On Nov. 30, 1994, Georgetown's Office of Public Relations announced the establishment of an endowed chair for the new Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, the result of a $2 million gift. Funding for the new chair, the Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia, originated with four Southeast Asian businessman, affiliated with banks and corporations in the region. While the position is still open, the nominating committee in Malaysia is searching for a candidate.
The new chair will expand the School of Foreign Service's (SFS) coverage of Southeast Asia, an area Dean Emeritus Peter Krogh called deficient in a Nov. 17, 1994, Voice article. Yet such endowed tumescence comes at a price. The Malaysian donation was a lay man's lofty sum, but, obviously, university operating costs amount to much more than that--in higher education figures--pocket change. The issues behind raising university funds go beyond mere money and verge on compromising academic integrity. While debates over academic ideology are usually spirited and sometimes bitter--witness the recent battle in Georgetown's English department--the question of scholastic relativism is neither new nor in danger of fading any time soon. A new dilemma has arisen--how to pay for the continuation of those debates, and whether any sacrifices follow.
Increasingly, universities are turning toward the endowed chair as a method of fund raising. A fact of life on today's college campus, this form of academic financing originated when universities started funding positions, usually with the help of alumni, and naming them in honor of notable scholars. Of Georgetown's 85 chairs, many are of this kind, such as one named for Bill Clinton's favorite professor Carroll Quigley and another for a former university president, the late Timothy Healy, S.J. The hopes were that other faculty members would follow the chair's namesake into the higher reaches of academic endeavor.
The endowed chair has developed into a type of development that allows outside contributors to finance positions in specific disciplines, areas in which the donor often has a vested interest. In some ways, Georgetown has become a partial joint-stock company with the shares held by a variety of sources. Many are alumni and non-profit foundations, but some are entities who, understandably, have individual interests involved in their donations.
In this time of increasing tuition costs and lagging alumni support, these donations are a boon to cash-strapped colleges. Schools can hire top-notch, high-profile faculty to supplement their departments, and donors get to see their interests pursued academically. Who benefits more? The situation begs the age-old Yuletide dilemma: is it better to give or to receive?
During the last two years, Georgetown pursued a grant for such an endowed chair from the Turkish government designed to expand the field of modern Turkish studies in American universities. Georgetown, with its villa in Alanya, Turkey, and past decisions to grant honorary degrees to Turkish government figures, was a natural choice for funding. Turkey awarded the university a $750,000 grant, matched by Atlantic Records CEO--and Georgetown MBA alum--Ahmet Ertegun. Similar monies went to Harvard, the University of Chicago and Princeton. Ertegun named the Georgetown chair the Nesuhi Ertegun Professorship in Turkish Studies in honor of his deceased father.
As reported in the campus press, a subdued response from student groups ensued, clouding the scholastic kernel of the issue. While the objections from the campus' chapter of Amnesty International and, predictably, the Hellenic Club were couched in humanitarian and ideological terms, the protests ignored the larger question of an academic chair funded by the government of an overseas republic. While university officials insist it is preposterous to suggest that the Turkish government can hold Georgetown hostage by simply depositing a check in its coffers, Lawrence Soley disagrees.
Soley, a Marquette University communications professor, is a leader in the protest against outside sources funding higher education and has spent the last 20 years studying the effects of such developments. His latest book, Leasing the Ivory Tower, chronicles Soley's perceived demise of the independent university education, positing that universities now cater more to their well-heeled patrons than to their students.
"The reason endowed chairs such as this exist is so donors can give money and point scholarship in the direction they wish," Soley said in a recent telephone interview. "While it may not be a conscious decision, Georgetown won't select a candidate who is critical of the donor."
Georgetown History Professor John McNeill, chair of the search committee created to find a candidate for the newly created Turkish Studies chair, insisted the donor was in no way party to filling the position.
"I wouldn't be involved if it was," he said.
Over the last few years, it cost alumni, foundations, foreign governments (controversial or otherwise), corporations, and academically-inclined philanthropists $1.5 million to endow a chair for a specific field of study at Georgetown. Interested imminent alumni better get on the ball now if they want to take advantage of this price--policies are now being put in place to raise it to $2 million. Checks should be made out to the Office of Alumni and University Relations (OAUR), the university's bureaucratic organism that officially oversees items ranging from fund raising and The Georgetown Magazine to public relations and sports information.
OAUR's development office, which raises private funds for Georgetown, has undergone a face-lift in the last year and is now under the domain of Michael Goodwin, associate vice president for development. He said the solicitation of funds for specific academic chairs fits snugly with development efforts to enlarge Georgetown's general endowment.
"It's part and parcel of the same effort," Goodwin said. Fund raising focuses on four areas: the endowment, capital projects, annual giving of unrestricted support, and expenditures for immediate projects.
