CSUN gets $40M donation, the largest in school history
Funds among $2.7B donated by MacKenzie Scott
Cal State Northridge has received a $40 million donation, the largest in its 63-year history, to address equity gaps at the four-year university.
The donation comes from author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, one of the wealthiest people in the world, CSUN said in a Tuesday statement announcing the gift.
The $40 million CSUN received is part of an overall $2.7 billion Scott is donating to
286 “high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked,” she announced in an online post Tuesday morning.
Other schools in Southern California also received donations, according to that post, including Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Fullerton, Pasadena City College and LongBeach City College. Fullerton and Pomona received $40 million while LBCC and Pasadena City College each received $30 million. Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga was given $25 million.
“Higher education is a
proven pathway to opportunity,” wrote Scott, who was married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos before the couple divorced in 2019, “so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved.”
The donations also went to nonprofits that focus on minority communities, including Homeboy Industries, a LosAngeles gang rehabilitation and re-entry organization and Arts for Healing and Justice Network in Long Beach.
The unrestricted grants will go to a wide range of other organizations, many in Southern California, including:
• A Place Called Home in Los Angeles.
• The Asian Pacific Community
Fund in Los Angeles.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation in Los Angeles.
• Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles.
• The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
•The L.A. Arts Endowment Fund.
•Self Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles.
Scott’s wealth, estimated by Forbes at roughly $60 billion, has only grown since she divorced from Bezos in 2019 and walked away with a 4% stake in Amazon. Shortly after the split, the 51-year-old signed the “Giving Pledge,” a commitment developed by Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett to get the world’s richest people to give away a majority of their wealth
during their lifetimes or in their wills.
Scott, who made the donation with her husband, Dan Jewett, who also is a signatory to the “Giving Pledge,” said in her Medium post that she is troubled by the increasing concentration of vast wealth among a small portion of people.
“In this effort,” the billionaire said, “we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”
The CSUN donation will go toward “presidential priorities,” the university said in its announcement.
President Erika D. Beck, who assumed that top post in January, undertook a
100-day listening tour at the beginning of her tenure and issued a report on what she learned.
The university’s priorities, based on that report, include eliminating equity gaps, diversifying the faculty, academic excellence, and supporting the “educational goals and intellectual promise” of its students, the CSUN announcement said.
“While one-time dollars cannot be used to support long-term expenses in perpetuity,” Beck said in a statement about Scott’s donation, “with a mix of focused spending and investment, we can, and will, use these dollars to transform our campus for generations to come.”
U.S. News & World Report recently ranked CSUN the 21st best university in the West on social mobility. And, like most Cal State universities, CSUN has a diverse student population, with more than half of those enrolled identifying as Latino. And 71% of those enrolled were first-generation college students, as of fall 2020, according to university data.
“This transformative gift provides a once-in-alifetime opportunity to advance our future as leaders in equity-centered student success,” Beck said, “to provide a brighter and more equitable future for our students, their families and the communities we are so proud to serve.”