Ever wonder how much money it takes to get a college named after you?
On October 1, 2015, it was announced that the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation would be committing $50 million dollars to the University of Florida’s College of Engineering.
In honor of the largest cash donation in the history of UF, the college will from this point be called the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. With this gift to UF engineering, the Wertheim family will have contributed more than $100 million to Florida’s public universities and colleges.
This donation is only the beginning of a $300 million public and private investment effort into the newly named college at UF. At least two high-tech facilities are planned, including the 80,000-square-foot Engineering Innovation building, which will also be named in Wertheim’s honor and has a ground breaking scheduled for spring 2016.
Helen Goh, director of marketing and communications for the college, talked to UF student-run WUFT-TV news about the other quantitative goals of the expansion. “We hope to drive our research expansion to $100 million a year, up from about $60 million. We also want to raise our tenure and tenure-track faculty to 300, in addition to bringing in new graduate and Ph.D. students.”
Cammy Abernathy, dean of the now Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, reminded us however that it is not only money required to make changes to a learning environment. “Let me be clear about this: such an undertaking requires more than just an expansion. It will require a transformation, a transformation of how we teach, educate and equip the next generation of engineers,” she told WUFT-TV reporters.
Wertheim himself seemed to echo those sentiments after the announcement ceremony. “We want to graduate and prepare our engineers, both undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. level, to be able to discover how to do things better than they’ve ever been done before… We’re going to prepare them to have the tools to be great thinkers, not just great doers, but great thinkers, and great humanitarians, and great leaders, because engineers have an education no other profession has.”
Andrew Kay’s complete coverage of the event can be found at WUFT-TV’s website.
Click here for more information about the college’s transformation.
Interested in making your own donation to the college? Click here.