A UCLA professor who helped launch a high-tech company while on leave from teaching and quickly amassed a $4-billion fortune announced Tuesday that he is giving a total of $50 million to the UCLA and the UC Irvine schools of engineering.
"It's payback time," said Henry Samueli, co-founder of Broadcom Corp., a communications chip maker based in Irvine. "UCLA has been very understanding about my starting a company. I hope to help promote the next guy who is going to start a Broadcom."
UCLA will receive $30 million, its second-largest gift, while UC Irvine will receive $20 million, the largest cash gift ever to that campus.
Samueli's donation reflects a growing trend among the technology elite who are shedding their reputations for stinginess and beginning to approach civic duty with the same entrepreneurial spirit that made them billionaires.
For Samueli--whose net worth has exploded from "comfortable" in 1995 to more than $4.3 billion today--donations also represent smart business. The UCLA and UC Irvine engineering schools are two places where Broadcom competes for top engineering graduates.
The schools "have become an amazing, untapped resource of talent," said Terry Holdt, chairman and chief executive of Entridia, a small chip maker based in Irvine. "For years, everyone else was running straight to Stanford. But people are starting to understand that there's a lot of very talented people right here in Southern California."
Scholarships, Endowed Chairs
In exchange for the gifts, the highly ranked UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science and UC Irvine's School of Engineering will bear Samueli's name.
Both schools will offer Samueli scholarships to undergraduates, Samueli fellowships for graduate students and endowed Samueli chairs to perhaps a dozen of the most promising faculty.
"I won't let the money be wasted on bureaucracy or media buzz," said Samueli, 45. "I was once a struggling student and a young faculty member. I know what they go through. I'm here to help them."
Samueli, the son of Holocaust survivors from Poland, grew up working in the family's tiny liquor store in East Los Angeles. He enrolled at UCLA at the age of 16, earning his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering.
"My parents could not have afforded to send me to a private school," he said. "I don't want money to be a reason that any highly intelligent, highly motivated person cannot go to college."
