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Bill Gates Gives $20M to CMU for New Building

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you-must-reboot-before-taking-this-class dept.

touretzky writes "Carnegie Mellon University announced on Tuesday that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated $20 million toward the cost of a new building to be called the "Gates Center for Computer Science". Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."

2 of 919 comments (clear)

  1. No thanks. by kkovach · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'd attend class under a bridge somewhere before I stepped foot in a building bought by Bill.

    --
    The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
  2. CS is not science by dankelley · · Score: 0, Troll
    OK, let's move along from the name of the donor to the name of the department. This building is not for "Computer Science", since "Science" on a university campus is shorthand for Natural Science, i.e. the study of nature. (By the same token, Mathematics is not Natural Science and therefore in many universities it is place in an Arts faculty.)

    At least to my ear, the "Science" in "Computer Science" sounds a lot like the "Science" in "Social Science", or "Library Science", or "Marketing Science", or, moving from the campus to the commercial world, "Shampoo Science". The intention seems to be more to inflate than to describe -- to distinguish the work of folks who think logically and who are not afraid of technology from the work of the chin-strokers and pipe-puffers on the other end of campus, where they dress better and mainly in black.

    Better names for CS might be "Information Technology", or perhaps "Computing Studies". Even "Computing" is catchy and rings true..