Today, Mayor Bloomberg will donate $350 million to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, making the sum of his donations since he graduated $1.1 billion. According to the Times, which has the exclusive, this means Bloomberg is the largest living donor to education in the nation's history. “When you look at these great investments that have transformed American higher education," Hopkins' president Ronald Daniels says, as a donated orchestra led by John Williams swells and Ken Burns pans out slowly on old black and white photographs of the mayor, "it’s Rockefeller, it’s Carnegie, it’s Mellon, it’s Stanford—and it’s Bloomberg.”
At $2.6 billion, Johns Hopkins has one of the largest college endowments in the country. The article discusses how Bloomberg became enamored with the school as an intellectual playground that gave him opportunities he otherwise wouldn't have had, given that he was a mediocre high school student (“Let’s be serious—they took a chance on me."). Hopkins—and its Bloomberg School of Public Health—has served as a test-kitchen for many of the mayor's successful public health initiatives.
After tackling smoking, obesity, and gun control, Bloomberg is also focusing on "building a better mosquito," one that cannot transmit malaria. “He always asks about the mosquitoes,” Dr. Peter Agre, a Nobel Prize-winning professor says.
$100 million of Bloomberg's donation will go to financial aid, while the other $250 million will be used to hire 50 professors "as they pursue research in areas like the global water supply and the future of American cities." It appears that The Bloomberg White Sock Awareness Foundation For Troubled Boys will have to wait for another donation cycle.
Hopkins alumnus Rebecca Fishbein seemed pleased with Bloomberg's donation. "I'm just glad someone donated money to something useful. The last massive donation we got was to build a second museum for our lacrosse team."
