

Bill Dietrich gives CMU $250,000,000 - spottiness
http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/

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epenn
I was originally going to post that sometimes I wish gifts like this would be
given to smaller, less fortunate schools. A top tier school like CMU is always
going to be able to find new sources of endowment. I still believe this in
general. However before reading the previous comments, I had no idea how small
CMU's endowment was compared to other top tier universities. If the numbers I
read are correct, CMU's $815 million is only 2.97% of Harvard's $27.4 billion.
Not nearly what I assumed it was.

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pilom
CMU made some very big announcements (big to students at the school) in 2007
when their endowment broke $1 billion for the first time ever. And then 2008
happened.

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ahi
According to Wikipedia, CMU currently has an endowment of $815m so rather huge
donation. I was actually surprised by this. For some reason I thought CMU had
one of those endowments where $250m gets a urinal named after you.

~~~
cschmidt
I'm a CMU alum, and I asked about that once when they were mentioning "space
naming opportunities". Very roughly and unofficially speaking, $50,000 gets
you a classroom, $1,000,000 gets you a floor or wing, and $20 million gets you
a department. Apparently $265 million gets you a college.

~~~
dmv
$55 million (Tepper) in 2003 was the previous price...

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cschmidt
Well, you expect the b-school to cost more than other departments, don't you
:-).

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benmccann
The Tepper School of Business is a college at CMU just like the newly-named
Marianna Brown Dietrich Humanities and Social Sciences college. The colleges
contains departments such as English, Philosophy, etc.

~~~
cschmidt
Sorry, of course it is. I wasn't thinking straight.

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sb
I wondered what the other biggest gifts were, but could not find a canonical
list. A good starter is the following:

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2000/neurogifts.html>

I guess that its top 3 still hold. In addition, I found the following:

\- $1b endowment to found Vedanta University from Anil Agarwal Foundation
(2006)

\- $454.5m to National Taiwan University from Terry Gou (2007)

\- $400m to Columbia from John Kluge (4th largest in 2007)

\- $360m to RPI from an anonymous donor (page mentions largest in US history
in 2001)

I could not easily find the _official_ list all of these pages refer to,
anybody has an idea?

~~~
hullo
I don't know about 'official', but it's highly likely that the Chronicle of
Higher Ed/Chronicle of Philanthropy are the most referred to. Here's a list
from 2008:

<http://chronicle.com/stats/big_gifts.htm>

And here's a searchable database:

<http://philanthropy.com/stats/topdonors/index.php>

~~~
sb
Thanks for that list, it seems to me that this is the list all of the articles
refer to.

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cleverjake
It starts after his death? Why might that be

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suking
I think (and I may be wrong) - he gets to write off the donation now (probably
amortized) to help his tax basis even though the $ doesn't go anywhere until
he's gone...

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes, this is something I talked about with an estate attorney when we had kids
and were setting up a living trust. Basically you can create an entity called
a charitable trust which is a gift to a third party, that transfers on your
death, and avoids estate taxes. What is more interesting is that many of these
are more durable than language in one's will, specifically the will can be
challenged and thrown out but a charitable trust won't get screwed because of
it.

~~~
cleverjake
Thanks for the answer, thats real interesting.

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spottiness
Live announcement here now <http://www.cmu.edu/event/sept7/>

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startupcomment
This is great for CMU but it has a long way to go to catch up to the
endowments of its peer institutions -- both on a gross and on a per capita
basis.

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HardyLeung
Congrats to CMU!

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pitdesi
Always amazes me that there are people out there who have $265mil to give that
you can barely find anything about on Google. (Bill likely has a lot more too,
as he is expected to give a very large gift to the University of Pittsburgh).

More details on him here:
<http://www.postgazette.com/pg/11250/1172681-455-0.stm>

~~~
testcock1
What surprised me even more was that it was only the 14th largest donation in
history made to higher education. Here's the list if anyone else was
wondering: <http://chronicle.com/stats/big_gifts.htm>

~~~
ehsanu1
That list is slightly outdated, missing the $10b endowment for the King
Abdullah University of Science and Technology (endowed by its namesake).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Science_and_Technology)

~~~
threpinatoy
Does a large endowment incentivize murder?

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sp332
I'm sure the document has a clause which invalidates the donation if they
murder him for the money.

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bluekeybox
Wow, just looked at his book, "In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The Political
Roots of American Economic Decline" (published in 1991, at the time when Japan
was today's China...), and this guy is about as far away from my libertarian
worldview as you can imagine. He believed that America's problem at the time
was that it didn't have enough bureaucracy (which is especially ironic given
how bureaucratic gerontocracy today is believed to be stifling Japan's
growth). Hope his donation will do some good though.

~~~
0x12
> And this guy is about as far away from my libertarian worldview as you can
> imagine.

There is something really funny about a guy with a 'not so libertarian'
worldview donating 265 million to a university and a guy with a libertarian
worldview that probably will never be in a position to do so commenting on
that.

~~~
dmm
"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

