Ken Griffin's Philanthropy and Andrew Carnegie
Ken Griffin seems to operate his life according to the Gospel of Wealth. It is fitting both that he's teaming up with the university that bears Carnegie's name and that they are doing this to gentrify a neighborhood in Miami that is prone to flooding.
By Philip Cardella September 30, 2026
Wynwood Neighborhood of Miami, Florida
On Wednesday the Miami Herald breathlessly announced an exclusive story that billionaire Ken Griffin was teaming up to create a new campus for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami.
The article mentions the $3 billion dollar donation.
The article mentions the 3500 student seats the university campus will have.
The article mentions that the campus will take over Mana Wynwood, a convention center in Wynwood.
The article states that "The university’s entry into Wynwood comes after decades of transformation in the neighborhood. Once an industrial area with wholesale garment factories, Wynwood has become a hub for arts and tech."
The article also mentions that Carnegie Mellon's top ranked School of Computer Science "will receive $500 million and be renamed Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. Griffin will also join the university's board of trustees."
What the article, which I humbly suggest is propaganda mostly written by Ken Griffin's staff, doesn't mention is that every university in America is worried about the drop in student enrollment due to a lag in American births 15 to 20 years ago.
educationaladvisors-ana
What the article also doesn't mention is that the Arts district in Wynwood is a case study, maybe the case study, of gentrification. According to Miami History Tours, after decades of neglect by local and state authorities a developer from New York named Tony Goldman bought much of Wynwood's decaying warehouses–of which there were almost too many to count as it was historically a warehouse district–and used Miami's famous Art Basel festival to thrust it into the international spotlight. Initially, artists flooded into the area with its affordable rents and literal walls as canvases. Over the next five years this art scene caused a 400% increase in rents to the surrounding residents. Some blocks experienced a 600% increase in rents over the same period. Eventually, the artists that changed Wynwood into what it is today could no longer afford to live there. This new university continues that trend.
This is the rhythm of American urban gentrification, and Wynwood is one of its clearest examples. A neighborhood that nobody wants becomes a neighborhood that artists can afford. Artists make it interesting. Developers notice. Money comes in. Artists get pushed out. The neighborhood becomes "the next Wynwood." And then the cycle starts again somewhere else.
Another thing the article fails to mention, despite a photo of the mural of the mascot of Florida International University (it's called Panther Pride and was painted by Nate Dee in 2022) in the article, is that Florida International University was trying to do all the things this new university campus says it will do and if Ken Griffin paid his taxes maybe there wouldn't be anyone who saw a need for this new campus of the North. Griffin bought the property on Wednesday for $1B. The lease FIU had with the property expired last year. It is unlikely this is a coincidence.
Fun fact, FIU is the largest hispanic serving four year institution in the world. Carnegie Mellon University...is not. A major property sale can take as long as a year or more even in an uncomplicated place. Near Downtown Miami is a complicated place. So, it is not a stretch to think that Griffin bumped a highly ranked public university out so he could replace it with a university from the North and profit off of the ensuing gentrification while, with one of the largest donations to a university in history, making a great case for controlling the curriculum.
Paul Kiel and Mick Dumke
The Miami Herald did run a parallel piece that addressed some of the omissions in the propaganda piece, with the author of the first (and featured on the website) piece, Catherine Odom, co-authoring the second piece with Luisa Yanez. Yet even that piece is more a history of Wynwood culminating in the coming of the Griffin's Gospel of Wealth to Wynwood, than it is a critical look at this development.
Towards the end of the 1700 word long piece the authors write: "The people who helped create Wynwood’s identity increasingly faced the possibility that they could no longer afford to remain there. And the community that had survived decades of poverty and neglect confronted a different threat: being priced out of the success it had helped create. That tension remains at the heart of Wynwood today."
But then they conclude only half a dozen sentences later, '“Wynwood’s success is an unlikely story,” he said, “but it continues to play out.”'
