Endowed faculty positions increase the U's ability to attact
top students and recruit and retain world-class faculty.
A major focus of Campaign Minnesota was to increase
funds available for attracting and retaining the best faculty,
primarily by creating new endowed chairs and professorships.
A
campaign gift of $15 million from the McKnight Foundation
is helping the University take a giant step toward this end
by creating the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair fund.
The quality of a university is directly related to the quality
of its faculty, but competing with other schools for outstanding
faculty becomes more and more difficult. The impact of this
gift will be felt for many years to come.
Law Professor Dan
Farber, a specialist in constitutional and environmental
law and one of the first appointments to
the new chairs, underscores the benefits of having a strong
faculty, including their contributions as mentors to younger
faculty and graduate students. "These are the people
who will help to raise the next generation of scholars at
Minnesota," he says. "Having a stellar faculty
has an enormous ripple effect."
