For many students, the reason some professors have longer titles than others may seem a mystery, but plenty of thought, time and effort goes into the awarding of distinguished professorships. An improvement to the procedure of distributing these honors earned faculty approval at last week’s meeting of the Academic Council.
Under the revisions, each school at Duke will have a separate group of 12 faculty members to evaluate who ought to receive the distinguished chairs restricted to faculty in that field. A campus-wide committee, which used to be responsible for all of these honors, will now consider only appointments that are open to faculty across the University—James B. Duke professorships, for example.
These new committees will report to the deans of their divisions, who will then make recommendations to the provost.
“I get the final approval,” said Provost Peter Lange, “as I have in the past.”
An update to the system was necessary, Lange explained, because it had undergone no serious revisions since the 1980s. At that time, there were 75 chairs, and 40 of them were open to professors across the University. Today, there are 235 distinguished professorships, of which 150 chairs are endowed and school-specific, and a further 35 unfunded titles are also largely restricted.
“One of the reasons we now have 150 school chairs is that when we switched to decentralized [budgeting], we created all these incentives for the deans to raise endowments for chairs,” Lange said.
As the number of chairs to distribute grew, continuing to follow the procedures that worked 20 years ago became a challenge, Lange noted. Moreover, concentrations of chairs vary from field to field, which creates distinct dynamics that a central committee can have difficulty understanding.
Alexander Rosenberg, who holds the R. Taylor Cole professorship of philosophy, said the current methods work well. He added that he generally approves of the decision when he meets others who have recently won distinguished chairs.
“I’m not surprised, and I am impressed at who gets chosen,” Rosenberg said.
Decentralized committees will have closer access to information, but comparing candidates to others across the University could become more difficult, particularly in the smaller schools, Rosenberg said. Furthermore, the close acquaintance of committee members with those they are evaluating could lead to breaches in privilege.
With the University’s current system, “the confidentiality rules are actually honored,” Rosenberg said. He described the surprise of receiving his own appointment: “I couldn’t know either that I was being fired or that I was being awarded a distinguished chair.”
The changes probably will not have a great effect in practice, though they will streamline the procedure, said Lawrence Zelenak, Pamela B. Gann professor of law.
“I would guess that to an awfully large extent the University-wide committee pretty much has to take the word of the people from the relevant department or school anyway,” Zelenak noted.
One thing is certain: the number of endowed chairs is still on the rise. They are important in part because they help to alleviate the hiring constraints imposed by a tighter budget, explained George McLendon, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“We can anticipate that there will be a number of those kind of appointments that will become available over the next several years,” McLendon said.
Seyward Darby contributed to this story.
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