History
Richard King Mellon and his wife Constance had long been interested in urban and social issues. In 1965, they sponsored a conference on urban problems, in which they began discussions with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to create a school focused on public affairs. In 1967, Carnegie Mellon President H. Guyford Stever, Richard M. Cyert, Dean of the Tepper School of Business, and Professors William W. Cooper and Otto Davis met and formed a university-wide committee to discuss creating a school that would train leaders to address complex problems in American urban communities. Davis was asked to draft a proposal to create such a school.
In 1968, William Cooper and Otto Davis presented the final proposal for the School of Urban and Public Affairs (SUPA) to the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The proposal found favor with R. K. Mellon and he became strongly committed to creating such a school. The R. K. Mellon Foundation sent a proposal to President Stever to finance it with an initial grant of $10 million, and on 1 November 1968, President Stever created the School of Urban and Public Affairs with William Cooper as the first Dean. The school initially drew much of its faculty from the Tepper School of Business and was based in the Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall. Eventually, the school became independent of other colleges within the university and moved to its current location in Hamburg Hall when the facility was acquired by the university from the U.S. Bureau of Mines. Subsequent Deans include Otto Davis, Brian Berry, Joel Tarr, Alfred Blumstein, current Carnegie Mellon Provost Mark Kamlet, Linda C. Babcock, Jeffrey Hunker, Mark Wessel, and current Dean Ramayya Krishnan.
In 1992, Teresa Heinz donated a large sum of money to the school, which was then renamed as the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management in honor of Mrs. Heinz's late husband, Senator H. John Heinz III. Senator Heinz, heir to the H. J. Heinz Company fortune, had been killed when his small private plane crashed one year before.
In 2007, the Heinz School received a grant from the Heinz Foundations that transformed the school into a college and formalized the School of Information Systems & Management alongside the School of Public Policy & Management under the college's administration. The official launch of the H. John Heinz III College was held on October 24, 2008 during Carnegie Mellon's Homecoming weekend and was led by Dean Krishnan, Teresa Heinz, and former United States Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.
Heinz College is headquartered in Hamburg Hall and has a branch campus in Adelaide, South Australia, that offers masters degrees in Public Policy and Management and Information Technology, a North Hollywood Center in Los Angeles, CA as part of the masters degree program in Entertainment Industry Management, and an academic and research center in Washington, DC on Capitol Hill for students in the Public Policy and Management masters program.
Heinz College focuses on the application of quantitative analysis, statistics, economics, operations research, decision science, and information technology to tackle public sector problems in a practical manner. The faculty of Heinz College is often considered the best in the country in such application.
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