprints to final beam — to drive revolutionary breakthroughs that address society’s defining challenges."
$3 billion dollars from a weirdo that fled to Florida because he was too cheap to pay his taxes, establishing a school to train more weirdos like him, a thousand miles from the actual school and presumably with different curricula/professors/degrees sounds like he's just buying CMU's name for legitimacy on his experimental anti-education project.
IIRC Carnegie was the original archetype of the rapacious union-busting wage-suppressing monopolistic billionaire robber baron, and Mellon was all that plus a corrupt self-dealing all-but-impeached laissez-faire Treasury-secretary-cum-megabanker whose deflationary and protectionist response to the Wall Street Crash caused unemployment and destitution on a historic scale.
But yeah this Griffin guy could give the place a bad name. (Full disclosure, I did a postdoc at the SCS.)
Andrew Carnegie no longer has power or influence, so it doesn't matter. Griffin has both, and the school enhances it and becomes a vehicle for it. Will the Miami campus be free to violate Griffin's beliefs? Are 'woke' educational programs allowed?
You went to a school who's founder was a robber baron (Carnegie) and who's other founder (Mellon) causes the Great Depression and whose family funded Trump 2.
Alternatively, be happy CMU has more capital to continue to build programs.
In my experience students will just keep using the old name (sometimes even the name before the old name) in perpetuity. With regard to the new campus, satellite campuses never carry the prestige of the mothership, for schools or companies.
I don't know why you still care about this several decades after graduating. Do you not have an identity outside of graduating from the previously-unsponsored "School of Computer Science"? (By the way, the entire school was funded by and named after another extremely wealthy businessman, but seemingly you don't have many qualms with that).
They're not "renaming" it -- they're "naming" it, right? The School of Computer Science is not currently named for anyone, and his $1B puts his name on the school. It's not like they're changing CMU to KGU.
Do names really matter? Half of all Canadian universities has a building or a faculty named after "Schulich". Most people do not know who that person is.
New tech leaders is the last thing we need. What is this emphasis on leadership anyway? Are they building a NAPOLA in Florida because Pittsburgh is too woke?
Reminds me of the Paul Graham essay on Silicon Valley. Looks like Ken decided the easiest thing was to partially move Carnegie Mellon.
"Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds like."
"However, merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.
To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university. It has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate."
Academic and intellectual freedom would seem to be major questions given the size of the gift and the location:
And are they academically and intellectually free from Griffin? Can CMU itself or their Florida school do things and have programs that violate Griffin's beliefs?
And I wonder how CMU intends to handle the limits to academic freedom and other l freedoms in Florida. Maybe being a private university will insulate them? At the heart of this issue: Why is it important to Griffin to put the school in Miami, FL? There are obvious political possibilities.
Freedom isn't incidental; it's the core of what America is and it drives unprecedented innovation and prosperity, among other things.
Also, as someone else posted: How much is this a CMU campus, and how much a Griffin campus for which he paid to use the CMU name?
People giving you money often want something in return. If the something is unstated, be very suspicious. For $3B you could be giving them something priceless - your reputation, independence, or merely your soul. Big numbers tend to blind people; the bigger the number the more wary you should be.
The most fundamental negotiating advice is that you should always be willing and able to walk away from the deal. 'No' is always an option.
Well if you gave three billion dollars to a normal school it would turn into a prestigious university (think Michael Bloomberg donating billions to Hopkins to turn it from a decent second rate university to a world class university).
That said they're building a new campus so they'll be able to admit more students.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 7.7 ms ] threadHis son was even better.
Wait, I guess this is someone else?
$2B for new Miami campus (could have been in NYC, but well ...) $1B - split w $500M for CS Dept - for Pittsburg campus
"CMU Miami will invert the traditional higher education model by organizing learning and inquiry around societal challenges rather than academic majors. It will be entirely designed and built — from first blueprints to final beam — to drive revolutionary breakthroughs that address society’s defining challenges."
But yeah this Griffin guy could give the place a bad name. (Full disclosure, I did a postdoc at the SCS.)
Their contemporary equivalents seem to be interested in speedrunning a revolution that ends badly for everyone.
Musk's narcissism is unsurpassed in that he forsees a legacy that excludes the entire human race, except for those aboard his space expedition.
But Bill Gates has something of the Carnegie trajectory about him. I think there is actually a Gates building at CMU.
You went to a school who's founder was a robber baron (Carnegie) and who's other founder (Mellon) causes the Great Depression and whose family funded Trump 2.
Alternatively, be happy CMU has more capital to continue to build programs.
Renaming after this guy?
Miami?!
thats a good thing.
"Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds like."
"However, merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.
To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university. It has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate."
And are they academically and intellectually free from Griffin? Can CMU itself or their Florida school do things and have programs that violate Griffin's beliefs?
And I wonder how CMU intends to handle the limits to academic freedom and other l freedoms in Florida. Maybe being a private university will insulate them? At the heart of this issue: Why is it important to Griffin to put the school in Miami, FL? There are obvious political possibilities.
Freedom isn't incidental; it's the core of what America is and it drives unprecedented innovation and prosperity, among other things.
Also, as someone else posted: How much is this a CMU campus, and how much a Griffin campus for which he paid to use the CMU name?
People giving you money often want something in return. If the something is unstated, be very suspicious. For $3B you could be giving them something priceless - your reputation, independence, or merely your soul. Big numbers tend to blind people; the bigger the number the more wary you should be.
The most fundamental negotiating advice is that you should always be willing and able to walk away from the deal. 'No' is always an option.
That said they're building a new campus so they'll be able to admit more students.