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Tuesday, June 4, 2019

$100 million gift to expand UCLA’s engineering school

The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has received its largest gift ever: $100 million from longtime supporters Henry and Susan Samueli. The gift, made through the Samueli Foundation, will be used to spur the engineering school’s planned expansion, which is to continue well into the next decade and is its most significant growth since the school was founded in 1945.
UCLA Samueli plans to enroll at least 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students by 2028, up from 5,300 at the start of the expansion in 2016. The school will also seek to add approximately 100 professors over the same period of time for a roster of nearly 250. New faculty will be in emerging research areas, such as engineering in medicine, quantum technologies, and sustainable and resilient urban systems...
A full-time professor of electrical engineering at UCLA from 1985 to 1995, Henry Samueli earned three degrees from UCLA: a bachelor’s in 1975, a master’s in 1976 and his doctorate in 1980. He co-founded Broadcom Corporation in 1991 and serves as chairman of the board of the company, which is now known as Broadcom Inc...
Full news release at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/henry-susan-samueli-100-million-expand-ucla-engineering

From the LA Times:
Some question whether the growing reliance on philanthropy will inappropriately skew public university research priorities toward private interests. A $200-million donation by the Samuelis to UC Irvine in 2017 raised some concerns that it would be used to promote unproven alternative medicine. But the Samuelis did not specify how their new gift should be used other than to expand the engineering school, Murthy said.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said he does not believe the state will ever resume past levels of funding, which once covered nearly all costs of attendance. So the campus has aggressively courted private donors, raising $4.7 billion in its current fundraising campaign launched in 2012 to commemorate its centennial anniversary this year.

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