The Foolproof Recruiting Tool

W hen a full professor retired two years ago, the department of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College was faced with a choice.

The small, tight-knit department could hire a junior faculty member, as is typical in such situations, or go after a senior scholar, someone who could immediately help chart its direction and shape its future. But that would mean trying to pry someone loose from a place where he or she was already well established.

The search committee advertised the job, and members personally contacted well-known scholars to urge them to apply. One of them was Virginia L. Parks, an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She had been a faculty member at the elite research institution for more than a decade. Persuading her to move would take a powerful incentive.

“We knew that she was a hot ticket,” said Peter Dreier, chair of the department and head of the search committee.

For Ms. Parks, an urban geographer, the possibility of moving to Los Angeles, where Occidental is located, was an intriguing one. She had gone to graduate school at the University of California campus there. It would be a natural backdrop for her work on labor, immigration, residential segregation, and racial, economic, and gender inequality in cities. Ms. Parks also knew that her background in community organizing would be an asset to a department with a scholar-activist bent.

Still, none of that was enough to get Ms. Parks to leave Chicago behind. Part of recruiting a senior professor, Mr. Dreier says, is that “you have to go out and convince somebody who is happy where they are that they’ll be happier where you are.”

And that often means offering top candidates an endowed chair, as Occidental did for Ms. Parks. These age-old symbols of academic status are an indispensable means for luring prized faculty members. Professors are attracted to endowed chairs because they provide prestige, consistent financial support, and validation of their scholarship and teaching. Administrators see them as an almost fail-proof recruitment tool that can help reshape departments and campuses, and bring in fund-raising dollars.

The endowed chair helped ease Ms. Parks’s ambivalence about moving. She joined the faculty last academic year as the inaugural Madeline McKinnie Endowed Professor. “This gives me a little bit more breathing room,” says Ms. Parks, now a full professor. With the endowment money, she can cover research expenses and ramp up her travel to scholarly meetings.

Her new position also makes a statement. “When you come in with an endowed chair,” she says, “it’s evident that you’re coming in at a certain level.”

Endowed chairs have been a mark of distinction in higher education for centuries. In 1502 the mother of Henry VII established the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. The first endowed chair in America came about in 1721, with the Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard College.

Now they are widespread, with colleges of all types amassing them in hopes of bolstering the number of top scholars in their ranks. Michigan State University is raising money for 100 endowed positions. Southern Methodist University has nearly doubled its number of endowed chairs since 2008, to 116. Tougaloo College, in Mississippi, wants to create an endowed chair in civil rights, and Saint Anselm College is filling the second endowed chair in its existence. With college budgets increasingly under pressure — particularly at public institutions — endowed chairs and their self-sustained funding are more attractive than ever.

For professors, an endowed chair means they don’t have to worry about the impact of budget cuts on their work. That’s because the private donations that create an endowed chair are invested in a fund that generates annual income in perpetuity. The money can pay or subsidize the chair holder’s salary, cover travel to scholarly conferences, support graduate students, or underwrite research that grant-making agencies might not be willing to fund.

An endowed chair also confers a level of prestige to a faculty member’s career that few milestones in academe can match. “There’s a finite number of named chairs at any given time, and the faculty who have them are identified as being the elite group at a university,” says Kevin McLaughlin, dean of the faculty at Brown University, who himself holds an endowed chair as the George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English. “There’s a lot of cultural capital in having a named chair.”

Administrators see the endowed chair as a critical bargaining chip in faculty recruitment. Sometimes a coveted professor simply can’t be wooed without one. These positions can also stretch the general budget. At Brown, for instance, 17 percent of its budget for faculty salaries is offset by endowed chairs.

Endowed chairs are also at the heart of many a capital campaign. One of the most striking examples at a public institution was at Berkeley, where a $113-million challenge grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for 100 endowed chairs exceeded expectations. It raised more than $220 million, and donors gave enough additional money to pay for an additional 54 chairs. The money gave the university a competitive edge, but not just in recruiting star scholars. It also helped Berkeley stave off raids of its talent by other top-tier institutions.

L uring a few new senior professors can help transform a department.

Justin Schwartz traded his endowed chair at Florida State University for one at North Carolina State University. He also became head of the department of materials science and engineering there, and started working on a plan for burnishing N.C. State’s reputation in organic electronics, in part by hiring a top scholar in the field. He knew that his chances of success hinged on having an endowed chair to offer as a deal sweetener.

