Had Kenneth C. Griffin not become so frustrated with the state of Illinois as to move himself and much of the financial company he founded, Citadel, to Miami, we suspect he would have had a prime spot on the current listening tour of Mung Chiang, the new president of Northwestern University.
We’re reasonable people. We would have given up our place.
After all, persons who are willing to donate $3 billion to an institution of higher education are not to be found on every street corner. On Wednesday, Carnegie Mellon University announced a grant of that eye-popping amount, reportedly the largest single gift in the history of higher education, from Griffin, a former Chicagoan. Around two-thirds of the big dough, the university and the donor said, will be used to build out Carnegie Mellon’s satellite operations in the very trendy Miami neighborhood of Wynwood, which is precisely where you would want to be in that city if you were a student.
Griffin was not boosting the fortunes of his alma mater as grateful or less imaginative billionaires often do. He was boosting the fortunes of Miami in a very smart way: expanding the value of the real estate in a city where he has made massive such investments and also improving the scale and prestige of its higher education offerings, knowing full well that long has been Miami’s weakness, with all due respect to the University of Miami Hurricanes.
Citadel, which now calls the city home, needs highly educated talent, of course. But it can recruit from anywhere.
What many people are missing, especially in the liberal media, is that Griffin really is setting about re-orienting the business city hierarchy in America, building up Miami at simply astonishing scale and equally astonishing rapidity, and eroding the decades-old competitive advantage of New York and Chicago, cities that have not appreciated his largesse.
Think about it for a minute: One of our city’s greatest advantages is our stellar institutes of higher education, especially Northwestern and the University of Chicago. We don’t need satellite campuses. We have the higher ed goods already here, just as New York City has Columbia University and New York University, with Princeton University an easy commute away.
But Griffin and his inner circle long ago figured out that anyone who snoozes at the wheel gets run off the road. And that includes higher education, a sector where there are a lot of leadership naps.
More Top Picks Best Home Gym Equipment For Crossfit
We’d already noticed the unusual entrepreneurial prowess of Carnegie Mellon, everywhere from the tech sector to the Tony Awards. Griffin clearly had noted the same thing and, since he tends not to waste time, he just coaxed a good chunk of the university to his reinvented Miami. A win-win, you might say.
We’ll resist the temptation to note again how counter-productive it was for Gov. JB Pritzker, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to feud with Griffin, notwithstanding ideological differences, or the billions of dollars in economic consequences for Chicago and New York.
Suffice to say that they helped create a very powerful competitor entirely capable of remaking Miami into a dense and livable urban core with an ample supply of highly educated workers and good restaurants and art galleries, too. This is urban re-ordering on a scale America has never seen.
Interestingly, Chiang, an electrical engineer by training and a most genial guest, told us that he intended to set about reminding everyone that Northwestern is in Chicago as well as neighboring Evanston. That long has been the case, of course, with a law school and a medical campus and a business school, among other programs and operations, located downtown. But the implication was that the university also was looking to grow in Chicago.
We pressed Chiang as to whether that meant new facilities; he demurred, saying it was too early in his tenure for him to say.
Fair enough. But it was good to hear that Chiang had Chicago on his mind. We need all the very smart and far-seeing friends we can get.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].