Dear Commons Community,
Bill Miller, an American investor, fund manager, and philanthropist and former chairman and chief investment officer of Legg Mason Capital Management, has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. It is believed to be the largest gift ever to a philosophy department. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article on this story:
“The quants and their algorithms may have taken over Wall Street. But one investment legend is making a big bet on a more old-fashioned mode of analysis: philosophy.
Bill Miller, the value investor who famously beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for 15 consecutive years has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University.
The gift, formally announced on Tuesday, appears to the largest by far to a philosophy department anywhere in the world, the university said. It will allow the department, which will be renamed for Mr. Miller, to nearly double in size, to 22 full-time faculty members, while also supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and new courses aimed at attracting undergraduates.
While a number of billionaires and business titans have created splashy million-dollar philosophy prizes, Mr. Miller — a former Ph.D. student in philosophy at Johns Hopkins — said he was pleased to be making an investment in the infrastructure of the profession.
“I wanted the gift to go to something where it would have a significant impact, and change the trajectory,” Mr. Miller, whose firm, Miller Value Partners, is based in Baltimore, said in a telephone interview.
Philosophy, he added, “has made a huge difference both to my life outside business, in terms of adding a great degree of richness and knowledge, and to the actual decisions I’ve made in investing.”
Mr. Miller gift may seem modest compared with the $1.5 billion that Michael Bloomberg has given to Johns Hopkins over his lifetime, including a $300 million gift to its School of Public Health in 2016.
But Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins, said Mr. Miller’s gift would give a much-needed boost to the beleaguered humanities, at a moment when many universities, and the governments that support them, are heavily focused on the so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math.
“This gift is so wonderfully contrarian,” Mr. Daniels said. “To have someone of Bill’s stature who is willing to lend an imprimatur to philosophy, this most ancient of disciplines, and to the idea of its continuing relevance as an end in itself, is simply spectacular.”
Mr. Miller, 67, is not the only old-guard Wall Street figure with a background in philosophy. George Soros was heavily influenced by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. Carl Icahn was a philosophy major at Princeton, where he wrote a senior thesis titled “The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.” On the watchdog side of the street, Sheila Bair, the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was also a philosophy major.”
Kudos to Mr. Miller for his faith in and generosity to the study of philosophy!
Tony
