In higher education endowed professorships are coveted, and rightfully so. Typically the highest honor a college or university can bestow upon faculty, endowed positions are reserved for eminent scholars whose work is believed to substantially advance a discipline or field of study. Professors who hold endowed positions are national and international thought-and-service leaders; hence, they are deserving of such distinguished titles.
In addition to the prestige that endowed professorships and chairs confer to their holders, these honors have also proven to be extremely beneficial for the institutions of higher learning that award them. For instance, colleges and universities normally use these prestigious positions as tools for recruitment or retention; both uses benefit the institution directly. The endowed positions may be used to recruit talented faculty members, or to retain highly productive faculty members who might otherwise wish to leave for greener pastures—in other words, those professors who may be receiving offers of higher pay and opportunities if they go somewhere else.
Endowed positions also have been used to diversify departments and colleges, something that benefits both the university and its students.
And what’s not to like about having an endowed position? Endowed positions regularly come with generous research budgets. The unfortunate reality is that institutions of higher education continue to receive less and less funding from state legislatures, leaving faculty members scrambling to seek out and secure the funds necessary to carry out their important research agendas. In no uncertain terms, there is simply a shortage of funding for research. Thus, an endowed position mitigates or acts as a buffer for the desert-like funding conditions in which faculty in colleges of education find themselves.
Moreover, endowed faculty members are frequently provided reduced teaching loads. Taken together — a stable source of research funding and decreased teaching requirements — endowed positions are premiums in higher education. Again, these financial and instructional supports, in return, also help the college or university gain more prestige while growing its influence in academe. Prestige and influence are two forms of currency that are respected in the knowledge economy that academe prides itself on because universities that produce rigorous and high-impact research consistently move up on the annual News and World Report standings. The News and World Report annual publication is considered to be a rankings authority when it comes to power, prestige, and influence.
As a hard-working male Asian-American Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Illinois State University who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and who one day would like compete at receiving an endowed faculty position, I wondered: Do male faculty have an advantage when it comes to receiving endowed positions in education compared to their female peers? Are certain races more likely to hold endowed positions in education than others? Are professors who earned their highest degree at an elite college/university more likely to hold endowed positions in education than those who did not? In other words, I wondered: What would a critical look at endowed professors in colleges of education reveal?
Our study
