Hedge fund CEO gives $3bn to Carnegie Mellon University in historic donation

Carnegie Mellon University will receive an unprecedented $3bn donation from the billionaire investor Ken Griffin, making it the largest single donation in the history of US education .

Griffin, 57, is the founder and CEO of Citadel, described as the most profitable hedge fund in history. The money is going toward a new Miami campus as well as big investments at the university’s longtime home in Pittsburgh.

Part of the funding will be used to develop Carnegie Mellon’s presence in Miami, Florida , where Griffin lives and where Citadel is now headquartered. The rest will support priorities in Pittsburgh, including recruiting prominent academics and making attendance more affordable for students.

The Miami campus will support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and PhD students, nearly 300 faculty and more than 600 staff members, with construction slated to begin in 2027.

$1bn will go toward Carnegie Mellon’s computer science school and other priorities, including financial aid, Griffin and the university president, Farnam Jahanian, said. The school will be renamed the Kenneth C Griffin School of Computer Science.

“Throughout our history, CMU has anticipated moments of profound technological change and responded with new ways of thinking and solving problems,” Jahanian said in a statement. “Artificial intelligence represents one of the defining intellectual developments of our time, and it demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research and partner with others.”

Founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Carnegie Mellon is particularly known for computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics and the performing arts. Its School of Computer Science is ranked as the top undergraduate computer science program in the US.

The planned Miami campus will take a different approach from the traditional academic-major model. According to the university, education there will instead be structured around “societal challenges”.

The campus will concentrate on “challenge areas spanning human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation”.

The expansion also reflects Griffin’s continuing investment in Miami and south Florida. Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, and Griffin has since increased his commitments to the region to about $2.4bn, according to Reuters. Those contributions include support for a Miami charter school network, the University of Miami, Miami Dade College, public schools and math tutoring.

Griffin, whose net worth Forbes estimated at about $58bn, will also become a member of Carnegie Mellon’s board of trustees. The board already includes hedge fund billionaire David Tepper, a Carnegie Mellon graduate and donor.

The announcement comes one week after Nike co-founder Phil Knight donated $1bn to establish an engineering college at the University of Oregon.

Universities are increasingly seeking wealthy donors to expand science and tech programs as artificial intelligence drives economic changes.

These large donations have generated concerns about how much influence the wealthy class has over higher education.

Griffin has publicly criticized the use of political power for personal enrichment, emerging as one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump and his administration on Wall Street. Earlier this year, he condemned how the president’s family appear to have made financial gain from their proximity to the White House.

Copyright for this text belongs to The Guardian.