During his first decade, Pradeep Khosla has built, started, planned and purchased buildings, bridges and special projects at an estimated cost of $8.8 billion.The skills Khosla is using to advance UCSD were developed long ago and dovetail with San Diego’s ever-expanding interests in biotech, defense, energy and computer science.
Khosla was part of that rise. He joined the faculty and specialized in robotics. At one point he took a break from Carnegie Mellon to help the federal government do research that would contribute to the evolution of the sort of unmanned aircraft that are developed in San Diego by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman.
Khosla responded by heavily recruiting non-California residents, who pay far higher tuition. His main target: China., producing revenue that helped underwrite UCSD’s budget and partly covered the cost of adding more California students. “I saw the wilderness through which the light rail was going, which you never see ... ,” Khosla said. “I’m thinking, this is San Diego. We’ve got multiple crises . We should be developing this.”Historically, UCSD has been largely content to exist as an isolated Eden on the bluffs of La Jolla, largely shielded from sight by its terrain and proximity to the ocean.
Construction is underway on the first of six dormitories that will range from 16 to 23 stories tall, and he plans to seek approval for a village that can house 4,000 students, which is roughly the population of Del Mar. The complex is likely to cost upwards of $1 billion.The university also bolstered its already large healthcare system, which has given at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot to about 370,000 patients, a number that’s far higher than all of the UC’s other four major health programs.
“You have to care that the new grad housing units recently built are unaffordable to many, care that students are looking to the university for a kind of leadership that invests in a clean future they need but don’t see it, care enough to invest in mental health resources for students, and so on.” “The university has isolation housing now for students who get COVID. Students expect the university to call them, pick them up, put them in a van and take them to a hotel and give them three meals a day.”