According to Elisabeth Liptak, director of communications for the Georgetown School of Business, the solicitation and pursuit of endowed chairs is part of the university's approaching capital campaign, a project designed to raise funds for specified purposes. Individual schools are submitting plans and suggestions as to how the upcoming capital campaign can benefit their respective programs.
"The quiet phase [of the capital campaign] is to end in June," Liptak said. "There are still sensitivities among the faculty about some of these issues."
As a part of the pursuit and maintenance of this type of fund raising, OAUR's expanded office includes Susan Githens, assistant director of foundation relations; R. Clark Thompson, a director of corporate relations; and Laurie Boeh, director of stewardship programs.
"[There is] on-going communication with the donor," Goodwin said. "Part of stewardship is to let donors know what is happening to their contribution, such as who we've hired."
The use of the word stewardship--obviously meaning to act as a steward to, or manage, another's money--seems to support Soley's assertion that the creation of such positions perpetuate donor involvement. He used the recent Modern Turkish chair at Georgetown as a prime example of how the endowed chair system works, adopting the common indictment of Georgetown's Turkish connections.
"Turkey is not happy if [Georgetown] fills the chair with a scholar whose research is on the Armenian genocide or the country's campaign versus the Kurds," Soley said. "As a consequence, future donors are suspicious if approached; donating is not in their best interest. The problem then is that the university must maintain its relationships with its donors and be sure not to antagonize them."
For OAUR's pragmatic fund-raising concerns, placating contributors makes perfect sense.
"I work with donors after they give money," Boeh said. "We want to keep donors happy so they keep on giving."
Boeh said some of her priorities were producing an annual development report for donors so they could see how their contributions were performing, creating a complete list of endowed chairs with reports on their status, and publishing a development brochure to peruse. She said the brochure would be something relatively simple for "lay people to understand."
One way in which development narrows its fund-raising efforts is by stationing employees in each school to focus on cultivating school-specific capital.
"People who are interested in those areas the [individual] schools study work with specific faculty for a specific field," Goodwin said. Robert Johnson, director of development for the Business School, handles all private donations given to the school.
"We are all on the same team and part of the overall plan," Johnson said. "It is a partnership. I work in the Business School, but I am on [OAUR's] payroll."
Barbara Wiesel dons a similar mantle in the School of Foreign Service as its director of development. She is not without help in her efforts. When Krogh was dean of SFS, he often boasted about the enormous endowment size of his academic unit. Gallivanting around the globe to drum up financial support, Krogh sometimes ran into trouble when he accepted donations from certain countries, such as Iraq and Libya, but he did help raise SFS's endowment to about $20 million.
The spoils of the endowed chair sweepstakes have fallen in SFS's favor. The school has 19 of the 85 positions the development office listed, while the other three undergraduate schools total only 23 (see chart). The Sultan of Oman chair, held by Professor Irfan Shahid, is an example of Krogh's productive globe-trotting tenure.
Krogh is not alone in his wandering ways; deans regularly rack up plenty of frequent-flyer miles in their quest for money to pay their respective school's expenditures.
Students often misunderstand how the university's endowment, which as of October 1995 stood at $432.7 million, really works. Facing full-time tuition costs approaching $30,000, students sometimes can't comprehend how Georgetown can quibble over a few dollars here and there when a multimillion dollar fund is mysteriously floating around somewhere. But, as in the real world, a university must have money in order to make money, and the endowment functions primarily as a seed, with a $326.7 million portion of the total amount invested. This sizable quantity of milt is nurtured by investment firms and reaped quarterly by Georgetown.
Endowed chairs for specified academic fields are no Chicken Littles in this barnyard equation. As of October 1995, monies from endowed chairs accounted for $81.7 million, or 19 percent, of the total endowment and constituted $79.2 million, or 24 percent, of the invested amount.
The financial goal of endowed chairs is to provide funding for the designated position indefinitely. When a private contributor donates money, it goes into the general endowment unless the donor designates it for a chair if the amount meets the minimum chair financing requirement.
"Otherwise it is not held in perpetuity," said Barbara Barrett, assistant manager for the endowment fund in the university's accounting department. Barrett said donors can specify how they want the money invested, such as a special mutual fund of their choosing, but the money usually goes to a pooled endowment fund.
According to Barrett, the university has a unitized pool, which means that the individual chairs are accounted for separately even though they are invested in the pooled fund. Endowed chairs are essentially purchased slices of the larger endowed pie, and the interest from each chair must be large enough to cover the position's annual costs. Oftentimes, other donors must add money to the original amount in order to bring the quarterly gains up to par.
Put simply, other people's money is at work for students, but here's where it all gets complicated. Earnie Porta, director of treasury services, said the pooled investment fund is managed by 12 different firms (see chart), ranging in dollar amounts from $1 million to $98 million. Of these 12 firms, eight are passive investors, placing Georgetown's money in non-indexed mutual funds (mutuals managed separately from the firms' other clients). The remaining four are active firms, trading on a daily basis--sort of like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street.
