Philanthropy
As the co-founder and chairman of Qualcomm, Jacobs has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the field of education through generous donations and grants to several schools and organizations. His donations have gone mostly towards fellowships and scholarships for deserving students in the fields of engineering and computer science, as well as the arts, and are focused in the San Diego area. The San Diego Union Tribune in 2011 dubbed him the "Philanthropist in Chief".
As of September 2009, Jacobs had donated a total of $31 million to his post graduate degrees school the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had donated $15 million and another $110 million to the University of California at San Diego where he was a professor of computer science and engineering for several years. Additionally he has donated $62 million total to the American Society for Technion, his alma mater Cornell University, KPBS Radio and Television, and San Diego Natural History Museum. His KPBS donation was in the sum of $1 million, and the multi-year gift is designed to strengthen the station's local journalism and news collaboration with NPR. The Jacobs have donated funds to build studios for KPBS and have supported the station for decades. In 2010 he funded an engineering study on how to fulfill a long-planned proposal to remove automobiles from the Plaza de Panama in San Diego's Balboa Park and agreed to chair a committee to study the proposal and develop private funding for it.
Jacobs has pledged $120 million for the San Diego Symphony, a similar amount for the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego, $75 million for UCSD's future specialty hospital and $20 million to replace the central library in downtown San Diego. Also in 2005 the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse was named after Jacobs and his wife in honor of their philanthropic contributions towards the institution's development.
Read more about this topic: Irwin M. Jacobs
Famous quotes containing the word philanthropy:
“Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)