When John L. Harvey learned in May about an endowed chair in history at Brown University honoring Hans Rothfels, he was puzzled. Mr. Rothfels, a German historian who died in 1976, was an early supporter of Hitler, Mr. Harvey says. Mr. Rothfels eventually fled Nazi Germany because of his Jewish heritage, but he is criticized for remaining an apologist for the German right wing after World War II.
Mr. Harvey, a history professor at St. Cloud State University, says a controversial scholar like Mr. Rothfels shouldn’t be honored with an endowed chair at a prestigious university and has questioned Brown officials about how they decided to establish the position.
While his inquiries have focused on Mr. Rothfels, his concerns raise larger questions as colleges add endowed chairs and professorships to their departments. What should the vetting process be for an endowed chair? And since a gift for a professorship may reflect on the faculty more than, say, a donation for a stadium, should professors have some say in who gets honored?
A person for whom a chair is named ought to represent the values of the institution accepting the gift, says Kevin Moss, a professor in Middlebury College’s Russian department, who protested his institution’s 2006 decision to create an endowed position to honor former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. “A college that is in a relatively good financial situation should be able to refuse a gift,” Mr. Moss says. “Are we going to compromise our ethics just because of money?”
Fund-Raising Tool
In an era of limited resources, endowed chairs and professorships have become a popular tool to attract gifts and recruit faculty members. Fund-raising consultants say college presidents and provosts increasingly seek to create endowed positions, often measuring their institutions by how many they have compared with their peers.
In most cases, the person an endowed chair is named after is not controversial, though sometimes the most innocuous of names can cause headaches later on. Spelman College recently suspended a professorship named after Bill Cosby and his wife, saying in a statement that the “current context” — an oblique reference to charges that Mr. Cosby has sexually assaulted several women, allegations he denies — prevented the college from fulfilling the chair’s goal of attracting accomplished visiting scholars.
Colleges should develop a defined process to determine whom they accept money from to create an endowed chair or any other gift, says Sue Cunningham, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “Different institutions will have different challenges and issues, but what’s important is that the institution has determined what its position is for any given situation.”
Many colleges do have rules about how endowed chairs are vetted and named. Claremont Graduate University, for example, states that naming a chair for an individual is one of the highest honors it can bestow, and that honorees must have “unquestionable integrity.” Before the board approves naming requests for endowed chairs, a review must be conducted that includes examining the background of honorees.
Even so, Claremont doesn’t have a formal process for gauging faculty input, says Tammi J. Schneider, dean of Claremont’s School of Arts & Humanities. Part of her job, she says, is to make sure everyone feels good about the endowed chair, including the donor and the faculty. To that end, informal conversations with faculty members naturally ensue. Usually they are less concerned with the name of the professorship or chair than with than its academic mission, Ms. Schneider says.
That was the case with Claremont’s endowment in 2008 of the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, named after a former president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Faculty members’ concerns were assuaged when administrators made clear to professors and donors alike that the chair, in the religion department, would be strictly academic, not devotional.
It’s unclear how much deliberation, if any, was involved in Brown University’s Rothfels position, which was established in 2006 and is an assistant professorship in history. “Regarding the Rothfels chair, I’m afraid that time and history are obstacles to reconstructing how it was established and to what extent faculty may have contributed to the process,” Elizabeth Doherty, senior associate provost, wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
She did say that the gift to establish the position came from an alumnus, who wished to be anonymous and wanted to honor Mr. Rothfels, who taught at the university during the war years. During Brown’s most recent capital campaign, from 2005 to 2010, the university added about 60 endowed chairs, Rothfels’s among them.
Usually, Ms. Doherty says, when Brown fund raisers begin talking with a donor who wants to set up a chair, deans and other senior administrators are consulted, but not professors.
Mr. Harvey has pressed Brown for more details on the decision making regarding the chair. “The manner by which it was done does not pass the smell test,” he says. “It’s not clear that the faculty reviewed the request, and that the university did due diligence in vetting Rothfels.”
Faculty members at Brown, including the chair of the history department and Jo Guldi, the assistant professor who holds the Rothfels position, did not respond to requests for comment.
Doing ‘Good Things’
At Middlebury, the decision to create an endowed chair honoring Mr. Rehnquist divided the college nine years ago. Its president at the time, Ronald Liebowitz, who recently stepped down and could not be reached for this article, told the campus newspaper that it “would be foolish and appear overly political and even small-minded to reject the opportunity to honor a former chief justice.”
But others, like Mr. Moss, said it would undermine the college’s ability to promote diversity among faculty members and students, given what they described as the chief justice’s opposition to rights for gay people and other minorities. The professor says he would not have opposed the late Rehnquist’s speaking on the campus. But there is a difference between that and honoring someone with an endowed chair, which “strikes more at the heart of what an educational institution is,” Mr. Moss says.
The Rehnquist chair has survived, and concerns have largely faded away.
Stephen J. Trachtenberg, a former president of George Washington University, says administrators must balance the windfall of an endowed chair, which can amount to millions of dollars, with any potential reputational damage of accepting it. The process doesn’t need rules to guide it, he says, but rather common sense.
As president, Mr. Trachtenberg says, he would consult people he trusted, perhaps including faculty members.
But the decision would be his and the governing board’s — and the bar for turning down the money is high, he argues, quoting Balzac: Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.
“People who give us gifts typically have great fortunes,” Mr. Trachtenberg says. “I’ve taken money from slumlords and all kinds of people I might not have approved of. In the end, the gift was going to add value to the university and allow us to do good things.”
But he, too, has a line. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the late Libyan dictator, once wanted an honorary doctorate from George Washington in exchange for a $10-million gift. It was an offer that Mr. Trachtenberg says he seriously considered. Eventually it was one of his trusted advisers — his wife — who persuaded him to pass, he says. “She said there was no way I’d be able to explain it to the faculty.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
