Griffin, the founder of the financial firm Citadel, last week made the largest gift in the history of US higher education: $3 billion to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, of which $2 billion will go to build a new campus in Miami. It comes at a time of crisis for American higher education, as it deals with demographic decline, falling public support and attacks from President Donald Trump’s administration.

But a system in crisis is more open to change — and Griffin’s gift could deliver it, so long as Carnegie Mellon’s Miami campus has the freedom to become something truly new and the federal government lets it thrive.

The number of US high school graduates was projected to peak in 2025 and fall 13% by 2041. Foreign students, whose spending makes education America’s seventh-largest services export, could help fill the gap, but the Trump administration has pressed universities to cap international undergraduates at 15%. That would barely matter at most colleges (nationally, foreign students are about 2% of undergraduates), but it would at Carnegie Mellon, where they accounted for 19% of students in 2024-25. Universities, with their high fixed costs in land, facilities and faculty, are ill-prepared for that kind of contraction.

Crises like this can both spur and block innovation. Clark Gilbert, then an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a study in 2005 about how eight newspapers responded to the internet. It found that a strong sense of threat both helped them overcome their reluctance to invest in something new and made them cling more tightly to their existing routines. The ones that escaped those routines had set up their online operations as separate units, brought in outsiders and treated the venture as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Griffin’s gift could help tip all American higher education, not just Carnegie Mellon, to the innovation side. It’s happened before. When Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins died in 1873, he left $7 million to found a university and a hospital, then the largest philanthropic bequest in US history. The university’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, used its half to build an institution organized around graduate training and research, and Johns Hopkins became America’s first research university.

The incumbents had to respond. Harvard President Charles Eliot said that Harvard’s graduate school didn’t thrive until Hopkins’ example forced his faculty to invest in it. That school is now Harvard’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

For this new gift to have the same salutary effect, the Miami campus has to be free to be truly different. The greatest threat to that is the tenure process, which shapes everything at a university. Junior faculty are consumed by it, and senior faculty are produced by it.

One issue is distance. If tenure is decided in Pittsburgh, professors in Miami will be at a disadvantage. Anyone who has served on a faculty, as I did at Harvard, knows that colleagues champion the people they see at seminars, in the hallway and over lunch. Out of sight really is out of mind. Another issue is that the tenure process may threaten the success of CMU Miami’s distinctive approach.

The campus will organize research around four challenges, such as energy and climate resilience, rather than traditional academic disciplines. But tenure at Carnegie Mellon is institution-wide, so a professor tenured in Miami holds it across the university, and Carnegie Mellon has promised that Miami will be built “to the same standards of academic excellence that define CMU.”The danger is that professors at a campus built on crossing disciplines would be judged by experts in one.

Carnegie Mellon lets each college set its own tenure criteria, and anticipates colleges that are not organized by departments, which sounds like CMU Miami. But every college’s policy must conform to the university’s, and every tenure case goes through university committees that will be dominated by personnel in Pittsburgh. So there will be a constant temptation to adopt the main campus’s process and standards.

That’s where the sheer scale of Griffin’s gift makes a difference. With nearly 300 faculty, CMU Miami will be big enough to form its own community. It should give junior faculty the freedom to pursue long-term, high-risk projects. A 2011 study found that investigators at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which tolerates early failure and rewards long-term success, produced high-impact papers at a much higher rate than similarly accomplished scientists funded by the NIH, whose grants come with short review cycles and little tolerance for failure.

Those were established scientists. Junior faculty, working against a tenure clock, face those pressures even more acutely. CMU Miami should protect that kind of work long enough to judge its real value.

There’s one other way CMU Miami can be a godsend for US higher education. Griffin says CMU Miami will attract exceptional students, scholars and researchers “from across the globe.”In 2024, temporary visa holders earned 61% of US doctorates in computer and information sciences and 54% in engineering. In fall 2025, new international enrollment fell 17% and international graduate enrollment fell 12%.

Among institutions reporting declines, 96% cited problems with visa applications, after the Trump administration paused new student visa interviews in May 2025, then resumed them with expanded social-media vetting. It has since imposed a 39-country travel ban, and this fall, international applications to doctoral programs at major research universities fell 21%.

If there’s one person who could convince the administration of the folly of those policies, it might be Griffin. What happens next will help determine whether his gift produces a new school in Miami or a new and better education system for the country. Either way, Griffin has made the kind of investment in American higher education that Johns Hopkins made in 1873, on a scale even Hopkins never approached.