Neither piece mentions that Griffin was dominating news in Miami just last week with the headline piece, written by none other than Luisa Yanez, one of the authors of the previous piece mentioned, titled, "Ken Griffin's helipad faces pushback from Miami Beach neighbors. What's next?"
The lede of that story is, "Billionaire Ken Griffin’s plan to add a private helipad to his megayacht marina in Miami Beach is facing growing opposition from residents of some of the city’s most expensive condominium towers. The dispute sets up a clash between one of South Florida’s wealthiest newcomers and neighbors who say they don’t want helicopter noise outside their luxury condos."
Apparently, Ken Griffin has a penchant for dominating even wealthy neighbors.
Guardian staff reporter
Griffin is, also taking a bold stand on the field of computer science, which, according to the provost of another top ranked university told me is "dead," thanks to AI. That's not good journalism on my part though as I can't quote the person by name and there is a chance they were being hyperbolic, even though I pressed them to on the topic.
Heather Hollingsworth and Nicky Forster of the LA Times on the other hand put the state of Computer Science degrees more diplomatically, "Computer science grads face a brutal job market as AI reshapes entry-level work."
Ken Griffin was born and raised in Florida but spent most of his adult life in Chicago. His philanthropy went mostly to Chicago, hence donations to the Obama Foundation (I've long called the Obamas Reagan Democrats, as contrary to Fox News' claims, they've always been right of center pro-business folks). It appears he left Chicago and moved to Miami because...Illinois floated the idea of a wealth tax. In 2012 Griffin went on the record with Chicago Tribune that the rich, well ackshuly, have too little influence on politics.
Griffin also mentions Chicago's crime. Neither Miami nor Chicago make the top fifty most dangerous cities for violent crime according to Open Crime's database. Neither makes it in the safest cities either. It seems Griffin's concern was just taxes after all.
Ken Griffin chose wisely to partner with Carnegie Mellon as it was Andrew Carnegie literally coined the phrase "The Gospel of Wealth," in an article where he argued the rich should control society in such totality that they have no wealth at the time of their death. According the Heather Cox Richardson 'Indeed, Carnegie wrote in 1889, “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition” were the very height of human achievement. While the new economy created great disparities of wealth, he thought those differences were inevitable and a good thing. The money flowing up to the top meant that the country’s wealthiest men could build libraries and concert halls and universities and art collections to raise the cultural standards of the whole country."'
Heather Cox Richardson
In a different piece Heather Cox Richardson goes on to write
In June 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published what became known as the “Gospel of Wealth” in the popular magazine North American Review. Carnegie explained that “great inequality…[and]...the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few” were “not only beneficial, but essential to…future progress.” And, Carnegie asked, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”
Rather than paying higher wages or contributing to a social safety net—which would “encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” Carnegie wrote—the man of fortune should “consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer…in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”
“[T]his wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves,” Carnegie wrote. “Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among themselves in trifling amounts through the course of many years.”
As for what that gospel actually gives the rest of us, consider what the original Gospel of Wealth adherents contributed to society in a piece called "How America's Most Powerful Men Caused America's Deadliest Flood," by Erin Blakemore. I promise, if you don't know the story it is worse than you're thinking. The tl;dr is that a bunch of rich guys, driven by their need to fish, put up a shoddy dam, ignored warnings that it was shoddily built, then when it broke functionally murdered hundreds of people. Blakemore's piece concludes, "It turns out that the flood could actually have been prevented—if only the magnates of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club had been willing to trade in a bit of their leisure for the safety of the town below."
Ken Griffin seems to operate his life according to the Gospel of Wealth. It is fitting both that he's teaming up with the university that bears Carnegie's name and that they are doing this to gentrify a neighborhood in Miami that is prone to flooding, all while slapping his name on things and buying a slice of governance of top ranked university.
What story could be more Florida than a man who built his entire adult life in the North, coming to Florida and using real estate to force the economy of a flood prone neighborhood to benefit himself while demanding the community to kiss his ring as thanks, all while the local media fawn over the deal, no questions asked?