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Endowed Professorship - Endowed Chair

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An endowed professorship (or endowed chair) is a position permanently paid for with the revenue from an endowment fund specifically set up for that purpose. Typically, the position is designated to be in a certain department. The donor is allowed to name the position, which typically takes the format: First-name Last-name professorship of Department-name. Endowed professorships aid the university by providing a faculty member who does not have to be paid entirely out of the operating budget, allowing the university to either reduce its student-to-faculty ratio, a statistic used for college rankings and other institutional evaluations, or direct money that would otherwise have been spent on salaries toward other university needs. In addition, holding such a professorship is considered to be an honor in the academic world, and the university can use them to reward its best faculty or to recruit top professors from other institutions. Currently, a donation of $1-3 million is required to endow a professorship at the most highly-regarded private and (flagship) public universities. At smaller state schools, donations in the low 6 figures may suffice.

The practice of endowing professorships began in England more than five centuries ago, in 1502, when Margaret, Countess of Richmond -- and grandmother to the future King Henry VIII -- created the first endowed chairs in divinity at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Nearly 50 years later, Henry VIII established the Regius Professorships at both universities, this time in five subjects: divinity, civil law, Hebrew, Greek, and physic -- the last of those corresponding to what we now know as medicine and basic sciences.

Private individuals soon adopted the practice of endowing professorships. Isaac Newton held the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge beginning in 1669, and today that chair is held by the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking. More information at Wikipedia