Citadel’s Griffin Gives $3 Billion to CMU for Miami Campus

Thank you so much, and I wanna welcome everyone from Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio. I am here in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University with Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, along with the president of CMU, Farnam Jahanian, who joins us here after this record $3,000,000,000 donation investment in CMU. Ken, I wanna start with you. How did you choose CMU, and why did you decide to make your biggest ever investment, doubling your total investments in terms of a gift in CMU. So you picked the right choice of words. This is an investment in excellence. Carnegie Mellon University leads the nation in computer science, in artificial intelligence, in cybersecurity, world renowned program robotics. This is a university that represents the future of our country, and it is a privilege to support the incredible momentum here at Carnegie Mellon University, the team here at Carnegie Carnegie in Carnegie Mellon, and the unbelievable faculty and students. President Jahanian, in the press release, you talk about this new campus that you're creating in Miami. A significant part of this $3,000,000,000 is gonna go there as a pioneering a new model for higher education. What does that look like? What is this going to be? Well, first of all, it's good to be with you. You know, CMU, when you think about our history, Carnegie Mellon was founded by Andrew Carnegie in early nineteen hundreds to serve sons and daughters of the working class, and this has been in our DNA all along. Whenever there are massive societal and technological changes, CMU steps up. We make big bold bets, and this is one of those. I think given the changes that we see in technology, advances we see in AI, there's no question that every sector of our economy is being transformed. Transformed. There's no question that scientific discovery is being accelerated. As a result of that, our national security, our economic competitiveness depends on how we educate the next generation, how we prepare them, and so how we accelerate discovery and impact that we have. So, Ken, you know, everyone has a story about knowing someone whose kid just graduated from college, spent $500,000, maybe liberal arts, maybe even something more concrete, can't get a job, has to pay back this debt, doesn't know how. Where are we going wrong? Right? What kinds of skills are not being taught currently at the university as a major employer that you see? Well, let me first talk about where things are going right. US News will report updated their ranking system to include how are students doing several years post graduation. And that ranking placed Carnegie Mellon University number three in the country on return on investment on the college education, propelling CMU to number 14 overall in The United States as one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in our country. We need to learn from our success stories and play to our success stories rather than whine about the universities that aren't delivering value for their students. My investment here, as I said earlier, is an investment in excellence. To me, excellence is creating the students that will lead our country in the future. They'll solve our important problems. They will build big things, and they will do so with urgency. And if you look at the economic prospects of the students who graduate from CMU, they are outstanding. This is what a university should deliver. And I hope that this gift catalyzes discussions across the country in the boards of trustees and in the c suites of colleges and universities to focus on what best practices do we need to bring into our four walls that we see at a Carnegie Mellon, that we see at an MIT, that we see at a Stanford, that will drive the success our students and the prosperity of our country. So let me build on that. Go ahead. You asked earlier what this new model for education is gonna look like. We're not thinking in the terms of departments, colleges, and schools. We're really thinking about grand challenges, big societal issues, opportunities as Ken likes to call them, like human health and national security, cybersecurity, innovation, energy, and climate resiliency. Organizing the campus around those, bringing our learning and research to bear, not in the context of disciplinary silos, but bringing people together to address these grand challenges. This is really the vision for the future. And when you ask about what do we teach our students, we need to teach them foundation. There's no question. But we also need to teach them inherent human skills, critical thinking, problem solving. These students are gonna go out there and change the world. They need to be able to essentially not only have knowledge and skills that are technical and scientific, but also the human skills that are gonna serve them well as we shape the future. And I think if you look out the window here at Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial success stories of America. The renaissance of Pittsburgh is being created here at Carnegie Mellon University. There's a 100 different robotics companies here in Pittsburgh, leading the way for the reindustrialization of The United States Of America. And that's being driven by the students and faculty and resources of Carnegie Mellon University. So this is your biggest gift ever, $3,000,000,000. It's a massive sum. It breaks all records when it comes to a single gift to a single institution. You're focused also on building out the Miami