Bloomberg’s Latest Racial Equity Move Taps a Familiar Grantee to Diversify STEM
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PHOTO: Gorodenkoff/SHUTTERSTOCK
Mike Bloomberg, a mega-billionaire who was not born rich, owes much of his success to science and technology. He got an undergrad degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and famously went on to make a fortune through Bloomberg LP, a computer-based financial information and news service. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Bloomberg Philanthropies has, over the years, made STEM education an element of its grantmaking and other supporting programs.
But a new $150 million commitment under its relatively new Greenwood Initiative takes that support for STEM to a new level. It also continues and expands Bloomberg’s work to address racial wealth disparities in American society by helping to equip Black Americans with the resources not only to boost their economic and professional prospects, but to increase the passage of wealth down from generation to generation—a key driver of economic security.
Recently, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Johns Hopkins University announced a new initiative to address the historic lack of diversity in STEM fields: Black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, but received just 3% of STEM Ph.Ds. The disparity appears in other minority groups: Latinx people are 18% of the population, but receive only 7% of STEM Ph.D.s.
Bloomberg’s new $150 million initiative is intended to strengthen the pathway for diverse students to move from historically Black and minority-serving colleges and universities to pursue Ph.D.s in STEM fields. Called the Vivien Thomas Scholars Initiative, named for a celebrated Black surgical laboratory supervisor at Johns Hopkins who, despite the lack of a medical degree, was instrumental in the development of a life-saving cardiac surgery technique in the 1940s to treat blue baby syndrome. (HBO made a pretty good movie about Thomas in 2004, starring Mos Def and the late Alan Rickman.)
Johns Hopkins stated in a news release that through the initiative, it will “dramatically scale up its efforts to diversify its STEM Ph.D. programs and graduate more diverse Ph.D. recipients to help bring sorely needed new voices and backgrounds to STEM industries and workforces.” The university will reach out to applicants matriculating from more than 450 HBCU and MSIs nationwide and provide funding for 100 new slots for diverse Ph.D. students in JHU’s STEM programs. The fund will support up to six years of stipends, health insurance and travel funding, along with mentorship, research and professional development opportunities.
Most of the funding will go to, or through, Johns Hopkins University—Bloomberg’s alma mater, which the former New York mayor has showered with more than $3 billion over the years—but other schools will receive support, as well. More than $15 million is dedicated to strengthening pathways for talented undergraduates to pursue STEM Ph.D.s at Johns Hopkins and other institutions. Those efforts will include direct funding of programs at an initial cohort of partner HBCUs and MSIs, including Howard University, Morehouse College, Morgan State University, Prairie View A&M, Spelman College and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
In one sense, this hefty gift is a continuation of Bloomberg’s singular alumni giving, long-running and record-breaking support for the elite university he himself attended. In 2018, the billionaire famously donated $1.8 billion to JHU to help low-income and moderate-income students attend the university. The move drew its share of criticism; IP’s Mike Scutari pointed out at the time that supporting financial aid at more accessible universities would have helped far more students get ahead.
But the new announcement is also the latest step in a turn toward racial equity that Bloomberg Philanthropies and so many other funders are embarking on right now. HBCUs, in particular, have risen to become a top-tier philanthropic cause, after being a niche interest for years. For Bloomberg, the new STEM gift is part of a larger commitment embodied in the Greenwood Initiative, which is intended to boost Black American families’ generational wealth and counter systemic underinvestment in Black communities.
While the initiative is now under the umbrella of Bloomberg Philanthropies, it was initially part of Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign in 2020, unveiled along with other racial equity plans coming from leading Democratic primary candidates. At the time, Bloomberg was once again under fire for his expansion of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policing practice, which disproportionately impacted young people of color in the city. The Greenwood Initiative was viewed by many as an effort to woo Black voters, or perhaps to make amends for his track record. It was named for the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the race massacre in 1921, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.
Last fall, Inside Philanthropy’s Connie Matthiessen covered the first big move out of the Greenwood Initiative. The organization’s $100 million commitment to four HBCU medical schools aimed in the immediate term to help Black students pay down medical school debt, part of a larger effort to increase the number of Black physicians in the U.S. A second Greenwood Initiative round was just announced in April, providing $6 million to four HBCU medical schools to expand COVID-19 vaccine efforts in minority communities.
This new tranche of funding seeks to address chronic diversity problems in additional fields, and the assistance doesn’t only help Black Ph.D. candidates with their careers. It also brings more excellence to the STEM fields in the form of top students who otherwise—through financial or other systemic hardships—might not be able to apply or complete Ph.D. studies and develop academic or professional careers in those fields. The historic underrepresentation of these top students has been a loss for STEM fields and for society.