Despite the sizable total investment, approaching one-third of a billion dollars, Georgetown's money is relatively unhindered. This is due in part to the university's non-profit status, exempting it from capital gains taxes.
"We are very liquid--the limited partnership excepted," Porta said. "We have equity when we need it."
For endowed chairs, that need manifests itself as academic expenses and professorial salaries, and Barrett said funds are dispersed quarterly to cover all expenses. The interest not used is rolled over to the next quarter.
Johnson said after the gift receives full funding, it generally takes about a year before the school selects a candidate to fill the position and the chair is inaugurated.
Dr. Sabri Sayari holds the distinguished sounding title of executive director of Georgetown's Turkish Institute, but he is actually running a one-man professorial show. Tucked away on the first floor of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), the institute fills two small offices-- one for Sayari and one for his secretary. Trained as a political scientist, he has been at Georgetown since 1993 and said his sophomore seminar, a broad survey of Turkey's history and culture from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, has been filled to capacity. The Ertegun chair will create more curricular options in the field.
"There is a growing demand in this country for scholarship with the new Turkic world emerging," Sayari said. In the wake of the Cold War, Turkey's global position has changed with the advent of the petroleum politics of Central Asia, despite the country's recent voting trend toward stricter Islamic parties.
"People are looking at Turkey as a country with three linkages: to the Middle East, to the Central Caucasus and to the Balkans. It is the centerpiece for many regions," he said. As a result, he said expansion of the Institute and use of the chair could evolve in a variety of ways. Although Sayari is not directly involved in the selection and recruiting process, he said the candidate could conceivably come from any discipline. John McNeill said the search committee, comprised of CCAS Director Barbara Stowasser; McGhee Alanya Program Director Scott Redford; and Professors Eusebio Mujal-Leon, Judith Tucker and Michael Hudson, has progressed slowly.
He said the committee's international search is considering both junior and senior candidates from a range fields, including anthropology, history and economics.
Princeton raised eyebrows when it filling its chair with Heath Lowry, a former Washington lobbyist for Turkish issues. Ertegun was also the matching funds donor for Princeton's award.
"That was their choice," Sayari said. "Bit bucks are involved, but any connection [to the donor] is difficult to see. You cannot impose personal feelings in the selection. They narrowed to 50 applicants, short-listed to five, and made their choice."
Even through this process, the real question is left unanswered: Whither a Turkish chair?"It would be great if the Turkish government gave money to Georgetown and put it into the general endowment or scholarship fund," Soley said. "What I find objectionable is how money is used, even if only obliquely, to direct the course of study."
Soley's rather Pollyannish attitude toward chairs sustains academic purity but ignores some of the financial necessities in today's universities. Johnson said historically the university wants money for specific academic programs to be budget relieving, freeing up salary money for other purposes. Yet chairs serving as supplemental assistance are just as beneficial, if not even more in accordance with university academic goals.
"Endowed chairs allow the university to bring in a caliber of professor usually unattainable under regular salary structures," Johnson said. "We can bring in the superstar. Endowment comes in to pay salaries that exceed normative pay so you can keep your salary structure consistent."
Barbara Wiesel put the advantages in even more succinct terms: "An endowed chair gives you a permanent faculty position you did not have."
Dr. Thomas Donaldson, who holds the John F. Connelly Chair in Business Ethics in the Business School, said endowed chairs are a way universities can give tribute to donors. He said his chair came from a group with long ties to Georgetown, including alumni Connelly family members. The Connelly Foundation, named in honor the late president of Crown Cork & Seal Company, Inc., made two other academic programs at Georgetown possible, a lecture series and a visiting lecturer position.
"You can almost tell a university's rank by the percentage of its faculty who have chairs," Donaldson said. "It is a way alumni and friends of universities show their support for higher education."
The donated money goes toward teaching positions at Georgetown, but the source of the funding determines its public perception and possible use. Soley doesn't even see the existence of endowed chairs in the terms of a financially-necessary evil.
"Universities like Princeton have massive endowments," Soley said, "but they're still doing this. The issue is with ethics, but we don't confront ethics in academia. This isn't an issue universities want to confront or debate openly," Soley said. "I've seen internal investigations of the corrupting influence of outside money, but they are always stamped 'Not For Public Release' or something like that."
Sayari does not think these protests are even serious considerations.
"It is unbelievably simplistic to think that Georgetown and Princeton are being bribed by the Turkish government," he said. "In this day and age, the function of the university is to get over that through reasoned debate and scholarship."
Donaldson said he did not even meet any representatives from the Connelly Foundation before his selection as the Connelly Professor.
"Maybe the donor is involved at lesser universities starved for money," Donaldson said. "But not at a responsible institution."
While there is something to be said for not biting the check that feeds your account, the onus is on Georgetown to select a candidate whose background studies are strong, yet still objective. McNeill, who said he volunteered to head up the search committee because he trusts his own judgement, said who that will be and what their field will be remains to be seen.