WaPo: “Bruce and Martha Karsh are names that may not sound familiar, unless you follow the world of educational philanthropy, where they have been major, if quiet, players over the past couple of decades.
Through their foundation, this billionaire California couple — he is the founder of the investment firm Oaktree Capital Management — has given more than $300 million toward programs and scholarships that largely focus on lifting disadvantaged students….
On Friday morning, the University of Virginia will announce that the couple is giving $50 million, which the university has promised to match, to establish what will be known as the Karsh Institute of Democracy.
The institute will aim to elevate the practical understanding and promotion of democratic principles. One of its missions is to coordinate the expertise currently spread in a disjointed fashion across more than a half-dozen programs on the campus.
The new effort will be run by Melody Barnes, who directed the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama and who before that was chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
I can’t think of a more fitting place for such an endeavor than this storied public university. It was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe — three U.S. presidents who hailed from Virginia — were all present when the cornerstone for U-Va.’s first building was laid in 1817.
What Barnes envisions is a vital center of scholarship and debate, a place that will bring together political leaders across the ideological spectrum with historians and economists, scientists and educators with artists and cultural leaders.
The goal, she explained, is to “start to put ideas into the bloodstream, in such a way that they start to shape the way that policymakers, and business leaders, and grass-roots leaders in the public are thinking and talking about them, so that they can in turn then shape legislation and policy and practice.””