the Miami branch, and you're talking about your efforts to try to create Miami as a world class city with pipeline of talent. Is this gonna be your focus? I mean, is there more to come with this, or is it really CMU that you're putting your kind of focus on to try to see what kind of results you can get? I'd like to think that I have decades ahead of me to explore that question more fully, but this gift, the magnitude of this gift represents the magnitude of the aspiration. I truly believe that just as Carnegie Mellon University is transforming Pittsburgh, a renaissance for the 20 century, that CMU Miami will transform Miami, bringing to Miami hundreds of technology companies, startups, career opportunities, and futures that impact both the people of Miami and the greater prosperity of our nation. I just wonder if this means that in going forward, the new model of education needs to be something a little bit more technically driven with respect to skills that are applicable in the real world, whether it's sort of the the classic concept of the Ivy League kind of rounded human doesn't have a place for $500,000 or $400,000 in the world that we live in today. We need round well rounded human more than ever before. Think about advances in technology. Think about the impact that on society. We need to train engineers and scientists who understand the implications of those advances, the implication of that on society, on communities, and be able to navigate it. So in fact, I think not only we need to give them technical knowledge, scientific knowledge, we also need to give them, as I mentioned, problem solving skills, communication skills, ethical applications of the technologies that they develop. All of that goes into it. And this is in fact part of the reason when we talk about these grand societal challenge areas. We wanna bring interdisciplinary group of people to work together, and this is really wave of the future. Ken, you had some pretty I I actually think that point is really important. I had the benefit of a liberal arts degree and a strong background in computer science. It's been defining to my life. Carnegie Mellon has an incredible history in the humanities. What? There's 70 Tony Award winners from Carnegie Mellon's alumni. Absolutely. First school of drama in The United States? It is. 1914. And Andy Warhol went to school here. I know. I heard the museum. It's pretty amazing. What an incredible I do wonder, though. Going forward, you had some pretty scathing comments about some of the universities back a couple years ago when you were talking about where you disagreed with some of their approach. Do you think things have gotten better since 2024? So things have improved over the course of the last two years across American campuses. And let's use the word pointed because we lost the narrative. The point of higher education is to educate our young men and women to lead our country, to run businesses, to create new products, to entertain us, to actually enter the workforce and have tangible skills in solving problems. And we lost that narrative to a variety of of other issues that just don't truly matter don't truly matter to the future prosperity and well-being of our country. But you feel like it's coming back to some degree? There's no doubt the pendulum is shifting back towards the center. It needs to be in the center. We need campuses where students have really good intellectual debates, and they have really great educational experiences. I think most university presidents actually agree with Ken on this issue. You know, what these universities in this country have done over the last seventy five years, they have contributed disproportionately not only to educating the next generation, but are to economic prosperity, to our national security, to well-being of society, in in health care, in other areas. So I think we've been true to our mission. The important thing for us moving forward is to stay true to that core mission, educate the next generation, create knowledge to benefit society, and have economic and cultural impact true to our core mission. I mean, I'm a bit older than you are. When I applied to Princeton, the conversation with the admissions officer was, if you come to Princeton, what great thing will you do for our country? That needs to be the ethos of higher education. It's not four years of fun. It's not four years of an entitlement. It's four years preparing a young man or a young woman to make a difference in America. Just real quick, what's gonna be your metric of success for the Miami campus in particular in this new approach? Look. I would love to see the continuation of the success that happens here in Pittsburgh. I mean, this university is single handedly rearchitecting Pittsburgh to be a great city of the twenty first century. You know, Ed Glaser at Harvard has done a fair amount of work on the importance of universities. Great cities are anchored by great universities. And to complement the universities that exist in Miami today with one of the greatest universities in the world is a gift that I will that will be one of the highest impact gifts I will make in my lifetime. We talked about Miami quite a bit, but let's not forget that Ken is also making a historical gift to the Pittsburgh campus on day one to support our most important priorities as well as to support our number one computer science school in the country that's going to be named Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. President Jahanian, Ken, both of you, thank you so much for taking the time today.