from Hacker News

Bill Dietrich gives CMU $250,000,000

by spottiness on 9/7/11, 3:13 PM with 45 comments

• by epenn on 9/7/11, 5:12 PM

  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.

• by ahi on 9/7/11, 3:57 PM

  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.

• by sb on 9/7/11, 4:46 PM

  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?

• by cleverjake on 9/7/11, 3:34 PM

  It starts after his death? Why might that be

• by spottiness on 9/7/11, 3:27 PM

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

• by startupcomment on 9/8/11, 6:49 AM

  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.

• by HardyLeung on 9/7/11, 4:58 PM

  Congrats to CMU!

• by pitdesi on 9/7/11, 3:58 PM

  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

• by bluekeybox on 9/7/11, 3:47 PM

  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.