Stephen Schwarzman Gives MIT $350 Million Anchor Gift For School Of Artificial Intelligence
Copied from Forbes, 10/15/2018
by Susan Adams, senior editor in charge of Forbes’ education coverage.
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Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, is donating $350 million to a new $1 billion college for the study of artificial intelligence announced this morning by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The college, to be named the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will create 50 new faculty positions and multiple fellowships for graduate students. It will start operating in the fall of 2019 in temporary quarters before moving to its own space on MIT’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus in 2022.
“As computing reshapes our world, M.I.T. intends to help make sure it does so for the good of all,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif in a statement. In most universities, the study of artificial intelligence is centered in engineering and computer science departments. The new MIT school will seek to cultivate AI scholarship across disciplines, including the sciences and the humanities.
“There is no more important opportunity or challenge facing our nation than to responsibly harness the power of artificial intelligence so that we remain competitive globally and achieve breakthroughs that will improve our entire society,” said Schwarzman in the statement.
The MIT gift represents the largest single donation from Schwarzman, 71, whose net worth Forbes pegs at $13.6 billion. He has made a series of gifts to academic institutions for programs and buildings that carry his name. In 2013 he gave $100 million to create a Rhodes Scholarship-like program called Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University in Beijing to educate future global leaders about China. Two years later he pledged $150 million to Yale to establish the Schwarzman Center, a cultural hub designed by A.M. Stern Architects that is slated to open in 2020. Schwarzman graduated from Yale in 1969.
Back in 2008 he gave $100 million toward a $1 billion project to expand the New York Public Library’s lion-guarded Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue, renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.