“No one’s going to be a star at one place and then go to another place to be demoted,” says Mr. Schwartz.

He approached Franky So, an endowed professor of organic electronics at the University of Florida, and invited him to campus for a seminar. He showed Mr. So his plans for distinguishing the department’s work in his field. He knew that Mr. So — who had been courted by Duke University a couple of years before — already thought highly of the Research Triangle area, where N.C. State is located. And Mr. Schwartz had one other card to play: an endowed chair.

Mr. So started at N.C. State in 2015 as the Walter and Ida Freeman Distinguished Professor. “Without an endowed chair,” Mr. Schwartz says, “we would not have been able to get him.”

Adding several endowed-chair positions can jump-start an entire campus. The University of Connecticut at Storrs has used these chairs to lure senior professors, who are among the 400 new and replacement faculty members it has hired over the past five years. One of the positions went to Manisha Sinha, whose book on the history of the abolitionist movement was recently published to rave reviews.

Ms. Sinha had been at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, most recently as a professor of African-American studies and an adjunct professor of history. The chancellor and provost at UMass were “very committed” to keeping her, she says. They matched Connecticut’s offer and said they would double the one year of leave Ms. Sinha is taking now to write her next book. UMass also pledged to revive a vacant endowed chair to give to her.

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It wasn’t an easy choice. But the collegiality of Connecticut’s history department appealed to her. And the larger endowment for the chair there meant that she would have more money for research expenses, hosting conferences, and inviting speakers.

“Making a change seemed like the right thing to do,” says Ms. Sinha. “It gives you new energy academically and professionally.”

Sometimes endowed chairs can help a professor realize a long-held goal. Fred A. Bonner II held an endowed chair in the graduate school of education at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, where administrators were “completely supportive” of his research on academically gifted black males in postsecondary institutions, he says. Yet Mr. Bonner never forgot the promise he’d made to himself when he was a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He wanted to work at a historically black college or university and, eventually, lead one.

Then Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU in the Texas A&M system, came calling. The university wanted to raise its research profile, in part by hiring faculty members who were standouts in their fields. Prairie View administrators made a strong case for Mr. Bonner to leave Rutgers, offering him an endowed chair of educational leadership and counseling — and his own research center.

“I just thought a deal like this would never come along again,” Mr. Bonner says. He started work at Prairie View in 2015.

The endowed chair has given him what he calls an “unfettered opportunity” to pursue research. Last month he took three graduate students to the University of Notre Dame to help him evaluate a diversity program there. “You know the money you need is going to be there,” he says. “That makes a major difference.”

Mr. Bonner’s endowed chairs have also held a larger meaning for him as a scholar in a field where validation in the form of financial and institutional support isn’t a given.

“The beauty of me having an endowed chair,” he says, “is it really gives other scholars of color, particularly African-American scholars, the opportunity to see that when you do solid work, it doesn’t have to be about traditional issues for you to be a top-tier faculty member.”

E ven though endowed chairs can offer an advantage in the market to recruit and retain professors, their results can be uneven.

Sometimes the offers work as expected: Nearly all of a cluster of cinematic-arts faculty at the University of Southern California who received endowed chairs 11 years ago are still at the institution.

And sometimes they don’t. James Levinsohn received an endowed chair from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in an effort to keep him from going to Yale. In the end, it didn’t keep him there. At Yale, he is director of the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and holds an endowed chair. The Johns Hopkins University, perhaps to get ahead of the possible poaching of its own professors, has awarded some of its newly created Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships to faculty members who are already at the institution, including two Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

But there are never enough endowed chairs to go around. And that can be a source of tension for administrators to manage.

“In our department, we have a lot of people now who have been promoted to full professor and continue to thrive,” says Mr. Schwartz, of N.C. State. “I tell them to keep working so they can make the case that they deserve an endowed chair.” And then, he says, it’s up to him and his institution’s fund-raising staff members to make sure the money for a chair is there when that time comes.

Administrators at Brown know that time will come, at some point. That’s why they’re raising money for endowed chairs as part of a $3-billion capital campaign and keeping some endowed chairs unfilled, to be used as retention tools. Some portion of the faculty at Brown will get job offers every year, Mr. McLaughlin says. When that happens, the institution has endowed chairs at the ready. “We don’t want them to feel like they have to go out on the market to get a chair,” he says.

Officials at Brown also realize that the arms race doesn’t apply just to senior scholars. They’ve even named assistant professors to endowed chairs designated specifically for emerging stars on the tenure track.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.