The Art of Endowing

Academe's massive fund drives no longer aim exclusively at new buildings and expanded facilities. Since the bigger need now is to meet annual operating costs, mainly in teachers' salaries, there is a new emphasis at many universities on setting up endowed chairs. At the same time, sophisticated benefactors have found that giving their names to a professorship is more satisfying than simply seeing them carved on the donor's plaque of a new building.

Columbia University's current $200 million fund drive is centered around the creation of 100 new academic chairs, each to be backed by $750,000 in endowed funds. A primary goal of a new $52 million academic-improvement program at Notre Dame is to set up 40 endowed chairs at $500,000 each. Harvard, which has more than 300 endowed chairs, has been able to create 90 of them since 1959. The public universities are eying the same kind of financial help. The University of Minnesota is trying to find donors for 20 chairs, while Wisconsin already has 64 chairs and is seeking more.

High Prices. The price tag on academic chairs is high. The minimum at most prestige schools is $500,000, which, at a 5% return a year, provides up to $25,000 for the professor's salary. Yet the pursuit of such money is well worth a school's time and energy, since endowments free operating funds. Stanford Provost Richard Lyman considers endowed chairs, next to outright unrestricted gifts, "the best possible long-term financial base for a university."

The prestige of endowed chairs, normally named for the donor or someone he wishes to honor, often helps a university land top scholars. The glitter of endowment helped hold Sociologist David Riesman at Harvard as the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences.

Among Yale's 25 Sterling Professors* are Historian C. Vann Woodward and French Literary Critic Henri Peyre. The State University of New York landed Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Chen Ning Yang for a state-subsidized $100,-000 Albert Einstein Chair in Science. Endowments frequently support visiting professorships, such as one at the City College of New York, named after C.C.N.Y. President Buell G. Gallagher, which this year is held by Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar.

To land chair money, fund raisers often cater to the specific interests of the potential donors. Conservationist Laurence Rockefeller, for example, endowed a professorship of outdoor recreation at the University of Michigan.

Corporations can often be tapped for chairs allied to their interests, such as one in pediatric nutrition supported by Mead Johnson & Co. at the State University of Iowa.

Successful Technique. Usually, the best way to land a donor is by appealing to his desire for intellectual distinction. As Columbia College Publications Editor George Keller puts it: "You can feel almost like a Medici prince--personally responsible for a distinguished professor's livelihood and scholarship." One successful technique is that used by California's tiny Claremont Men's College, which has set up ten endowed professorships since 1958. "The best way to do it is to take the great teacher who will occupy the chair to meet the prospective donor," contends Claremont Presidential Assistant John Payne. "The result is often electric."

*Named for Lawyer John W. Sterling, an eccentric, meticulous bachelor who helped defend such famous 19th century figures as Jim Fisk and Henry Ward Beecher, willed his entire fortune of $16 million to Yale in 1918.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.