Sterling Professor

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Sterling Professor is the highest academic rank at Yale University , named after John William Sterling who left a large foundation to the university.

Foundation, endowment

John William Sterling, himself a Yale graduate in 1864 and a wealthy American lawyer, left the university with a donation of 15 million US dollars when he died in 1918 - a sum that would now amount to around 150 million US dollars and the highest at the time private donation ever given to a university. In his will, Sterling stipulated that $ 5 million from this foundation (a sum that the foundation's trustees have nearly doubled over time) must be earmarked to equip the university's most prestigious chairs.

Many universities have chairs that are sponsored by a foundation, and it is often the norm among professors to withdraw from teaching in favor of research. However, this is precisely what is not customary at Yale - the appointment as a Sterling Professor does not include an exemption from teaching. Nobel Prize Winner and Sterling Professor of Biology Sidney Altman said, “I did not expect to be excused from teaching - nor did I want to be” (“I neither expected nor intended to be exempted from teaching ”).

Appointments

In 1920 the chemist John Johnson was appointed the first Sterling Professor. Since then, 159 other professors have received this highest academic award, which is open to all faculties, although in 1958 the foundation limited the number of sterling professors teaching at the same time to 27 - a rule to which exceptions are made every now and then.

Well-known Sterling professors

The Sterling Professors have included some of the most famous scientists in various fields. Among them are, for example, the Nobel Prize winners Sidney Altman and James Tobin , the mathematicians Øystein Ore and Benoît Mandelbrot , the literary critic Harold Bloom , the sinologist Jonathan Spence , the economic researcher and Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus , the philosopher and political scientist Bruce Ackerman , the political scientist James C. Scott , Robert A. Dahl and Ian Shapiro , the literary theorist Paul de Man , the historians Charles Seymour , Donald Kagan and Jaroslav Pelikan , the Pulitzer Prize winner David Brion Davis , the medical historian John Farquhar Fulton , the philologist Geoffrey Hartman , the orientalist Franz Rosenthal , the literary scholar and Romance scholar Erich Auerbach , and the lawyer and international law expert Myres Smith McDougal .

Marilyn Farquhar was the first woman to be a Sterling Professor of Medicine from 1987 to 1989. She was followed in 1991 by Carolyn Slayman , Sterling Professor of Genetics and Vice Dean of the Medical School. Marie Borroff was Sterling Professor of English from 1992 to 1994 and Joan Steitz was appointed Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 1998 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Bruce Fellman, How Sterling Professors Get That Way. Yale Alumni Magazine, February 1999 issue

literature

Web links